Perfect Days

Last fall I had a drink one evening with a new DePauw friend. I told her that I had just had a perfect day, which I had. Since then, whenever I see her, she asks me if I have had any more perfect days, in a tone that is part affectionately teasing, and part wistful. Usually, I have.

It seems so easy to have perfect days here. All the ingredients for them are present. Right now I have had four perfect days in a row.

Thursday was perfect because it began with breakfast at the Prindle with Nicki and Linda. The morning was cloudy, so I turned on the gas fireplace in the Great Hall and read for class while lying on a comfy couch. Class was lively, thanks to an enthusiastic student discussion leader. After office hours I headed out to the Prindle for the rededication of a large public sculpture called "Reach," which had been relocated from the main campus out to the Nature Park, the first of a series of sculptures to be located along a proposed Sculpture Walk leading from the Prindle Institute back to campus. The rededication ceremony featured a speech about the artwork by a DePauw art professor, a ceremonial poem for the occasion by wonderful DePauw poet Prof. Joe Heithaus, a performance of a John Cage composition by a dynamic percussion ensemble, and then - as if this weren't a perfect enough day - a gathering by the fire circle up above the Prindle where we toasted marshmallows to make s'mores.

Wouldn't you call that a perfect day?

Friday: another Prindle breakfast with Linda and Nicki; long happy hours working on the edited manuscript for my forthcoming novel No Exceptions; lunch with Linda and Nicki at Chief's just off the courthouse square followed by a long walk with Nicki and her little dog, Henry; a productive afternoon back at my office; and then seeing The Hunger Games at the one little Greencastle cinema just across the street from my house.

Wouldn't you call that a perfect day, too?

Saturday: breakfast at the Blue Door; long walk with Nicki and Henry through some of Greencastle's loveliest neighborhoods with every tree bedecked with spring flowers; an afternoon at the Prindle getting a huge amount of work done in the peace and quiet there, finishing my toil on my manuscript AND finishing the review of twenty submissions for CU's Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress coming up this summer; dinner with Keith and Meryl and Meryl's dear friend Debbie, visiting from Oxford.

Sunday: Easter! - plus tea and New York Times with Keith - plus another long walk with Nicki and Henry - plus an evening curled up in bed reading A. J. Jacobs's wise, insightful, and hilarious memoir, The Year of Living Biblically, in which he tries to follow the Bible literally in every regard, from refusing to wear mixed fibers, to stoning adulterers, to loving his neighbor as himself.

Four perfect days in a row. This might be a record. But I learned a long time ago that all I need for a perfect day is my four pillars of happiness: writing, reading, walking, friends, in any combination. If I can have those four plus the Blue Door Cafe, or plus Easter Sunday, or plus s'mores - what more could I ask for, really?

Easter Sunday 2012

This is my first Easter in Greencastle.

Last Sunday I had Palm Sunday back at my beloved church in Boulder, St. Paul's United Methodist Church, for the procession of palms which unaccountably brought me to tears at the sight of the congregation's children eagerly thrusting palms at those of us in each pew, as we sang, not the traditional "Hosanna, Loud Hosanna," but "Lift High the Cross." But then I missed our huge church egg hunt on the Saturday before Easter, attended by church families, neighborhood families, and families invited through the Emergency Family Assistance Association. And I missed the youth sunrise service. And the first glimpse of the sanctuary transformed by lilies as well as a profusion of spring flowers.

Instead, I walked up and down Seminary Street in Greencastle this morning as I talked on the phone to Christopher, who was getting ready to attend the Easter service on his base in Gulfport, Mississippi, shining his shoes to go with his dress uniform. Then I arrived at Gobin United Methodist Church, the church situated on one corner of the DePauw campus. Eager children handed me a white paper lily on a green pipecleaner stem; I tucked it into the bodice of my dress. The service began with "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," as all Easter services ought to begin. The spectacular DePauw choir outdid itself, including a wonderful quartet made up of DePauw voice students singing an additional piece of their own. Children in the congregation decorated an Easter tree with symbols of the Resurrection. The service closed with a stunning performance of Charles-Marie Widor's famous organ Toccata, which I associate with all the years I attended Easter services at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC - glorious, swelling soaring music. And then I had Easter dinner with friends from church who kindly included me in their holiday gathering.

So Easter would have been lovely in Boulder, but it was lovely here, too.

Easter is lovely everywhere.

Sugar Cream Pie

As my readers know, I have come to love the small town of Greencastle, Indiana, with its mere ten thousand inhabitants. But today I discovered an even smaller town to fall in love with: Fillmore, Indiana, a few miles away, population 533.

I was invited to Fillmore Elementary by a wonderful new arts organization called Castle Arts, founded by Beth Benedix. The mission of Castle Arts is to bring rich, creatively stimulating arts programming into public schools suffering from budget cuts that are decimating their arts offerings. In this pilot year, some eighteen or twenty artists, many of them DePauw University faculty, have been going to tiny Fillmore Elementary (one class per grade level) to engage the kids in every kind of art imaginable: poetry, dance, classical music, songwriting, painting, sculpture, and more.

Today I spoke to seven, yes, seven classes, getting the kids to engage in an interactive activity around the writing principle "show, don't tell" and then to write their own stories showing a character's emotion or personality by placing him or her in a scene and letting a natural reaction unfold. Oh, and part of our charge was to integrate the science curriculum as well, so the students were writing about characters out on a field trip to gather fossils or to study the night sky through a telescope.

Much exuberant energy emerged. I have to admit I'm exhausted now. But it was really a wonderful day. For lunch the organizers and I hurried off to Fillmore's one restaurant, a charming little eatery called Bert & Betty's. I had half of an open-faced tuna fish salad sandwich on home-made sourdough bread as well as my first-ever slice of an Indiana delicacy I had never heard of before: sugar cream pie, a pie shell spread with layers of creamed butter and sugar, then filled with vanilla cream, and baked. Apparently it is supposed to be a dessert you can rustle up even when the apple bin is empty and your cupboards are otherwise bare.

I didn't end up adoring sugar cream pie, but I'm certainly glad I sampled it. I love sampling all things Indiana. I especially love sampling them on a rainy, green-green-green Indiana day when I've given seven talks to lively children who seemed to be as happy to have me there as I was to spend the day in their company.

Kindred Spirits

One of the highlights of my spring break was spending two days doing school visits at three different schools in the North Kansas City School District. The kids were lively and well prepared, and I even came away from Bell Prairie Elementary with a possible idea for a new chapter book series: watch this spot!

But the most fun was staying for two nights with my friend April Armstrong, who in addition to being an extremely motivating school librarian is also an amazing musician (piano, fiddle, hammered dulcimer) and an even more amazing composer of her haunting compositions for solo piano. I stayed with her a year ago on a visit to her school, and instantly we recognized each other as Anne-of-Green-Gables-style "kindred spirits." Each morning we would get up early. April would go the piano and compose. I would lie on the little bed in her darling guest room and write. I have never felt more creative energy in any environment in my whole entire life.

April just has her first CD out: The Pink Rose. I am obsessed with it. I listen to it over and over again on my computer in my office and then take it with me as I drive anywhere so I can listen to it over and over again in my car. Go visit her website at http://www.pinkrosemusic.com/thepinkrose.html and buy copies of her CD for everybody you know. I want her to sell a million copies!

Heading Back to Indiana

I leave in an hour to get the bus to the airport to fly back to Indiana.

My week of spring break was crammed full of even more fun than I had expected. I surprised myself by absolutely adoring the Yves St. Laurent retrospective I attended with Rowan at the Denver Art Museum. I had never thought of myself as a "fashion" person; after all, I buy ALL of my clothes from the Fairview Marching Band yard sale and from the Greencastle Goodwill. But, oh, those suits, dresses, pants, tuxedos, and gowns were delicious! And then, to continue our sojourn in Paris, Rowan and I watched Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris last night. The plot was definitely predictable, but in such a satisfying way, and I loved spending time with Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein. But even better than spending time in France this week was spending time in Colorado: those mountains! that sunshine! dinner at the teahouse! strolling down Pearl Street!

Much as I love my stay in Indiana, right now I'm feeling a bit weary from juggling my two lives. The thing I have loved most about my appointment at DePauw is that I can be my whole true self: philosopher AND children's book scholar AND children's book writer, teaching Rousseau and Rawls in the philosophy department AND children's literature in the English department AND children's book writing during winter term, as well as organizing a major symposium on Ethics and Children's Literature scheduled for this coming September.

But the price I am paying for being my whole integrated professional self these days is to be a fragmented divided geographical self. It is hard living in two places, having to tear myself away from one to go back back to the other. I don't think I'll be back in Colorado again now until the beginning of July. July! I miss my church and writing group already desperately, even though I worshiped at St. Paul's in the morning yesterday for Palm Sunday and met with my writing group in the afternoon to share a new series idea and plan our summer retreat.

Colorado, I love you so much! How can I leave you? Indiana, I love you so much! I can't wait to come home to you later today. I've chopped my heart in half, and it beats in two different time zones now.

The Day Before April

Some readers have asked me to reprint this post in honor of the day, so here it is:

My mother was an elementary school teacher as well as a writer of a few published stories for children. Her love of reading and writing is where I get my love of reading and writing. My sister and I were raised on poetry. One of our favorite collections was Silver Pennies, edited by Blanche Jennings Thompson ("A Collection of Modern Poems for Boys and Girls" - modern, meaning at that time, published in 1959). The preface to the book begins with the lines:

You must have a silver penny
To get into Fairyland.

The premise of the book was that poems themselves are these silver pennies.

Of all the silver pennies in the book, this poem was the one we loved best, by Mary Carolyn Davies:

The Day Before April

The day before April
Alone, alone,
I walked in the woods
And sat on a stone.

I sat on a broad stone
And sang to the birds.
The tune was God's making
But I made the words.

My mother, my sister, and I have long celebrated "the day before April" as a holiday, a Mills family women's holiday. A few years ago I hosted a "day before April" party, with my mother and my boys (who did think it was a somewhat strange party) as the only guests. I usually gave my mother flowers on that day.

I've dreamed of writing a book with the title The Day Before April. Maybe someday I will.

It is the day before April today. I'm going to go buy some flowers - daff0dils, probably. Two years ago, when I first wrote this post, I took daffodils to my mother, who was in a rehabilitation center after a fall that broke her hip and arm; she died two months later. Today I'll buy daffodils in memory of her.

Happy day before April, everybody.

Lessons Relearned

One of my pleasant spring break tasks is going through the beautifully edited manuscript for my forthcoming novel, No Exceptions, about a seventh-grade student who brings her mother's lunch to school by mistake, a lunch containing a knife to cut her mother's apple, and who now faces expulsion under her school's zero-tolerance policies for possession of drugs or weapons.

Margaret had a lot of great queries for me to answer, ones that I'm still wrestling with, but mainly she just cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. I found myself blushing as I saw the passages she had excised: so flabby! so overwritten! so belaboring of the point! so self-consciously clever! so violating the principle of "show, don't tell"! Once, to my shame, she even wrote "Show, don't tell" in the margin by the deleted paragraph. I do a presentation for elementary school kids on this very principle! And yet I still told when I should have showed - or rather, told, when I had already showed.

I showed Sierra's principal giving a long self-congratulatory speech to a principal visiting from another middle school, as Sierra needs to talk to him to explain her situation. Then I wrote, "Sierra had to tell him, but she didn't know how to disrupt the flow of his self-congratulatory speech."

Margaret: "Does the speech show us this? No need to describe?"

And, oh, the needless repetition!

I wrote, "Sierra had never kissed a boy. The closest she had come to kissing a boy was imagining kissing Colin."

Was that first sentence needed? No, it was not.

Did I need TWICE to explain that the boys play with their Gameboys under the table so that Ms. Lin won't see them? (Margaret: "How they play with the Gameboys is already established.")

Did I need TWICE to have someone try to avoid saying something "that could never be unsaid"?

The best invention ever made for writers, I am now convinced: the delete key. And today I am using it liberally. I am using it a lot.

Did I need BOTH of those last two sentences? No, I did not!