The Last Hurrah

Tomorrow being September 1, I’m planning to start another New Life, this time focusing on getting my finances under control. I will bring my lunch to work (much healthier, anyway), religiously take the bus instead of drive (much more environmental), rein in impulse purchases.

The problem is that the day before I begin a New Life, I always feel like having a last hurrah of my old bad ways. The day before a New Life focused on healthful eating, I want to eat a whole box of Little Debbie snack cakes. And the day before a New Life focused on fiscal responsibility, I want to make just a FEW last major purchases: a new laptop? A gas insert for my fireplace? A plane ticket somewhere exciting? Which means that I’ll start the New Life that much fatter and deeper in debt.

I’ve always been this way. I remember one family trip years ago, which I billed to the boys and to myself as the last hurrah before another period of belt-tightening and living within a budget. On the trip we were going to buy one last hurrah Beanie Baby – and then no more, ever again! I remember that Gregory would say to me, as we were out sightseeing and shopping, “Is this the day we’re going to get the Hurrah?” Of course we ended up having many more trips and many more Beanie Babies in the years to come, but that particular Beanie Baby acquired the name from us of Last Hurrah.

I guess it could be my name as well.

Don't Envy, Emulate

Envy used to be my besetting sin (well, envy, and anger, and sloth). I even tried to give up envy once for Lent and found that I couldn’t do it. By day three of Lent I had that old knife-in-the-gut stabbing sensation when I contemplated all the manifold blessings of Other People.

But then I had a breakthrough. I started keeping a little list in my list-making notebook of people whose whole lives I truly envied so that I could have a reference point for what it is that I want to achieve in my own life. The people I envied could become my role models, my templates, my guiding stars.

One thing I found when I began keeping the list is that the people who had the most wonderful lives (in my appraisal) weren’t the people with the most money, or the most successful children, or the biggest houses; they were people who most filled their lives with creative joy. I have two writer friends with amazing, enviable lives, and neither one is even published, except in little, non-prestigious, non-lucrative ways. But they write every day and make their writing the center of their days; they write in interesting and beautiful places; they honor their creative efforts and celebrate them.

Wait – I could do that.

I really could.

Ginger Snaps

My signature cookie is ginger snaps, made from a recipe given to me on a little recipe card from a philosophy graduate student when I was in my first year of teaching at CU. They are so soft and comforting, with just the right amount of ginger and cinnamon and molasses.

I baked a double batch last night, enough to take to a church bake sale AND to have for us to eat at home – and they didn’t turn out! Inexplicably, the first batch burned; the second spread and oozed all over the pan; the third batch was tolerable, but all in all the evening was a terrible disappointment.

It’s awful when the universe lets us down FOR NO REASON AT ALL. Same recipe, same oven, same baking pans, same cook, same timer – different (and disastrous) results. I know, some of you are going to say that there has to be some explanation having to do with the laws of chemistry or physics, but last night was proof that those laws do have exceptions.

The same is true for me with my writing. I write all my books with the same process: same pad of white-lined, narrow-ruled paper; same Pilot Razor Point fine-tipped black marker pen; same quality of critique from the same writers in the same writing group; same desire on my part to make the book the best that I possibly can. Yet some books turn out worse than others; luckily, some turn out better. Some get bad reviews, others get starred reviews; some don’t sell through their advance, others sell thousands of copies year after year.

Maybe next time I make ginger snaps the laws of chemistry will decide to work in my favor.

Domestic Bliss

I spent all day yesterday at home, getting caught up at my desk, puttering around the house, and in general getting my entire life in order to launch the new semester, which actually launched on Monday, but now, five days in, I’m finally READY for it to launch.

For me, the best life-launching activity is laundry. I’ll be lying on the couch, utterly paralyzed by all that I have to do, hardly knowing where to begin, and then I’ll remember: laundry!

I love gathering it up, and sorting it, and then putting the first load in. From idea to inception takes less than five minutes, and then all of a sudden, something is actually being accomplished, progress is actually being made. I can even go back to lying on the couch, and STILL progress will continue to be made, all on its own, with no work or worry on my part. But I usually don’t go back to the couch, for now I have momentum, now I can see that it would only take another ten minutes to pay a few bills – and another few minutes to post something on my blog!

When the wash comes out of the dryer (and I know, I need to get a clothesline, and I’m going to), I also love folding it, imposing order on that heap of tangled fabric. Because I have a counting fetish, I tell myself, “Now I’m going to fold ten things.” And I count each one as I fold it. “Now I’m going to fold ten more.” If I’m feeling VERY overwhelmed, I only fold FIVE things, and then another five, and another five. Either way, the job gets done.

Clean clothes! Folded and put away! Maybe I CAN make a go of this life, after all.

Money Woes

Lately it seems that I can’t stop spending money. I half-remembered a wonderful discussion on this very issue in Great Expectations and just located it in Chapter 34.

“My dear Herbert,” Pip tells his friend, “we are getting on badly.”

His friend replies that those words were on his very lips.

“Then, Herbert,” Pip responds, “let us look into our affairs.”

The two aspiring gentlemen sit themselves down and make a sober reckoning of their debts. To bring home the seriousness of their situation, they deliberately over-estimate the amounts owed. Pip calls this “leaving a Margin. For example, supposing Herbert’s debts to be one hundred and sixty-four pounds four-and-twopence, I would say, ‘Leave a margin, and put them down at two hundred. Or, supposing my own to be four times as much, I would leave a margin, and put them down at seven hundred.’”

Alas, this plan sadly backfires: “For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.”

This is exactly what I have been doing! Pip and me, both!

Remembrance of Things Past

I’ve had my dear friend Kim visiting for the past four days from New Jersey. Kim and I have been friends since West End School in North Plainfield, when she was a private in the third grade army that I commanded as General Mills. Of course we spent a great deal of time over the weekend recalling junior high hijinks and heartbreaks, and I unearthed the memoir I wrote in eighth grade, T Is for Tarzan, which documents all of them.

In one chapter I’m trying to find a boy to go with me to the girls-ask-boys sock hop.

First try: I sent a note to blue-eyed heart throb Bob Senz. He laughed when he read it but made no further reply.

“Leslie!” I screamed, bursting into the room. “My life is ruined!” Everybody in the room looked up in surprise and interest. I gasped out the whole story in a lower voice.
“Oh, Claudia,” Leslie said sympathetically. “Anything but a note. Never write notes.”


Second try: I asked Bob Ohgren, this time in person. I told him, “I have something to ask you, and you know what it is, so just say yes or no.”

He told me he’d let me know eighth period.

“Oh, Bob, you know now, don’t you? What’s there to think over?”
“I’ll let you know eighth period,” he repeated.
Eighth period came and went with no significance. But Wednesday morning in French I was anxious to be finished with my second attempt, for better or worse. I had some more prospects lined up, and if Ohgren refused me I needed time to work on them
“Well?” was all I said as I came up him as we were walking to science and band respectively.
He hesitated, and I continued. “There are three choices: A) You’d die before you’d go with me. B) You’re not going at all for some reason or other. C) You’ll go with me.”
“I don’t think I’m going.”

I can’t believe I wrote all of this down and saved it for forty years! Stay tuned to see the results of attempt number three, when I pursue the “very interesting rumor that no one had asked Jim Burnett.”

Keep Flexible

For my whole life, I’ve written early in the morning. I loved to get up while the rest of the world was sleeping (such a virtuous feeling) and write in my bed, my mug of hot chocolate beside me. But as I grow older, I have to admit that it’s getting harder. It’s so lovely to luxuriate in the bed, snuggling under the covers as the room is finally cool enough for comfortable sleeping. So I’m exploring the possibility of – gasp! – writing at other times of day than dawn.

In her 1938 classic, If You Want to Write, the inimitable Brenda Ueland is scornful of writers who insist that they can only write at a certain appointed hour. Confessing that she used to be someone who thought she could not “work in the afternoon or evening at all, because I was absolutely certain I would not be bright then,” she dismisses such thoughts briskly: “All fear and conceit.”

As I child I read dozens of times Elizabeth Yates’s beautiful book, Someday You’ll Write, in which she also recommends that writers develop flexibility: “Keep flexible. Use a pencil when you write, and sometimes use a pen. Learn how to use a typewriter; then try composing on it to see if you catch your thoughts more quickly. . . Be able to write anywhere with any kind of equipment. The more you do it, the more adept you will become in creating around you your own area of quiet, and this is all you really need.”

While I’m not yet ready to try writing with a pencil (can it even be done?), and I insist on still writing all my children’s book manuscripts by hand, with my favorite Pilot Razor Point fine-tipped black marker pens, on my favorite white, narrow-ruled pads, I did astonish myself the day before yesterday by writing my daily page AFTER LUNCH. And then yesterday I astonished myself even more by writing my daily page in a busy lounge at a local college while my son Christopher was taking care of some administrative tasks for his fall semester. It was a good page, too.

No more fear and conceit for me!