The margaritas at Fonda have always been a little too strong – and a little too tart and tasty to stop at just one. That's where Mr. Trinkle and I were for dinner last Saturday night, eating grilled calamari, quesadillas, and guacamole, washing it all down with margaritas on the rocks, no salt. My in-laws had gone home earlier in the day and my mother was babysitting the kid, who was in bed for the night. Getting out was our opportunity to reconnect after almost a week of Christmas and visitor preparation, after almost six months of dissertation completion. The plan was to talk without interruption, to have tequila-smoothed conversation, to just be for few hours. Free babysitting, flavorful food, and a margarita or two: Conditions were perfect.

So it might surprise you that one quarter through that first margarita we started fighting. We don't fight often these days, and when we do it's usually quite civil. This was an old-style fight with incredulous looks and just-caught nastiness. Each of us thought the other was clueless, wasn't listening, was going off on some crazy tangent. Ultimately, we pulled it back together, reached a deeper understanding, but for fifteen tense minutes, I fought the urge to run out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I fought the urge to be by myself and pretend that it was better this way, to live without risk, to be warmed only by my own intellect and senses.

Yes, here they are again. My parents after their wedding, June 1969, staring off into the misty future. It's too late now ...

Earlier that day, my mother and I had been talking about trust and infidelity. I explained how how I learned some time ago that to trust in others blindly is foolish because no one is perfect. Other people can let you down, not out of cruelty, but because they are human and bound to make mistakes. If you expect perfection or total fidelity, you may end up very disappointed, so why not keep an open mind about it? Not to expect to be let down, but to not let yourself get crushed if it happens?

The words had come out with more vitriol and less clarity than I felt. I sounded angry, specifically with my husband, and Mom asked me if he knew I was so angry. Strange. I didn't feel angry. But there Mr. Trinkle and I were in Fonda a few hours later, raising our voices. For the last half of the fight, I'd been dabbing at my eyes with the corner of my cloth napkin, trying to hold back the tears. It felt like I'd been willing them not to fall for weeks, maybe months, while I kept the rest of life together. When it was over, when we reached détente, the tears came out, along with the sudden understanding that this whole thing was all about my mother. Or maybe it wasn't that simple. It was also all about my father. And let's not forget to point a finger at the dissertation and the feelings it stirred up in its death throes. That thing was once used as a wedge, a separator, an agent of my perceived rejection. The diss is dead and buried now. It hadn't been an issue for years. What could I hold against a corpse?

Here is my mother, more present than I ever remember. There is no demanding, angry Kevin, no Baltimore petty criminal heroin addict boyfriend, no personal life drama to get in the way. When Mr. Trinkle and I left the East Coast, the addict was the center of her life. Interacting with her then felt like a continual rejection, an extension of the loneliness of childhood, though I see now that that the rejection has never been personal. In the past two and a half years, she's changed her life. The addict is now on the periphery, no longer the center of her world. There is no drama. She is here, flawed but available. I have just enough safe space for the anger to emerge. It's wordless, this anger, and scared, too, rage coupled with fear. I know she is capable of turning on me, of causing great pain, of making me wish I never existed. Or at least that's how it used to be.

Here is my husband, present and loving. The days of avoidance by dissertation are long over, but I remember them, remember how neatly our neuroses fit together, his reluctance dovetailing with my grasping need for absolute acceptance, with the tests and the tantrums, the nastiness and tossed objects. We have a history, a time when I felt very rejected, unloveable, and even though we've talked the hell out of it, there are still those tight corners in our relationship that remind me.

Combine my mother's visit with the completion of the dissertation and those deep feelings of unworthiness rise up. They poke and prod. I want to run out in the rain and be alone forever. I want to ball up my fists and shadowbox in the cold attic. I want to be invisible, the observer who cannot be observed. An old self-protective voice whispers if you let them get too close, they could destroy you. Keep your distance. But this is not the only way to see things. I have choices.

Now the struggle to be present, to be in the moment, is mine. If I don't give all of myself over, if I hold back, I don't risk absolute rejection. It used to be that I would test the ones who loved me, would stamp my feet and pepper every fight with threats to leave. These days I hide under a carapace of calm. I hold it together and when I do break, I tend to downplay my vulnerability. I maintain a friendly facade, a protective attitude. Intimacy equals risk. Oh, it's easy with you, reader. We have geographical distance and thick words to separate us. The pull of the everyday, the undertow of the mundane, doesn't come between us. We can pretend for a few minutes that we are intimates, reach an understanding without touch, and then return to our real lives unscathed.

Already all of this is changing for me. By the time my thoughts get to you, I'm working them out, naming the feelings, articulating them so I can put them away. One of the reasons this blog was so important to my recovery process (I call it a recovery process because I don’t know what else to call it) is because it gave me a place to name my fears, to articulate my ugliness in a relatively risk-free environment. Still, there are risks. When I find out that someone I know in real life or from my past has read the blog, I feel a panicked thrill – they know! (Depending on how far they've read, of course. They may know very little.) And then my stomach sinks and I feel a different sort of panic. I'm afraid of being judged for the things I've done, for those I've scraped up along the way. But I also worry that they will read and think: She deserved it. They will wonder about the intrinsic evil in me, about the horrible things I must have done to cause my family to abandon me. Rationally, I know this is crazy. Emotionally, it makes my heart ache.

I feel it. I name it. I let it go. But it isn't easy.

Tags: guilt, child neglect, existential angst, family, secrets, shame

We have family in town for the next week, so things may be quiet around here. In the meantime, Happy End-of-December and Merry New Year! And be on the lookout for these guys -- I'm not sure if they are carrying little Christmas trees or spiky clubs.

Image: Some of the many Santas in my father and stepmother's collection.

Tags: Christmas, Santa, holidays

My writing desk sits in our guest room. It is a lovely, large room, with viridian walls and a set of French doors that lead out to the deck. There is enough space for a queen-sized bed, three bookcases, my battered oak desk, and an antique armoire with a mirrored door that was one of the first things my husband and I bought when we moved to Washington, DC together.

We lived in that first Adams Morgan apartment for five-and-half years. It was a stately, if somewhat shabby one-bedroom with a working fireplace in the living room and an ornamental fireplace in the eat-in kitchen. The ceilings were high and the front wall had three windows set in a subtle, pleasing curve. Just off the kitchen was a sliver of backyard space that I planted with impatiens and elephant's ear that first summer, before we figured out that the upstairs air conditioner dripped on our heads, left the small landing permanently damp, and that the dryer vent above would sometimes let loose flurries of lint. There was also no coat closet. Shortly after signing the lease we remedied that by buying the armoire at an antique shop around the corner on 18th Street. So the armoire was first. The dog, the marriage, the kid, they all came later. The apartment saw it all.

The one-bedroom was on the bottom floor of a four-story townhouse and the family that owned the house and lived in the floors above us had two girls and a pug. They weren't overly noisy, didn't have loud parties or screaming fights, but since our space was separated from theirs by a only couple of thin interior doors, we heard everything. There were pounding footsteps and scraping chairs, the sad howls of their dog when they left her alone over long weekends, fourth of July firecrackers set off three feet from our bedroom. Once the baby came along, the baby that slept like an insomniac, whose sleep we were desperate to encourage, we left the apartment for larger digs in Alexandria, Virginia, though our son was sixteen months old by the time we finally moved.

Moving to Walnut Street brought us full circle. The drafty three-bedroom house had a fenced-in yard, two floors, and a second bathroom and was on the very same block Mr. Trinkle and I had lived on when we first moved in together in late 1999. But it was temporary from the beginning: as we were packing up our DC apartment, we got a call that led to my husband's current California job. In the end we lived in Alexandria for only six months. I remember that time through a haze of rain and snow, of grasping grayness and cold feet. We were a 25-minute Metro ride into the city, but felt very far away from our cozy, familiar neighborhood in the heart of DC. My husband often didn't get home from work until after our son was asleep and we no longer had our occasional babysitter. I tried to keep sane, joined some mom's groups, bundled up the boy to get into the city when I felt up for dragging a stroller on the Metro or schlepping our 25-pounder on my back. Just as spring was beginning to dab the trees green, to coax flowers out of the soggy ground, we moved again, to Berkeley.

And it was tough. The first year here was lonely. Our son hated playgrounds and other children in general and I knew no one. Mr. Trinkle was grappling with a new job situation and I was grappling with an unacknowledged past. It's hard for me to believe now that up until the summer of 2007, I wrote nothing. Nothing. Well, maybe the occasional whiny journal entry, at the rate of one or two a year, but that was it. I started writing and Mr. Trinkle and I started repairing and then I found a friend or three and a writing group and a good place for the kid to go to preschool. And then Mr. Trinkle finished his dissertation (I could be calling him here "Dr. Trinkle," but he nixed that one), something that had been hanging over him, over the two of us, for our entire relationship.

We've been talking about what is next. It could be a move from here back to there, back to the center of the policy universe with its wonks and its humidity and beautiful houses. If we lived in Washington, DC, my family would be geographically closer. I have long-time friends there that I miss, and there are those cherry-tree lined streets and majestic buildings. I just don't know if it's home anymore.

Home. DC used to be home. It felt that way from the beginning, from the day I moved there at nineteen. It was all about the houses, the formal public architecture, the restaurants and street people. I took pride in living in the center of a very specific universe, the place where people would gather to march and protest, where the federal government would slowly crank out laws, regulations, and decisions. Even the wonks, in their rumpled suits, walking with a sense of purpose or the wide-eyed look of the permanently distracted, were endearing to me. (The K Street lobbyist/lawyer types left me cold.) I still feel truly alive wandering the neighborhoods there, sludging through summer heat or pressing my boots into the slush. However, I've never lived in DC without a shield, a barrier between myself and other people. The town was made for shields, all that talk about policy and none about emotion. The emotions go underground, are sublimated by intellect. It's so ... male and macho, in an über-rational sort of way.

Berkeley's architecture does nothing for me. My general reaction when I walk around our neighborhood is "meh, bungalows" though I do enjoy getting up into the hills where the air is rarefied. It's the people and the philosophies here that I love, the crunchiness of it all. Berkeley is where I had the freedom to come clean and to become a writer. I don't feel (much) of a need to explain myself here, to talk about why I don't have an outside job, to stumble over the "what do you do?" question. And I've made some real friends here, too, women that I want to know even better, that I want to have years with, so that our children can be lifelong friends, too.

Home is eucalyptus-scented. It's juicy local strawberries all year long. It's hills with bay views and streets with devoted bike lanes. It's where my son is making friends and where I am, too, friends who don't know me as a librarian but as a writer and a mother, a woman with a past who isn't defined by that past. This feeling, of home and openness, is fresh and delicate. I don't know if it will survive a move.

Ask me next week, though, and I might be pining for marble and brick, for trail runs in Rock Creek Park, for fireflies on June nights and snowstorms in January, for dinner with friends at Lebanese Taverna or Oyamel. I'll tell you that I can maintain those new friendships, can adapt to life back in the District, that proximity to my family will make things easier, will give my son the safety net of an extended family.

I'm split. We'll figure it out soon enough (I hope) and I'm sure you will be reading all about it.

Upper image: View out kitchen door, Washington, DC, Winter 2005?

Lower image: Our sidewalk, Berkeley, 2009.

Tags: Berkeley, CA, friendship, Washington, dc, home, homesickness

There’s a man with thick silver hair who will save me. I’ll run into him at Good Vibrations or while thumping melons at the Berkeley Bowl. Eyes quizzical, brow scrunched, I'll ask his advice as I peruse the erotica or the tomatoes. “How do I pick a ripe one?” I'll say, then press my lips together in anticipation, run a nervous hand through my own uncombed mane, worry the tear in my formless tee.

He’s capable, my man with silver hair, knows what I require. “I haven’t read this stuff in years,” I’ll tell him, batting my innocent eyes. “A girlfriend of mine recommended the selection here. Do you have any recommendations?” Or:  “My naturopath has finally given me the green light for nightshades, as long as I don’t combine potatoes and tomatoes in the same week. But how can you tell when a pineapple tomato is ripe?”

He’s firm, my man with silver hair. Turns out his name is Nathanial and he stays away from pornography and tomatoes. He scrapes a thin layer of coconut oil on his multigrain toast and makes his own organic soy milk. He lives in a house constructed of bales of hay coated in plaster, collects the rainwater and the grey water to pour over his lush, nightshade-free garden. In a far back corner of his yard, a former girlfriend has constructed a pyramid of empty television sets and we sit and watch in calming yogic poses, balancing our diminishing frames on iron loungers furred with ivy.

Nathanial leads me away from temptation. He slices layers of butternut squash, thin as sashimi, dries them in the sun, and layers them with nut cheeses and frothy cucumber juice:  lasagna! With him I learn the taste of a peach, the value of chastity, the length of my arms from fingertip to fingertip. During our monthly fasts, we see visions, hummingbirds like fairies in the passionflower, fabulous eagles, strong and formidable, emerging from sketchy fog. And my parents appear before me, penitent and humbled. They kneel at my feet and I dismiss them with a forgiving wave. The vision repeats and I never tire of it, my power, the moment of clarity.

When it’s over, when I am saved and clean and about twenty-five pounds lighter, after my visions start to wear thin, Nathanial will move on to the next orphan. He is evangelical, gathering souls away from processed foods and packaged T&A, a beam of light that moves from soul to soul. I want to warn them, the lady paused in front of the cornflakes, the college boy reaching for a six-pack of Milwaukee’s Best, the skittish dog-walker about to cross Dwight: It isn't us he wants. It's the karma.

From a prompt last summer: I am counting. Despite the first-person point of view, this is fictional. Just a reminder.

Image: The infamous Berkeley Bowl, from a 2005 New York Times article.

Tags: writing prompt, Round Robin

I’ve been reading a lot about death lately, death and long hospitalizations and the kind of hope that people with sick children cling to, a stretched kind of hope that comes with chemotherapy and radiation and surgery. When I started writing for National Novel Writing Month, that’s where I was drawn, partly out of some kind of voodoo thinking that writing about it would protect my family and partly out of wanting to work through how someone copes with the loss of a child.

And then there was what happened to Kevin.

I’ve written about Kevin, my mother’s long-term boyfriend, here before, in short bursts of roundabout language. He came into our lives when I was fourteen and nothing was ever really the same again. By the time I was fifteen, I was living in the Little House with disastrous results and he and my mother were at the thin edge of eighteen tumultuous years together. Kevin is starting to lose his mythical qualities, has become more human in my mind in the last year, more culpable and weak. He was a bully, really, a smart and witty bully, though that of course was not the whole of him.

[Warning: The below goes into detail about an illness and a harrowing hospital stay and may be upsetting to some readers.]

In March 2002, Kevin, 55 years old, died of, well, it’s a little murky. He was in the final stages of myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease, though it was probably pneumonia that did that last dirty work. With myelofibrosis, the bone marrow becomes fibrous and hard. Blood production that normally occurs in the bone marrow moves to other organs -- the spleen, the liver -- in a last-ditch effort to make blood, a phenomenon with the poetic name extramedullary hematopoesis. These organs try, but ultimately fail, to make useful blood. Instead, they produce bad blood, the cells immature and misshapen, blood that does a half-assed job of keeping the body healthy. People with myelofibrosis are often anemic; they bruise easily and are susceptible to infection and bone pain. While there are drugs to manage this disease, there is no cure outside of a stem cell transplant, which is always a dicey position. If you have it, one way or another, myelofibrosis will eventually kill you. Or more accurately, an infection will kill you. Or you will develop leukemia. Or you will develop a wasting illness. Or your liver will cease to work (because of the extramedullary hematopoesis).

Before March 2002, before we called in hospice and accepted the fact that Kevin’s death was imminent, Kevin spent six months in the hospital, nearly all of it in the Critical Care Unit (like an intensive care unit) or a unit one step below Critical Care. Trying to write about that time in a way that makes any sense is impossible. I’ve tried it, tried to come up with a timeline and a reason why he ended up on a ventilator (aka respirator) shortly after he was admitted and how early on we thought he was going to slowly bleed to death until a miracle worker hematologist/oncologist came up with a genius solution to get Kevin’s blood to clot, and how Kevin couldn’t swallow because his epiglottis was damaged from his emergency intubations, so he couldn’t eat and how there was a doctor we called Dr. Death because he insisted on telling Kevin he wasn’t going to make it, let alone walk again (he was right on the former, wrong on the latter). Kevin was on the vent/off the vent. He kept on getting pneumonia. He was hooked up to tubes and lines, trapped. But alive.

Fall 2001 was full of death and fire, of anthrax scares and work closures, of mail that came to the federal library where I worked months old, crispy and irradiated. It was the beginning of Kevin’s long end, a journey that required great vigilance on my mother’s part and the amazing efforts of a large number of doctors and nurses. Being in CCU for six months is incredibly intense, all-encompassing, and stressful, and when a patient is as fragile as Kevin was, you have to be vigilant. It isn’t that the professionals aren’t competent, it’s just that they want to do things, think that action is always the best course. And sometimes it isn’t.

When I sat down to start my NaNoWriMo novel, all those details of his hospitalization came out, details I have stored away for years: the sound of the ventilator and the beeps of IVs that need attention; the smell of pneumonic mucus as I suctioned it out of Kevin's trach; the image of Kevin trapped under a blanket of tubes and devices, so fragile you didn't want to touch him (and the too-late knowledge that he must have been desperate for touch); the horrors of his frequent intubations, emergency procedures where doctors had to essentially jam an air tube down his throat after his oxygen levels dropped precipitously; the rushed meals at Taco Bell Express, knowing we had to get back and that eating in front of him when he was getting his food, this green sludge, through a stomach tube would have been horribly cruel; how skinny, impossibly skinny he became. How, after being bedridden and hospitalized for three months, he took his 80-pound frame and a walker and did halting laps around the CCU, in an act of pure will.

So all this came spewing out last month, disguised under a new premise with a much younger protagonist. After the month was over and the first draft off my head, I realized I had a lot of legwork to do. For example, I know next to nothing about the disease I had chosen to grace my unlucky character with. And what do I know, really, about parental grief, which is a particularly virulent strain? I've been doing research, reading books and looking at websites. There is one blog out there, very detailed and well-written, created by a mother who was chronicling her little boy's fight against cancer. That little boy died in September. The whole thing is horribly sad (and as I read it, I wonder: why, exactly, am I doing this?).

When you are in the middle of a life-and-death-struggle, the intensity of keeping someone alive, of trying to make them well, it's all you can think about. Everything becomes medical and you find out all you can. You learn about the strength of nurses and the support system that crops up in a hospital. You learn to live with things you never thought were possible before. You are steeped in the smells and sounds of illness and it feels like it will never end. You don’t want it to end with death, but sometimes it does and you have to let go of the struggle. I read this blog and I cry, for this family and the little boy that will never grow up. I hope that I can do justice to him and to Kevin and to all the people who have experienced such prolonged pain.

The kid at Kevin's grave on Maryland's Eastern Shore, April 2009.

Perhaps this is an impossibly tall order. What I'm looking for now is authenticity, a way to write something that sings and is true and real, that doesn't exploit illness as a book topic, but brings it to life and honors those that have gone before us.

It's daunting.

Top image: Kevin at Georgetown University Hospital, January 2002, about three months before he died.

Tags: Kevin, NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, grief, hospital, ventilator, Critical Care Unit, dying, Death, myelofibrosis

I finally stopped running.

The routine felt oppressive and there was all that huffing and puffing. Everything went by so fast, the bungalows of Berkeley a blur, the friendly cats passed in a leap, the crazies of University Avenue or MLK deftly avoided (or ignored). I couldn't think beyond my heartbeat. When I first started running again, there was pleasure in the rush, in the pounding of my feet. There was purpose. But now I was getting bored with my routes and not feeling motivated enough to pick new ones.

So now I walk. Three mornings a week, I wander the sidewalks, sometimes stop to pet a cat or watch one hummingbird dive-bomb another. I still move quickly, a hair over four miles per hour, fast enough to get a workout, but slow enough to really see things. My weekday walks are relatively short, about three miles, but on Sundays I have the luxury (thanks to my husband) of going longer, often past six miles.

View of the hills from my street.

From our neighborhood in the flats, with its stubby trees and cozy two-bedroom bungalows, I head for the hills, where the trees and the houses stretch out in all directions. It's not that the hills are less populous: even more than in our West Berkeley neighborhood, houses here are packed in tight. And like the flats, there are places where large backyards have been taken over by second, income-generating houses. But there are all those trees, and the streets twist and get vertical before suddenly dipping and rising again. The houses are generally bigger and more various, fun to look at, to imagine myself in. The views are also incredible. My Sunday walk is a hike on sturdy sidewalks, much of the beauty with none of the mud of a woodland trail.

For the first half of the walk, I usually talk to my mother on the phone -- though I have to ask her to do most of the talking during some of the steeper climbs (and forgive me my heaving breathing). We've had some of our most interesting conversations during these walks, about books and what it means to be a writer, about art and spirit.

View of Marin County and the San Francisco Bay from Euclid Avenue, just before the Berkeley Rose Garden.

During the second half, I look at the houses and the view. I think. On a clear day, you can see the hills of Marin County across the Bay or catch a glimpse of the Golden Gate bridge. I imagine a life in a house perched high, where I would inch my way up from the sidewalk on a set of narrow steps edged into rock. The chill of pine-scented fog would accompany my morning coffee and I would watch every sunset from my teetering deck, stand wrapped in a wool blanket, sipping a glass of plummy Zinfandel as the sky fills with color. Near the base of one hill, I pass a small wooden house constructed around a tree. The house is rustic, with unfinished planks as siding. On colder mornings, a line of smoke trails from the chimney. What would it be like to live in such a house, where nature has been invited in? Here I would bake my own bread in a wood-fired oven, have a huge untidy garden, maybe a couple of egg-laying chickens out back.

The view down from Keith Avenue.

Around mile four, I'm going downhill and the endorphins start to kick in. I think about how lucky I am to have my husband, so funny and creative, smart and loving, how lucky we are to have our boy, how maybe I can do this writing thing after all. I don't worry about income or what is coming next, just feel appreciative for all that I have. Which is a lot. I realize that in many of my alternate-life fantasies, I am alone, and I wonder about my imagined bereftness when I have a loving family at home. I'm self-protective even in my imagination, and I make a vow to change that, to bring my family into these scenes, there with me as I sip the Zinfandel or collect eggs from the chicken coop. The recognition of my stubborn fear of loss makes my heart ache and I pick up the pace in anticipation of seeing my husband and son.

The trees start to get smaller, the houses less lavish. The sidewalk loses its slope. The hills are behind me now, a dramatic backdrop against cottony blue. My legs are starting to ache and my stomach growls in anticipation of food. By the time I reach our block, I have acclimated back to the flats, to the place where my family waits. I walk in the front door, tired and happy. Mr. Trinkle, the kid, and our various animals greet me with hugs, kisses, and licks, and the humans in the house sit down for our traditional Sunday breakfast of bagels and cream cheese with a side of the Sunday New York Times.

This is where I belong.

Top image: A peek at the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, taken from just above the Berkeley Rose Garden. All photos from November 2009.

Tags: Berkeley, CA, walks, Berkeley Hills, running, contentment, gratitude

Before I get all honest with you, I have some acknowledging to do. I've been neglectful. For well over a year, various kind bloggers have passed on awards and I haven't done a thing about it.

The most neglected of these good people is Dori, who writes a fine expat blog A Yellow House in England. She has given writing to survive several awards, including the Neno Award, the Most Inspirational Blog Award, the Friendship Award, and the Butterfly Award. It's one thing that that Dori has received all of these awards herself, which is a sure sign of her writing prowess, but it's also another that she has taken the time to pass them on, which is a sure sign of her kindness. Thank you, Dori, and my apologies for letting these awards slip away.

One of the perils of not acknowledging these things immediately is that they disappear into the Great Internet Beyond and my own memory's sketchy storage system. So I remember that Svasti passed on an award. And Robert. I know I'm missing at least one other blogger. If you are out there reading, leave a comment and I will add your blog to the list.

Which brings me to the latest award. La Belette Rouge, memoirist, humorist, spot-on writer and all-around great blogger, has passed along the Honest Scrap Award. One of the fun things about this award is the requirement to list ten honest things about oneself. A daunting task. The award also requires that I pass it on to ten bloggers. Here is where I always fall down on the job. If you would like to take this award and run with it, on your own blog or in the comments section below, feel free.

So. Gulp. Here I go.

My parents, all gussied up for the 1968 Senior Prom. Oh, if I could only still hold you two responsible for my neurotic ways! Instead, I will use you as photographic filler.

1. I find this task terrifying. Why? On one hand, I am pretty boring. On the other, I have all these worries that I am used to keeping mainly to myself. I am neurotic, for lack of a better term. So I find myself thinking of writing things here like "I am pathetic and antisocial." or "If you met me in the flesh, you'd be questioning whether I was really the person who writes this stuff." OK. Let's just say I'm insecure.

2. To continue in the same vein, now that it is possible that a lot of people from my past, childhood friends, old high school buddies, people who knew me in college, read this blog, I wonder what they think about these stories of mine. Did any of them know this stuff already? Do they look back at me with kindness or do they judge me? I'll never know, so I think I'll go for the kindness angle.

3. I will listen to a song over and over again when I have it stuck in my mind. Recent selections include Finish What You Started, All Come True, Funk #49, and Hot Sauce. Oh, and Ball and Biscuit.

4. While I am a good cook, some might even say a great cook, the only things that my son will eat in my presence are noodles with butter and cheese, packaged macaroni and cheese, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza crusts, and rice and beans from Chipotle (yes, he even refuses my rice and beans). Pasta with cream sauce? No. Soothing, buttery polenta? I don't think so. Anything with a green fleck or two in it? You must be joking. This would drive anyone crazy, but I had an epiphany the other night about why it was driving me murderously crazy. I have "meal issues," probably from a childhood of bad dinner table experiences, from being made to stand at the table as a three-year-old on a regular basis, to being totally ignored or berated by my former stepfather at mealtime, to finally being rejected as a dinner partner by my mother and Kevin when I was fourteen. My son's unhappiness with my food offerings felt, well, deeply personal. Once I realized this, my irritation level at his dietary preferences went down several notches. Though I still find them maddening.

5. You know that I don't drive, right? But did you also know that I don't bike, skateboard, scoot or Segway? It's a wheel thing, I suppose.

6. I really should be working on my novel. On my good (or is that "crazy"?) days, I have these grandiose notions of the brilliance of my writing. On my bad (or is that "realistic"?) days, I think my writing will never amount to anything. So blogging keeps me going while also distracting me from the larger purpose.

7. I hold on to people in my mind, keep crushes for decades, never really forget a friend, even if I haven’t spoken to them directly since middle school or even earlier. These attachments keep me plugged into the world, gossamer threads from my mind to yours. All it takes is a little tug -- a photo, an email, a similar name -- for me to conjure up the smells, the meal, the pains and joys, that awkward conversation we had fifteen years ago.

8. It could be that three cats, one dog, one child, one husband, a two-story house, and a backyard is too much. So I don't vacuum nearly as often as I should, the toilet needs scrubbing, and I finally stopped watering the impatiens after six months of careful attention.

9. My only regret is that I should have kissed him when I had the chance. Just to get it out of my head. This was years ago, when I was so focused on doing the right thing, on keeping a tenuous hold on my first marriage. But that kiss will never happen and as time goes by, the moment and its importance feel more and more distant. Still, I think about it sometimes and try to console myself with the fact that it would have been destined to end badly and my desire would have gone the way of most, shot through with sadness and regret.

10. I talk to my mother on the phone almost every day. Sometimes more than once a day. I worry about whether this is healthy, not because of our conversations or how I feel afterwards (I feel fine), but mainly because I think it can stand in for interactions with other people, like people on this coast or friends I haven't spoken to in ages. Maybe it gets in the way of potential friendships. Maybe I should pick up the phone and call my father every once in a while. Or maybe I'm just neurotic and worry too much.

There you go. Another morning of novel-writing gone. But this was more fun.

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