It’s been a year since my last blog post, and a year since my mom passed. To mark this occasion, I will be writing about boobs. Well, not boobs per se, but the harnesses with which we hoist them about. I could invent some tie-in here with my beloved mother—some maiden-mother-crone-link-in-a-chain sort of thing, but that’s not the point. I could make a feminist statement about women’s bodies and the undying efforts to control, shape, lift, hide, expose, minimize, and augment them, but not today. I could rail against consumer culture and fast fashion and planned obsolescence, but my heart isn’t in that either.
 
No, the point I wish to make here is much more nuanced, more rarefied: I went bra shopping last week, and it sucked.
 
First, the Intimate Apparel section—like a REM-state stress dream that lasts till lunch—is a study in extreme market segmentation, a million square feet of mysterious-yet-boring garments on tiny, clacking hangers. There are 36,365 females in Santa Fe (I looked it up), and I’m pretty sure that Kohl’s stocks a different bra for each one (possibly even the infant girls). Maybe if your weight hasn’t changed (mine has, thanks for pointing that out), or you’re one of those women who actually has a favorite brand (who could know?), or you can still read the label on the tattered specimen you’ve been wearing for ten years (right), your shopping trip will be a breeze (I hate you). But for me? After at least fifty try-ons and two hours of my life that I’ll never get back, I left with two overengineered, overpriced bras that I already hate.
 
Allow me to share with you the world of bras from the perspective of a woman of a certain age.
 
Your first task is to rule out the ones with “cutlet” inserts or pushup padding, bras marketed as “Love the Lift,” “Ego Boost,” and the like. When I was in high school, a girl suspected of wearing “falsies” was the target of eye rolls, but falsies are everywhere now. Speaking of high school, it’s best to avoid the Juniors section altogether. First, it’s full of miniature, mango-magenta bras sold in three-packs that you cannot—repeat, cannot—wear after two kids and a mortgage. Second, it’s full of teen-age girls. Now as a high school teacher I love teen-age girls, but in the phantasmagorical world of Juniors bras, they are a terror. The same way you’ve already squeezed the cups and declared half of their merchandise categorically unfit, they’ve done the same in your Misses section, smugly snickering at the giant, matronly devices you’re about to try on. So. Just. Stay. Away.
 
OK, on to Misses. Let’s get this done.
 
Say, this looks sensible: beige, smooth-ish, simple. My size must be here somewhere. Clack, clack, clack. This one, no this one, no this one, no this one—there! Well, there’s the band size, but not the cup. Wait, there’s the cup size, but not the band. Wait, there’s the—oh, it’s a different style now. Clack, clack, clack.
 
Here’s the style, but this one’s white. No, it’s different. Wait, where did the first one go? Clack, clack, clack. Fine, this will work. Wait, there’s my size, but this one’s black. Clack, clack, clack. OK, the black will do.
 
How about this one with the front-close contour? Way at the back, there’s my size. Clack, clack, clack. Oops, knocked four on the floor. How about a wire-free lift? Clack, clack, clack. T-front? Clack, clack, clack. Racerback? Clack, clack, clack. Plunge? Balconette? Convertible? Compression? Molded? Halter? Moisture wicking? Clack, clack, clack.
 
I have three viable options after twenty minutes. Not bad.
 
OK, find the fitting room, try on the first one, and…
 
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WHAT IS THIS THING? Shiny weirdness! Spillage! Strangulation!
 
AND WHO IS THAT MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN IN THE MIRROR? This isn’t even my size anymore! Oh, the humanity….
 
Back to the racks, clack, clack, clack. Back to the fitting room, cringe, cringe, cringe.
 
Perhaps an underwire… Rebar! Get it off!
 
Or no underwire… Rubber band! Get it off!
 
Maybe this lacy one… Scratchy! Get it off!
 
Or the fully lined… Scary mannequin! Get it off!
 
Barely there… Back fat! Get it off!
 
Full coverage… Body armor! Get it off!
 
Breast petals… Nipple hats! Get it off!
 
Comfort devotion… Uniboob! Get it off!
 
Lined cup, demi cup, soft cup, seamed cup…clack, clack, clack.
 
Line up, debit card, find the car, slump home…mope, mope, mope.
 
You know, just because Danté never wrote about the Intimate Apparel Circle of Hell doesn’t mean it isn’t real. What’s also real is that I hail from a bra-hating matriarch who taught me better. What I really should be doing at 8 o’clock on a Monday evening is unharnessing the girls, pouring a glass of wine, and enjoying my life. And that’s right where I’m headed right now.…

The idea invaded my mind in the spring of 2013 like a colony of stealthy termites. I hardly knew it was there, yet it ate at me—a relentless occupying force that quickly multiplied and chewed holes in all my summer plans. By June I’d totally lost control and the idea became a full-blown infestation: I would write a book about my mom. I would gather photos, interview everyone, and shape her story, all eighty-five years of it. And I would do it that summer.

It’s an audacious thing to grab hold of another person’s story, but I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that Mom seemed to be getting depressed and I wanted to stop that trend. I couldn’t afford to cheer her up with a trip to Paris, or a shopping spree on Las Vegas’s Miracle Mile. All I had to give was my time and my belief that she was truly extraordinary.

At first the book felt like any other project, though infused with more soul than, say, those nifty projects Home Depot expects us to tackle on brisk Saturday mornings with our dapper teen-age sons. I put together a binder with tabs and sheet protectors and compiled a list of interview questions. I planned the book in a predictable fashion—page 1 for title and intro, pages 2–3 for her childhood, 4–5 for early adulthood, and so on. I envisioned it as a yearbook of sorts—lots of photos, with just enough text to tie it together. I’d keep it to thirty-six pages. I had this.

I sent the plan to my four siblings and waited for them to laud my bold initiative and devotion to Mom. I waited for the heady collaboration to begin, the shared purpose, the teamwork. And then I waited some more.

“Would you PLEASE answer my email?” I pleaded in text messages.
After another week, the cringey replies crept in. No one had time for this, who knew where all those photos were, and why couldn’t I just lie on the beach all summer like a normal teacher?

But I was convinced Mom needed this. She’d had a tough life. Her first husband—the love of her life—had died young, leaving her alone with four kids to raise, the oldest nearly five years and the youngest six weeks. Then, after a brief failed marriage to my dad, she was left with this here fifth kid, too. A dozen years later, we were a horde of quarreling teenagers who blasted Black Sabbath and bared our midriffs and failed math class and hurled vases at each other while she was busy working. Then a few more years flew by and we all grew up and left her alone, too.

After she retired from thirty years of teaching elementary school, Mom had a great ten years or so traveling, bowling, and enjoying her grandchildren. But then the quality of her life seemed to head south. Her friends started dying, the Yankees stunk, Obama got elected again, her hair was still frizzy, she’d had to quit smoking, and Hurricane Sandy was a bitch and a half. She was watching Law and Order marathons and speaking in a worrisome, flat tone. (“I bowled a 127 yesterday. My thyroid is low. Remember Mrs. Paoni? She’s dead.”) I worried she would slip away into some sad dementia and then die disappointed, feeling like her life had been meaningless. Suddenly it became inevitable that I would spend the summer sitting on my butt scanning hundreds of photos, exchanging 40,000 emails with my sisters (“Was it you or Theresa whose doll got run over?”), and searching the internet for the Cracker Jacks label from 1933.

Once my siblings accepted the idea of the book, The Great Group Memory Dump began, in a barrage of voicemails, emails, and texts.

“Barb, you have to put in how Mom fell asleep at the typewriter that time and woke up on the floor.”

“Barbie, put in that time we waited for hours to see the Capitol but the whole time Mom thought it was the White House.”

“Hey, Boo-boo—remember Grandma’s story of how Mom painted a green stripe down the side of Uncle Tony’s car when she was little?”

They also sent photos. I’d asked for twelve pictures of each of them, from babyhood to the present, and six of each of their kids. Instead they sent terrible cell-phone snaps of old discolored photos, often with the glare of a flash or the shadow of their own hand in the frame.

After a few weeks I had a list of the same tired stories we’d been telling for decades and a bunch of crappy low-resolution photos. So, like the youngest kid that I am in a family with four older siblings who used to sit on me and tickle me mercilessly and steal my candy and tell me to go away, I flew to New York and whined to my mom.
 

“Mo-om,” I groused on the way back to her house from the airport. “Everybody said they liked the idea of this book, but they won’t help.”

“Well, it was your idea, not theirs.”

“And I’m willing to do the lion’s share of the work, but…”

She gave me the No Sniveling Allowed face, the same disinterested expression she’d given me when I complained that we never had potato chips, or that the lady I babysat for paid me with a check again, or that the gym teacher was a lech. So I shut up. Clearly this would be my very own project.

Back at her house that night, with the Yankees game at top volume and my stomach full of New York pizza, I dragged out the old hat boxes full of photos. Lifting their lids released the old musty perfume that said “story.” How many times had we pawed through these photos, listening to Mom tell of how Grandpa arrived at Ellis Island in 1909, of how Grandma worked nights at the munitions factory to help the war effort, of how her neighbors hunted rabbits in the Long Island fields that were now buried by strip malls?

“Hey, Mom!” I shouted over an Ambien commercial, handing her a booklet of old black and white prints. “Who are these people?” I muted the TV and waited for a long story. I poured myself a glass of wine as she flipped through the book with a wistful smile. After all, this was a whole book of photos that chronicled some event from a time back when men wore hats. This would be a good one.

She paused thoughtfully, handed the booklet back to me, and said, “I have no idea.” Her gentleman friend, Jim, unmuted the TV and they returned to the Yankees.

That set the tone for the next two weeks. Clearly I’d waited too long to do this book because at eighty-five, Mom had forgotten plenty, and many of the people who could have supplied the missing information were long dead.

Mom has lived in the same house for nearly sixty years, and many of her friends and neighbors have been there just as long. I made a list of the folks I would interview and began calling and visiting the next day.

As a freelance journalist, I’d interviewed hundreds of people, but nothing had prepared me for this.

“Mom held dance lessons in the basement?”

“Oh sure,” said our neighbor Mrs. Sliwak. “She taught us all. I still remember the fox trot.”

“Mom got drunk and almost fell in the Erie Canal?”

“Well there was this crazy bar in Brockport—” Aunt Cathy began.

“Mom fell asleep during her grad-school classes?”

“All the time!” her teacher friend explained. “She was always exhausted when you kids were little. It was my job to jab her and keep her awake.”

Then there were her bowling pals.

“She’d always get mad that we weren’t more competitive,” our neighbor, Mrs. Vandenheuvel said. “She’d shout, ‘Come on, ladies! Let’s get cracking!’ ”

Then there was Jim, her very-late-in-life love interest.

“She’s so down-to-earth,” he said. “She doesn’t think she’s King Shit.”

I interviewed my siblings (from oldest to youngest, these are Joanna, Ted, Madeline, and Theresa) and their spouses and kids. Some waxed poetic while others had to be prodded, but their responses were always moving.

“I learned to be honest from Mom,” Ted said, “and it pisses me off. I try to be dishonest, but I can’t.”

“One of the things I admire about Mommy is the way she took little things and turned them into big things,” said Joanna. “Even if it was just a five-cent candy after church, she taught us to appreciate it.”

“Nana taught me how to do long division,” said my niece Marianne.

After I interviewed everyone, I added my own core truth: “Mom showed me how to be tough. Whenever I feel defeated or feel sorry for myself, I think of her and I rally.”

My notes filled two legal pads, and frequently made me cry, first in appreciation because Mom’s long life had touched so many people—five kids, eleven grandchildren, three great-grandchildren, nearly two thousand students, countless friends and relatives—but also in sadness because so many people talked about her in the past tense:

“She was always so vivacious.”

“She always had lots of friends.”

“She was always the leader.”

She was still with us, still very much alive, but we all knew she was, well, fading. She’d lost four inches in height, her skin was becoming as gray as her hair, and she was doing old-person things that weren’t so funny anymore. We might have teased her years earlier when she drank from the wine carafe at dinner, or bought a set of candleholders thinking they were juice glasses, or called the fire department because she feared her stove was about to explode (the electric pepper grinder in a nearby cabinet was stuck in the ON position).

But now she was placing her hands beneath the paper towel dispenser and waiting for the water to turn on, setting the table for people who weren’t there, and uttering bizarre non-sequitors such as, “I don’t know why your brother has bricks on his feet.” If I hadn’t already accepted that my dynamo of a mom had truly entered the next phase of her life, namely the holy-shit-how-long-can-she-really-live-alone-what-are-we-gonna-do-now-crap-crap-crap phase, then the contrast being drawn in these interviews between Mom’s former and current selves certainly convinced me.

Interviewing my mom proved the most difficult. She’d never been all that skilled at articulating her feelings—“I feel rotten” was about all we could ever get out of her when she was clearly depressed—and she had no patience for pontification. Combine those tendencies with memory loss, and you get interviews like this:

Me: “What was it really like to be a single mom with five kids—on a teacher’s salary?”

Mom: “It was fun.” (I must have missed that part.) “You kids were good.” (No, we weren’t.)

Me: “What do you hope we’ve learned from you?”

Mom: “Be a good person.”

And while one can present a simple quotation like “Be a good person” as an elixir of truth distilled from hours of introspection, when it stands alone—I mean really alone—it’s a dud.

So I developed a method of first asking others about her life and then plying her with that information. If I led with something like, “Aunt Cathy says you were voted Best Dancer in your senior year. Tell me about your dance partner,” she might talk about why Jimmy De Rosa was such a great guy, and underneath all of that I’d learn what she valued in people: “You could trust him, and he was fun to be with. You could spend an evening with him laughing and dancing and whatnot, but you knew where you stood. Jimmy and I were dance partners, nothing more.”

With coaching like that, I was able to unearth a few other gems:

“Other people plan their lives. I decided early just to take it as it comes.”

“People today expect too much. That’s why they run up their credit cards and get boob jobs and take Viagra. They need to learn to be happy with less.”

“I don’t know how much time I have left. Why should I waste it on people I don’t like?”

Back at Mom’s dining room table, the photo sorting continued. Large piles were separated into smaller piles, and the book grew to forty-eight pages. When my sisters came over they would join in for a while, but I persisted long after they left.

Every day I gathered up artifacts to photograph in the early morning light before harsh shadows ruined the shots—our Christmas music album (the LP was red!), a favorite grease-stained recipe, the worn piano music for Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” that Mom would tackle anew every few years.

In the yard I photographed the hibiscus, the tea roses, and the Montauk daisies Mom nurtured every summer. Then the mailbox, the Ladonia Street sign at the corner, and the “Welcome to Seaford” sign on Merrick Road. I drove around town taking pictures of the pond at Tackapausha, where we used to feed bread ends to the ducks; All American, home of the best burger in town; Wantagh Lanes, the bowling alley where Mom spent countless hours; Jones Beach, which had become its own two-page spread in the book; and many more power spots from our childhood.

I downloaded pictures of S & H green stamps, Jack LaLanne, glass baby bottles, Charles Chips cans, Great Neck High School, Nancy Sinatra, and of course, the Cracker Jacks label from the 1930s because Grandma always bought Mom and Aunt Cathy a box after a day at the beach.

The gathering of photos and information occupied most of my vacation. When I left, I think Mom was glad to see me go. While she was flattered I was doing the book, she was tired of my constant questions and photo-snapping. The attention unnerved her, and it distracted her from weeding her flower beds and complaining about the Red Sox.
 

Back home in Santa Fe, I set up the book in the layout program InDesign. I typed up my interview notes and organized them by page number. My daughter, Maggie, and I spent days going through our photo albums. I sent more emails and scoured the web for more images.

Then the real work began, which hinged on answering this question: How much truth should the book present?

No one’s childhood is without difficulty, and ours was no exception. Of course there were great times—endless days at the beach, whole-block games of hide and seek, magical Christmas mornings, roller skating in the street, homemade birthday cakes—but Mom was gone a lot. And while she was busy earning her master’s degree, or out on Saturday nights attempting to have a life, her teenagers were home having their own lives. Suffice it to say that we kids navigated what was basically a Lord of the Flies scenario in a working-class suburb—the fight for power, the alliances formed and broken, the competition for scant resources, whether those resources were the last hot dog, the bedroom without the broken window, or our mother’s attention. So how does that play out in print? How should that be reflected in a book meant to honor an elder?

Joanna said to me about fifteen years ago, “Not for nothing, but if I saw your dad lying in the street bleeding, I’d step over him and keep on walking.” Hmm. So should my dad appear in the book? Or do we pretend I just happened along one day in 1964? What about the siblings from my dad’s earlier marriages? What about Mom’s old boyfriend Russ? What about the relatives Mom was never fond of? And what about that giant snorfeling elephant in the room—how was I going to handle her first husband’s death?

The book was meant to be a tribute, to chronicle Mom’s life and make her happy. But all of life is not happy. Treachery and disappointment worm their way into so many unsuspecting families, and that was true of us as well. But while various truths had found their way to the surface decades earlier—and I had exposed many of them myself—here I was eager to showcase the good. Was I nuts?

And who was I to be telling this story, anyway? Sure, I’m a writer, an English teacher, and a yearbook adviser—I had the skills—but did I have the cred? After all, I’m only a half-sibling, and because I’m the youngest, I lack the memories of the earliest years. Did that mean I had a unique perspective, a more objective point of view? Or did that mean I was not only ignorant, but also presumptuous? What if I got the story wrong? What if Mom hated the book because I whitewashed the bad times? What if she hated it because I didn’t?

One morning in early July, after I’d spent most of the night staring at the ceiling, my husband, Scott, casually said, “You know, after you finish the book and everyone has a copy, they’ll probably never even look at those old hat boxes of photos again. The book will become the canon; it will become THE story of the family.”

I pushed my coffee away and dropped my head to the table. He was right. And I was more trapped than ever. I couldn’t abandon the project at that point, yet I didn’t know how to proceed. To make matters worse, my mother’s weakening faculties made it all the more urgent that I finish the book quickly. I had initially told the family I would have the first draft done by August and a final copy for Mom by Christmas.

“That might be too late, Boo,” Madeline warned. “She could be one more mini-stroke away from not appreciating it at all.”

Scott refreshed my coffee, toasted us a bagel, and sat down across from me. “Hey,” he said, nudging my shoulder. “Who’s your audience?” As a marketing dude, Scott is adept at identifying and reaching specific audiences. “Come on,” he said, nudging me harder. “Who’s your audience?”

“Everyone,” I moaned. “The whole family. Maybe the whole world.”

“No,” he said. “It’s your mom. You have an audience of one, and you know that audience very well. That’s all you have to think about. Make every decision with your audience in mind. Come on. Just get started.”

So I did.

And it was an amazing experience.
 
The magic started with the scanning of photos. While turning a printed photo taken yesterday into a digital file is a ho-hum task, one you can do while reading a magazine as the machine whirs along, scanning a decades-old black and white photo is quite a different experience. First, picture my mom’s kindergarten class photo: 8 by 10 inches with thirty kids in four rows. Mom, sitting with hands clasped in a plaid dress and white anklets, measures about an inch and a half. But when I scan the photo at high resolution, the image fills the screen. Adjust the brightness and contrast, and there she is, in all her long lost little-girlness. In print, she’s just a dot among other washed-out dots. But now here she is, with her serious face and polished shoes, so much larger and more vivid than the print. I do the same for her other class pictures and scroll through them in wonder. Since the Great Depression, these photos have been keeping tremendous secrets, but now those secrets are out. Look at Mom’s sad dark eyes and swarthy complexion, in contrast with her self-assured, waspy classmates. (Mom grew up in Great Neck, on the north shore of Long Island, where Grandpa tended gardens on huge, Gatsby-like estates; these kids’ parents owned those estates.) Look at the starched collar, the carefully styled hair—Grandma made sure Mom was just as clean and shiny as the other kids.

The same miracle occurs for every ancient, faded photo I scan. Small, indistinct faces, long diffused in some sort of Kodak ether, suddenly coalesce, regaining their form and clarity. A glowing smile, a baby’s scowl, a thoughtful glance—they all reappear, often larger than life on the screen. Although I have for years railed against how Photoshop manipulates reality in today’s media, here I am experiencing its magic as I reclaim these images. The irony is not lost on me as I manipulate the past, removing a blemish here, restoring color balance there.

Not only do faces crystallize, but items in the background also appear. Wallpaper patterns, toys, trophies, baby formula, tiny shoes, framed certificates, tea cups, magazines, cigarette packs, fishing poles, dashboards, loaves of bread, TV knobs, Spic ’n Span—so many things that have been too small, fuzzy, or faded to detect in these old photos are suddenly clear. I can magnify the view so much that I can almost read the headline on The New York Times my grandpa is reading in 1956, and can tell that the item on the table next to him is a hinged frame with college graduation photos of my mom and my aunt. I can even discern the lace pattern on the curtains behind him.

As I work, I stream Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey on YouTube and fall into the dream of the past. I watch in constant wonder as images take form on my screen: Mom and her first husband, “Big Ted,” drape tinsel on a Christmas tree. My brother, “Little Ted,” grips the steering wheel on the family’s small boat. Baby Madeline dozes in a highchair. Joanna helps Mom mop the kitchen floor. Theresa grins with bits of teething biscuit smeared on her tiny face. Grandpa carves the Thanksgiving turkey. Grandma serves up spaghetti for Sunday dinner. Mom looks up from her teacher’s desk. Big Ted stands next to Uncle Chet at a picnic, bottles of Rhinegold in hand, laughing. There’s Ladonia Street back when today’s towering oaks were so small they needed to be staked. In these snapshots of the past everyone is happy. Everyone has nothing but hope for the future. Everyone is still alive.

The phone rings, interrupting my reverie. It’s Mom, calling to tell me I forgot “some phone thing” at her house. It takes me a minute to adjust to her shaky voice—I expect her to be twenty-nine. I figure out from her description that I left a flashdrive behind.

“No big, Mom. How are you?”

“The Yankees are winning.”

“Who’s your favorite Yankee of all time?” I click on the photo of her standing next to Joe DiMaggio at the wax museum.

“Joe DiMaggio.”

Yes!

“And today?” I find the photo of Derek Jeter I downloaded earlier that day. There he is defying gravity, caught mid-air as he leaps over a runner who is sliding into second base. His handsome, earnest face is fixed in intensity.

“Jeter, of course.”

Yes! I love Jeter. I love my mom. I can’t wait till I get to the baseball page.

“How’s the book?” she asks.

“Great!”

Several of the issues I’d worried about have resolved themselves. A neighbor, bless her heart, remembers my dad well, so I have one positive quotation to include with a picture of him. I decide to put all the many old stories, anecdotes, and private jokes into quiz form, which allows me to showcase my mom’s personality and to include her younger voice—the one that never shook while we were growing up.

Here is quiz item #23:
When Mom doesn’t like what someone is saying, or regards that person as an annoyance, what is she likely to say?
a.     “Go fly a kite.”
b.     “You’re full of beans.”
c.     “Go shit in your hat.”
d.     “Go play in traffic.”
e.     “Take a long walk off a short pier.”
f.      “Dry up and blow away.”
g.     All of the above.
You guessed it—the answer is “g.”

I work ten hours a day on the book, which has grown to sixty pages. Summer storms drench the world as the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra blend with the pelting rain. It’s hard to pull away to swim laps, make dinner, or spend time with my own kids, Nick, twenty, and Maggie, fourteen.

I finish the early years and skip ahead to the spreads about Mom’s travels, the beach, bowling, gardening, teaching, and the extended family. I set up a two-page spread for each of my siblings and their families, creating individual timelines. I call Great Aunt Nancy and Aunt Cathy continually to fill in information. I scan old drawings and cards we made for Mom. (“Dear Mommy, I love you you are a very nice cook. You are a woaman Who is Nice.”) I’m on a roll now, and I am certifiably the best daughter in the world.

But that snorfeling elephant is demanding my attention.

By late July, I know I can’t put it off any longer. The book is nearly done, but the pages dedicated to Big Ted’s death and the year following it are blank. I don’t want to work on those pages. I don’t want to leave behind the children’s merry faces, my vibrant mom, or the little pool where Big Ted smiles, kids clamoring over him as he relaxes after a day of work at the school where he was principal. Everything is as it should be. No one knows what’s coming, and I don’t want them to know. If I never finish the book, maybe they never will. Why can’t Tommy Dorsey keep playing? Why can’t my mom keep dancing? Why can’t the kids keep beaming in their safe, loving, intact family?

I remember how as a kid these pictures always looked so right to me, and the ones with my dad always looked so wrong. Theirs were the golden years; mine were brass. I recall how as a child I used to passionately tell my mom I would give up my life if it would bring Big Ted back. She would tell me she would have had a fifth kid anyway, that I would have come along even if Big Ted hadn’t died, so I could quit making that gruesome offer.

I step away from the desk, fighting tears. My chest hurts, filled with a heavy, tightening dread that makes it hard to breathe. It’s as if I’m leaving a loved one’s bedside after the doctor has said, “It’s only a matter of time.” And I’m somehow responsible for the patient’s death.

I lie down on the couch and watch an aspen sway in the breeze. Leaves rustle. Birds sing. I sleep. When I wake, I instantly remember what I’d been thinking before I fell asleep: He’s not even your dad.

I watch the aspens again.

No, he’s not my dad, but this is my family, and this story has been so big and so sad for so long that it has shaped everything. In my twenties, when I was more prone to New Age dogma, I used to believe everything happened for a reason, and that hard times were to be seen as gifts because they helped us find strength we didn’t know we had.

What a load of crap.

Big Ted’s death was a mistake, pure and simple. He went into the hospital because he’d been feeling weak—he had a heart condition—and soon he contracted a staph infection and died. Someone hadn’t washed his hands properly, or a janitor hadn’t use the right amount of disinfectant on the floor. That’s why my siblings lost their sweet father and my mom lost her beloved husband. It was a mistake.

Then there’s the issue of my dad himself. At sixteen years older than my mom (he was closer to my grandparents’ ages than hers), with his despised last name (he legally adopted the four kids), his son who lived with us (himself mourning the death of his own mother), his drinking (scotch), and his explosive anger (watch out!), he would be poison for the unwitting family who are still smiling on page nine of the book. How I wish I could direct my cursor to the Edit menu, select Delete, and spare them all that fate.

Was I a mistake?

As a kid, once I accepted that I couldn’t die to bring Big Ted back, I directed my energy toward wishing my mom would at least not have married my dad. Then she could have lived her life as a noble widow, with her young family unsullied by an outsider. There would have been no strangely spelled Dutch surname to supplant the Italian name, no capricious punishments from the erratic stepdad, no raging maniac to impel us to take shelter at Aunt Cathy’s house.

And after the divorce there would have been no Sunday visits for my dad and me, the ninety minutes of polite torture we endured week after week for years and years.

Dad: “Would you like to play Mankala?”

Me: “OK.”

Dad: “Would you like to go to the pet shop?”

Me: “OK.”

Dad: “Would you like to visit Aunt Rita and Uncle Jim?”

Me: “OK.” (Rita and Jim were my godparents. One Sunday when we dropped in on them unannounced, they were cleaning up after a party and she had a massive black eye.)

As I stare at the swaying aspen, I recognize the peculiar guilt I have felt my whole life. Faulty causation is what it is, a logical fallacy that I dutifully teach my students to recognize every year: post hoc ergo proctor hoc—after this, therefore, because of this. My existence didn’t cause Big Ted’s death; it happened six years before I was born. And it wasn’t my fault that my parents rushed into marriage when they were both still mourning their late spouses.

“Barbara’s so spoiled she even has her own father.”

How many times did I hear that as a kid?

And here I am agonizing about how to portray Big Ted’s death. Tell me again why I took this on?

I approach my computer the next day as if attending a funeral. I’ve saved two photos for this page—one of Big Ted in a sailor suit when he was about four years old, and one at thirty in a suit with a bow tie, looking both kind-hearted and handsome. I search my interview notes about him and sob as I format the text.

“Tell me about Ted,” I had asked everyone who knew him.

“He was a great guy,” Great Aunt Nancy said. “Your mother was so happy with him.”

“He was very good to your mother,” said Aunt Cathy. “Grandma and Grandpa thought he was fantastic.”

“He was a wonderful family man,” said Mrs. Vandenheuvel.

“Talk to me about your dad,” I had said to my siblings.

Theresa, as the youngest, never knew her dad, but she thinks about him every day. “I don’t think anyone in this world ever made Mommy smile like he did,” she said, choking up. “He touched so many people.”

“Daddy has my back,” Madeline said, as she has always said. A narrowly avoided car accident, a favorable job review, her daughter’s recovery from cancer—Madeline has always believed her dad is her guardian angel.
The older kids have some actual memories of him.

“All I remember is being on the boat,” Ted said. “I remember throwing my baloney overboard and eating the bread, and I think Mom was mad at me for it.” He added, “I grew up without a father. That’s why I’m so close to my kids.”

Joanna said, “I remember he had a green boat and he had a little fishing pole for me, but all I caught was seaweed. Teddy had a captain’s hat and Daddy would set him in the captain’s seat and Madeline was in a stroller.”

Although Joanna’s memories of her father are often envied, she also has the dubious honor of remembering his death: “When my father died, Mom said that Daddy wouldn’t be coming home, that he went to Heaven. I asked why and she said, ‘God needed a really good principal in Heaven and Daddy was the best, so God took him.’ I accepted it…. It made perfect sense in my four-year-old world.”

She also remembers, the following Christmas, making her dad a pencil box out of an orange-juice can that she painted and decorated. When she brought the gift home from school, she asked Mom how she could get it to him: “Mom said when Santa Claus came, he would take the gift to Heaven for Daddy‘s desk.”

I sob as I work on this page and no amount of big band swing makes it any better. Finally, I settle on a simple layout: The bow-tie photo takes the right half of the page, with birth and death dates below. Quotations fill the left half, with the sailor-suit photo on the bottom. Done.

I go for a swim, hoping to release my sadness into the water. But in the quiet of the pool’s deep end I begin to wonder, What is this book about, anyway? Is it about Mom and her life, or is it about me? Or, more specifically, about Big Ted and me? Am I chronicling my mom’s life, or am I trying to write myself into the family? I don’t have an answer.

I leave the pool, return to my computer, and push through to the following spread. I tear up again as I write the headline “A New Chapter,” which is how Mom always labeled the time after Big Ted’s death. One picture shows baby Theresa lying on a rug as a cousin stares at her blankly. Three-year-old Ted looks desolate. The rest are pictures of my grandparents on our old couch with kids sitting all over them. Evidently they helped out a lot during that time, and Mom avoided the camera. On the next page, I finally show up, along with five square inches about my dad. And life goes on.

This is enough reality for my audience of one. And enough for me, too. I take a break from the book for a few days.

When I return to it, I feel lighter, and I focus on the quiz. I laugh out loud as I sneak inside jokes and family trivia into fifty multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and matching questions. I laugh at Mom’s spunk and at the mishaps and idiosyncrasies that make up every family. I write up long-winded, snarky explanations in the answer key and snicker some more. It’s a hoot, that quiz. I still laugh when I read it.
 
My sisters made only minor changes to the first draft, and I designed a simple cover—a huge photo of a hibiscus blossom with Mom’s name across the petals: Madeline Abbene. It’s a beautiful book.

I mailed Mom her copy a week before Thanksgiving. I was sorry I couldn’t be there for the unveiling, but the phone call was pretty gratifying.

“I can’t believe you did this!” Mom said over and over. “It’s more than I ever imagined! I can’t believe you did this!”

“I hope you like it, Mom.”

“Like it? I love it! My goodness! I don’t know what to say!”

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, dolly. Thank you so much.”

“You’re welcome. Mom. Thank you. For everything.”

I like to think the book made Mom feel loved and appreciated. I like to think that when she looks back at her life, the joys and satisfaction will outweigh the pain and trouble.

In creating the book I had the opportunity to see my story anew. Yes, I told the story with more emphasis on the good than the bad. But isn’t that how it should be? And isn’t that how it truly was?

Greg was in good form at the St. Francis Auditorium in Santa Fe on Feb. 27. I thought y’all might like to hear about the show.

First, a surprise: Greg was not wearing a hat! Who knew the man had hair? Seriously, how often do we see him without a hat? But of course, he was wearing sunglasses.

Okay, now to the show.

One wonders how a songwriter as prolific as Greg decides what to play on any given night. He did say that his sister, who lives about 300 miles south in Silver City, was at the show, so he found himself choosing more family-oriented songs.
 
Here is the set list, along with some comments:
 
• Mercy Mercy Mercy
• Walkin’ Daddy
• Douds Jail (A new song, he said, explaining that the town of Douds doesn’t even have a jail, but he got an idea and just wrote the song: “Writing songs is like being God’s secretary—you write what you’re told and you don’t ask questions.”)
• Cheapest Kind
• Bones Bones (Lots of gravelly voice here.)
• Verona Road? (Not sure about this song. Oh, the shame...)
• Rexroth’s Daughter (Greg explained how Kenneth Rexroth, a beat-generation poet he admired, wrote a lot about his own daughters.)
• Spring Wind
• Never So Far
INTERMISSION
• Fat Boy Blues (Hilarious, especially at the end when he delivered a minute or two of grumpy, croaky murmurings that sounded like a fat man trying to get off a couch.)
• Laughing River
• Down at the Mill (He explained that his grandfather, who had been a railroad man, went on to run a saw mill powered by an old steam engine, and that he loved to visit Grandpa there because otherwise he didn’t commonly see “large, drunk men fight so close to heavy machinery.”)
• Besham’s Bokerie (So glad to have heard his wacky falsetto up close.)
• You Drive Me Crazy (Complete with that fun scat-dialogue.)
• I Could Just Cry (He explained that he wrote this song about his 9-year-old grandson’s grandfather, presumably, according to fellow fan and novelist Glenn Stenson, Bo Ramsey's dad.)
• Jesus & Elvis (Greg explained the origin of the song: There really was a parking lot in Missouri, just off a highway along the Mississippi, where he encountered a man selling art out of his van. He pulled off the highway, jumped out of his ‘78 Impala, and there they were: two large velvet paintings, one of Jesus and one of Elvis, representing the essential conflict of his life. In velvet, yet. He bought both paintings.)
ENCORE:
• Earth Is a Woman
• If You Don’t Get It at Home
 
An odd moment toward the end of the show was when someone shouted from the audience, “Were you ever a baseball player?” (I guess she regarded “Laughing River” as an autobiographical account.) Greg handled the call-out with aplomb and shared a little about his athletic past—he played basketball and football and ran track. “I was pretty fast,” he said, adding that baseball was too slow for him when he was a kid, but that the pace was probably just right for him nowadays.

The audience gave Greg a standing ovation after the encore, the lights came up, and the crowd filtered out. But as I gathered up my coat and set notes, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling exhilarated. Instead I felt a little…blah.
Greg was brilliant, of course—such a wealth of talent, wisdom, and generosity of spirit encompassed in one human being. He’s my all-time favorite artist, and he gave a good show. But alas, the venue was a dud.

I’d seen Greg twice before in nightclub settings (the now-defunct Club West and Firestone Theater in Santa Fe) and once at an outdoor music festival (Thirsty Ear, just outside of town), hopping party scenes all. But the St. Francis Auditorium is an old decommissioned church, a textbook example of Pueblo Revival architecture with a high ceiling and the Stations of the Cross painted on the walls. I mean, who really wants to sit upright in a pew for two hours to listen to a famously down-home singer-songwriter? The concert felt more like a recital than a scene of fun and merriment, which I believe dampened the mood of the night.

Then there’s Santa Fe’s annoying tendency to close up early. Although the concert promoter told us Greg would be out in the lobby after the show to say hi and sign CDs, most of the crowd—around 400 people!—left when the show ended. Fifteen minutes later, when Greg came out, there were only a handful of us there to greet him. Granted, most of the audience was silver-haired, but was everyone really so sleepy that they couldn’t stay up a few minutes later to meet the dude they just spent $30 or $40 to see? Weird.

But I got to meet him, and that was a thrill. Although I already owned all the CDs they were selling, I bought one for a friend just to have an excuse to talk to him. And I’ll confess I had an ulterior motive.

My first novel, “Love and Death in a Perfect World,” was published last summer, and in it I quote from several of Greg’s songs. I contacted him through his website a few years ago to ask permission, and he gave me his blessing. This past December I emailed him again to ask for an address to send him a copy. After a few tries, he responded, and I mailed him a book with a message telling him how important his music has been to me. It seemed like the thing to do, considering his massive creative output has contributed so much to my life.

As he was signing my CD, I told him I was the person who’d sent the book that featured some of his lyrics. He replied, “Oh, right. How’s that going for you?” My guess is he hasn’t read it or even looked at it, but…oh well. It goes that way sometimes. I shook his hand, told him it was an honor to meet him, and moved on.

I woke up this morning with “Rexroth’s Daughter” in my head and I realize that of all the songs Greg played last night, this moved me the most. First, it’s one of the songs I quote in my novel: “Life is a thump-ripe melon, so sweet and such a mess.” That line is truly a comfort to me when pretty much nothing in life goes as planned—or hoped—and I remember it’s my choice to appreciate whatever sweetness comes my way.

But more importantly, also from that song, is a line I literally try to live by:  “What is real but compassion as we move from birth to death?” I am filled with admiration and gratitude for the man. Thank you, Greg. Your music has made me a better person.

​I enjoy preaching about the value of challenging my beliefs, about seeking out positions that run counter to my own, about embracing diversity of all flavors. What I don’t enjoy is feeling like a hypocrite when doing those things totally sucks.

Here’s what happened.

I was in Silver City for the Southwest Festival of the Written Word in early October, where I sat at a table for two days trying to sell my book. The vendor area, in the banquet room of The Murray Hotel, turned out to be sort of an oxbow lake, a place apart from the free workshops and author readings taking place nearby that made the festival a magnet for book lovers. Consequently, the vendors spent a lot of time talking to each other, perusing each other’s books, and suffering through bad coffee. (I also spent a lot of time feeling guilty for not buying more books, but that’s another story.)

Enter “Jane Doe,” a woman with soft, thoughtful eyes who arrived a few hours after the hall opened. After setting up at a table across from mine, she greeted me warmly and spent some time looking through the books at our Terra Nova Books table. (It was technically a publisher’s “booth,” so there were about twenty titles for sale). When she got to mine, she said to me, “I know what it takes to write a novel, to stay focused on it for years, to put yourself out there. I congratulate you. Can you tell me about it?”

Who could ask for a better opener? I told her about my book and she listened earnestly. Then I asked about hers, which turned out to be a rich, fat novel set in Indian country. (I’m avoiding detail here because it’s not as if “Jane” thought she was being interviewed; she will remain anonymous.) Oh, that book looked delicious. Jane, a scholar and an academic, had done extensive research and spent ten years writing it. I read the jacket copy and was hooked. I promised to come to her reading and buy the book.

Somehow the conversation turned toward reading critically, and I explained how I teach my students to do analyses that require them to not only examine a text’s content (what the author says) but also its microstructure (what the author does). I explained that political speeches are a good place to start because they’re so transparent. (Try it some time—it will go something like this: Here’s the greeting. Here’s the invocation of God. Here’s the part that’s meant to appeal to my patriotism. Here’s the part that’s meant to scare me, followed quickly by the part that’s meant to assuage my fears because the speaker has a solution. Here’s the part that exhorts me to believe in a grand vision. Here’s the closing, which also invokes God. Done.)

“Yes, and you can see that when Obama speaks,” she said.

“Of course,” I agreed.

“Watch where he pauses,” she said. “He’s telling on himself.”

I’m sure I looked bewildered.

“He doesn’t even believe what he’s saying half the time,” she continued. “Just watch him.”

“Well I’ve watched him many times….”

And we were off.

“He’s done nothing as president.”

“He’s been blocked by vicious, self-serving demagogues at every turn.”

“Half my friends and family are uninsured since Obamacare took effect.”

“The AMA has concluded that the Affordable Care Act is a success.”

“Our Second Amendment rights are in danger.”

“The wingnuts are in the pockets of the NRA.”

It went on. And on. It wasn’t revealing, it wasn’t probing, it wasn’t stimulating. It just sucked. I didn’t want to look at her soft, thoughtful eyes anymore. I didn’t want to hear her earnest voice. And I certainly didn’t want to buy her book. I wanted her to evaporate.

I made an excuse to end the conversation—time for more crappy coffee—and escaped. When I returned, she was busy at her own table and that was the end of it.

But I sure felt like a fraud.

In his Sept. 23 piece in Time, “Ignorance Vs. Reason in the War on Education,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar writes, “We seem hardwired to discard information that contradicts our beliefs.” He quotes Francis Bacon: “The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion … draws all things else to support and agree with it.” To challenge these human tendencies, I always have my students read two important works: “The Indispensable Opposition,” by Walter Lippman, after which I encourage them to learn from their opponents rather than shut them out; and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” after which I encourage them to examine the “shadows” of knowledge to which they hold allegiance.

Which is to say I should be better at this stuff.

I remember decades ago scoffing at my classmates in a literature class who argued that we shouldn’t read Ezra Pound because he was a fascist.

I remember scolding a friend for being fearful of going to a jazz club in a non-white neighborhood in Kansas City.

I remember rolling my eyes when a friend posted on Facebook, “I just found out twenty of my FB friends like Donald Trump! What do I do?” and her friends urged her to de-friend them immediately.

The conversation—or rather, the volley—I’d had with Jane bugged me all day.

The next morning I went to her reading. In an airy gallery awash in natural light, Jane read from her book, answered questions with candor and humility, and talked about the process of consulting with her tribe’s elders and shaping the book to honor their views. She presented an intriguing slideshow, spoke at length about her native language, and provided a historical perspective to her novel. Her eyes were soft, her voice earnest.

I bought the book.

I just spent an afternoon wreaking havoc upon hordes of innocent victims. I tore down neighborhoods, leveled housing projects, and evicted thousands without due process. Streaming with sweat and sneezing out buckets of pollen, I whirled about in an adrenaline-filled frenzy, weed whacking my sprawling, menacing New Mexico yard.

Look, there’s gardening, there’s landscaping, and then there’s New Mexico yard work. Especially in the subdivision of Eldorado, where we all have leach fields as part of our septic systems that amount to something like 400 square feet of disturbed soil, “weeding” is more like tree removal. Leave a single tumbleweed to flourish for a summer, especially a good rainy summer like this one, and by October you’ll have a barbed, Buick-sized beast that will drop a billion seeds in your yard once the wind uproots it and sends it on its namesake journey. Or worse, since you’ll probably have a crap-ton of them growing tightly together, they’ll spend the winter huddled against the wind like emperor penguins and will still be there in April, a brittle, scratchy wall of horror that you think can’t get worse until the new crop starts to grow between them, and then you just have to sell your house and move on.

Since I don’t want to move next spring, I tackled the leach field, which means I defoliated a packrat neighborhood, dealt an earthquake to a gopher compound, and flushed out pockets of gnats that clung to my face like restless freckles. But as any Eldorado resident can tell you, this is business as usual. And it gets worse.

A few years ago, I got so sick of packrats trashing my yard and stealing our stuff (we’d see toys, barbeque tools, shin guards sticking out of holes) that I resolved to throw the bums out. I figured the trick would be to remove all the dead cholla cactus, which die when the rats set up house beneath them. So I attacked the spiky monsters with a Sawzall and picked up the gnarled branches with the log-gripper thingie from our fireplace tools. I’ll tell you what—nothing makes a person look so badass as driving to the dump with a truckbed full of cholla she removed herself. Even the dump dude, the one with the tattoo on his forehead, grunted in respect as I shoved the deadly cargo into the concrete pit.

But I digress.

A few years ago, in an attempt to make our yard as presentable as possible for our son’s high school graduation party, we decided [ominous music here] to take down our old shed.

First, a word about the shed. It was a beauty when my husband and I put it up in 1991. Since we were using our garage as an office, this was to become our workshop and storage area. Apple-cheeked newlyweds we were then, leveling the soil, following the diagrams, handing each other tools in the fresh breeze. We cheerily set up shelving, tacked up pegboards, and labeled boxes. When we were done we sighed and gazed upon it: This was where Scott would handcraft our baby’s bassinet. This was where I would carve stone sculptures to grace our patio. This was where our treasured possessions—vintage concert T-shirts, old sketchbooks, my Barbie dolls—would be safe.

As we linked arms and turned to walk back to the house that evening—wiping our brows, humming “Our House” as the sun set behind us—40,000 spiders moved into that sorry shack, the mice unloaded their tiny U-hauls, and the rabbits set up a burrowing network that would rival the drug lords on the US-Mexico border.

By the following spring, entering the shed was like a wardrobe passage into opposite-day Narnia, a dystopian land of spider armies presiding over castles made of mouse poop. I rarely went near the thing. If I really needed something that was stored in there, say, a suitcase, I would just borrow it from a friend, and if that wasn’t possible I would beg Scott to get it for me. When it came time for me to “put it away” afterward, I would crack the shed door open, chuck the item inside, and run away. Fast. I gradually forgot what was even in the shed. Scott would make a brave attempt every few years to clean it out and reorganize it, but it was dead to me.

But entropy happens, and eventually the shed was showing signs of wear—especially where the trampoline bashed into it the day it took flight in a gust of wind (yes, this happened). It was time to take the thing down.

The day of destruction was to be a Saturday morning in April. I got out there at first light in my haz-mat suit (kitchen gloves and a bandanna tied across my face), backed the truck up to the shed—taking care to avoid the red anthill nearby—and got to work.

First I surveyed the stuff stored outside the shed. Oh, look! My old kayak! What fun we used to have on the river! Maybe we could do it again. Maybe…well, maybe not. The thing all but granulated in my hands. The same was true for nearly everything we had “stored” out there. Turns out it was just a place where things went to die in the fierce, high-altitude sun. I filled the truck with these remnants of our possessions and also loaded up the milk crates we’d “borrowed” decades earlier, back when answering machines were all the rage and George Costanza still worked for the Yankees.

The kayak had been resting on four cinder blocks that I figured could be donated to Habitat for Humanity. I just had to lift up the plywood board above them, and—but what was this? A mouse house? Nay, an apartment house! Nests filled every opening! And everyone was home!

The mice looked up in stunned confusion, squinting in the sun as I gaped from above. I could swear I saw one of them flip me off. One dude who was making a sandwich dropped the mustard knife and angrily called the super. In the corner unit, a little mousette stepped out of the shower, shrieking as she rushed to cover herself with a towel. Suddenly they were all shouting: “Where’s the roof? What is that giant? Where are the children?” They scrambled to pack what they could into tiny suitcases and ran screaming as I poked a 2 x 4 into each space, dislodging their homes like a one-woman pogrom. In moments, their building was flattened and they were the new diaspora.

Of course, moving the cinder blocks revealed a whole other town—beetles, roly-polys, and all manner of wormy things had clearly lived there for generations. The beetles were the most vocal. “We live under a flippin’ cinder block!” one shouted, shaking his tiny bug fist. “Is that really too much to ask? You gotta take our homes, too?”

They didn’t even have luggage—they just tossed their stuff into grocery bags and cardboard boxes and scuttled away grumbling. Jeez, I thought, If I’m part of the 99%, where did these guys fit in?

“I’m so sorry!” I called after them.

And all those well-loved possessions inside the shed? A whole lotta mousified trash.

It goes on and on. Unholy creatures eat my spark plug cables, rabbits chew through drip irrigation hoses, a bobcat often hangs out—and generously poops—on our roof. And I’m not even mentioning the bazillions of critters brought into the house by our dear departed cat Woody, hunter extraordinaire. Those stories are, shall we say, not for everyone.

I figure if we ever take a long enough vacation, our house will quickly fill up with small mammals lounging on Barbie furniture, wearing concert T-shirts and dining on my car. On weekends they’ll go for day hikes in the lush leach-field forest and enjoy cool drinks from the washing machine hoses.

Then we’d really have to move. Into a big city full of concrete, where, for a change of pace, I could battle the cockroaches instead.

Here’s a startling realization: The beginning of life is a whole lot more fun than the end of life.

Okay, I take it back. That’s not startling at all. But this is: Sometimes, the use of the F-bomb is the best possible indicator of a person’s recovery. Better than heart rate, blood pressure, or respirations per minute. Better than all those arcane lab tests.

It’s Monday morning in a hospital room in Oklahoma City. I’m sitting by as my brother Bob, 75, comes back from a medical crisis. Buoyed along by machines and medications, he’s emerging from a dark, scary place after nearly three weeks of hospitalization. The docs say he’s out of the woods for now, but I already figured that out last night.

First, a look back.

I arrived at the hospital on Thursday. Although he’d already been released from ICU, Bob was still in rough shape. But he was completely alert when the hospitalist—our own Doctor Death—basically told him to hang it up.

“There’s nothing we can do for you but extend your life for a little while,” the unsmiling creep said. “You’ll have no quality of life to speak of.”

“Not…ready…to…cash…it…in,” Bob forced out, one shaky syllable at a time.

“I thought you had a DNR, that you didn’t want any extraordinary life-extending measures,” Dr. Death said, turning to my niece, who has power of attorney. “He can’t even feed himself!” he whined. “What kind of life is that?”

“It’s his life,” she said. “He gets to choose.”

Dr. Death left in a huff. We were all disgusted by his utter lack of compassion.

A lot happened over the next few days though, enough to make me think Dr. Death might have been right. Bob was deteriorating, and the anxiety we felt as the medical drama unfolded, along with the demands placed on the family, was wearing me down.

Although Bob seemed stronger on Sunday as more visiting relatives arrived, I was pretty grumpy about spending the night with him again. (At that point, he hated to be left alone.) He was asleep when I arrived, so I read quietly in his room. When he woke up I felt slightly annoyed, the way I used to feel when my kids woke early from their naps.

He shook off a dream, gave me a kiss, and said he was hungry. I fed him the homemade dinner his daughter had sent, and, surprisingly, he said it was delicious and ate most of it. This, after his eating next to nothing for days, was encouraging. Then he asked me to switch the classical music station to something more fun, so I found a country station and we discussed Johnny Cash. He asked me to make a list of things his assistant needed to do in the coming week. It filled two pages.

At around 10 p.m., after a nurse pricked his finger to check his sugars, she whistled and exclaimed, “250! Oh, Bob, you are sweet!” She injected some insulin into his arm and banged out of the room.

“Get me a Coke,” Bob said. “Lotta ice.”

“What?” I crowed. “Your sugars are too high.”

“Gimme a break,” he said in his breathy style. “Get me a Coke.”

“Look, Bro,” I said, “you’re not croaking on my watch.”

“Fuck you!”

I felt a rush of joy as I scurried to the kitchen down the hall. That ornery cuss! He was known as The Brat in the family, but his spirit had been largely absent since I’d arrived. Could he be rallying?

I dispensed a few ounces of Coke into a Styrofoam cup. Lotta ice.

“Good,” he said as I held the straw to his lips and he drained the cup. “Now let’s play cards.”

We played cribbage till midnight—open-handed since he couldn’t quite hold the cards—and of course I shuffled and dealt for both of us. I was winning when he started to get sleepy.

 “Fuck you,” he said.

Was Bob out of the woods?

I slapped his leg, nearly knocking his catheter line out of kilter, and he drifted off. Soon after, he slept through a treatment from the respiratory therapist, and after that dude banged out of the room I settled into my plastic recliner for a few hours of sleep.

The radiology tech woke us at 5 a.m. for a chest X-ray. “You need to wait in the hall!” she shouted at me, six inches from my face, her minty breath filling my sinuses. A few minutes later, her task complete, she banged out of the room and Bob and I sleepily watched the eastern sky brighten.

“What’s today?” he asked.

“Monday.”

“What a day I’m gonna have,” he said. “Dialysis, more relatives, and the fat nurse.”

“You want me to punch you in the throat to finish it off?” I asked.

“Fuck you.”

I smiled as the fat nurse banged into the room with a cupful of pills.

“Good morning, Robert!” she sang. “Don’t you look good today!”

And he did look good. His blue eyes were bright and alert, not heavy lidded. The tube that suctioned fluid from his chest was largely inactive, compared to the gusher it had been on Thursday. His words were connected in sentences, not uttered in labored syllables. He ate all his oatmeal, even feeding himself much of it. He picked up his orange juice and shakily sipped it on his own. Was he back?

“That oatmeal was good, but tomorrow I’d like French toast,” he said. “Mix it up.”

“Okay.”

We fell into a silence.

“Barb,” he said after a while. “All my organs are fucked up. My liver, my kidneys, my lungs, my heart.”

I knew this, of course. I also knew that when I said goodbye to him in a few days there was a good chance I would never see him again.

“Don’t forget your pancreas,” I added. “That’s a train wreck too.”

He burned me with a sidelong glance.

“But your epiglottis is in tiptop shape!” I added cheerily, beaming as I waited to hear those two reassuring words:

“Fuck you.”

It’s pretty easy to make the case that Robert Moses, New York’s iconic city planner, was a villain. But he did at least one thing right: Jones Beach State Park. Here’s one way we can know this park on a barrier island of Long Island’s south shore is first-rate: It hasn’t changed. Because they got it right the first time.

Of course I value and welcome innovation. I mean, stretch jeans, Trevor Noah, seedless watermelon, hybrid cars, hoppy IPAs, marriage equality, iPods, everywhere kale—it’s all good. My complaint is that the protest “But that’s so old!” in response to my wearing a certain dress or listening to a certain album is a non-argument. It’s a logical fallacy to assume things have value simply because they’re new. This is the mindset that brings us Iggy Azalea, the grapefruit diet, and the iFart app.

I’m more impressed by that which stands the test of time.

Take Sandy Wood. She’s been announcing the two-minute radio feature “StarDate” since 1991. For 24 years, millions of people have tuned in every day to this broadcast from the University of Texas McDonald Observatory as Ms. Wood directs our attention to the night sky. Twenty-four years, and what’s changed? Pretty much nothing. (I was once so moved by Ms. Wood’s consistent performance that I decorated an Easter egg in her honor. My daughter collapsed in laughter and Snapchatted it to all her friends.)

The Simpsons first debuted in 1989, and Bart, Lisa, and Maggie are still 10, 8, and something like 9 months. These kids haven’t grown up because we don’t need them to. (I’ll never forget how we watched an early episode on New Year’s Eve in 1989—stopping the party for it because there were no DVRs—and roared because in real life, many of us worked for a maniacal man named Mr. Burns.)

Then there’s Saturday Night Live, which just celebrated its 40th anniversary. Sure, the comedians are different from 1975, but the format hasn’t changed. The same is true for Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion,” which, except for a few years, has been airing every week since 1974.

Of course, Dick Estell has them all beat. Since I was in diapers, Mr. Estell has been reading aloud newly released books in their entirety on his syndicated “Radio Reader” program from WKAR at Michigan State University. Since 1965. Yes, for fifty years. (It was through his voice that I discovered the novelist Jane Hamilton. If you haven’t read her, you should.)

But back to Jones Beach, where I spent nearly every summer day as a kid. I had an idyllic day there in June of this year, and here’s what I found: It’s the same as it ever was. I even experienced one quick, disorienting moment when I looked for the thermos of iced tea my mom used to always pack—the red one with the spouty thing that always got full of sand—before I remembered it was 2015. And that’s because, for as far as the eye could see, it might as well have been 1975.

Most fields (as the individual beaches are called) have changed little since the park opened in 1929. Yeah, there’s some Trump thing at Central Field, but that’s easily avoided. Field 6, like the others, still has its low-slung building with the sandy bathroom, a concession that smells of coffee and French fries, a place to rent the same green-and-orange striped umbrellas, and a lifeguard shack.

The water’s still dirty. (How is it that a handful of ocean water looks clear but you can’t see your feet?) People still parade around mostly naked. (It’s amazing how people who wouldn’t be caught dead scantily clad in their own backyards will bare it all at the beach.) Young guys still sell ice cream. (Now they push big-tired carts instead of hauling around Styrofoam coolers.) The cars are smaller, the radios larger, and the skin more tattooed, but none of this adds up to much. It’s really just the same.

Yes, things change, because they must: Technology improves, resources grow scant, we get bored, we evolve. But let’s take a moment to appreciate those rarities that don’t change because someone got it right the first time.

After eight years of writing, nurturing, and fussing over my first novel, primping it and reminding it to behave, today it enters the big wide world. I’m incredibly proud of this grown-up book and I’m getting a little teary-eyed watching it leave home.

One might expect that today, its official release date, would be its birthday, but it doesn’t feel that way. The book was conceived in 2007 with a germ of an idea, born in late 2014 when the first advance reader copies were released, and today it flies. It has its own life now and I can’t protect it any more.

What’s even more terrifying, though, is that I’m in charge of promoting it. Whose idea was this, anyway? Oh yeah, mine.

Could this task have fallen to a more unlikely person?

I was telling my sister Madeline the other day how I have a booksigning at COAS Books in Las Cruces, NM, on July 25. Before I could say another word, she said, “Wear a statement necklace, something large and unforgettable, and a plain black dress. Wear that necklace at all your signings. You’ll need an obvious image that people associate with you.”

When I mentioned to my niece Theadora that today was the release date, she said, “Come with me—you need a photo. Wear this. Sit there. Hold the books this way. Are you happy about the book? Then show it.” Click, click, done.

A few nights ago, while celebrating the book’s imminent release with old friends, all of whom bought a copy, Eileen called out across the bar, “My friend here just wrote a book!” People raised their glasses and the bartender bought me a beer. I slinked away to the rest room. When I returned, Deirdre handed me $30 and said,  “Those people over there just bought two books!” No more sold for the rest of the night because, you know, I was in charge.

Clearly my family and friends are more natural marketers than I am. And clearly, this needs to change.

Some time ago while cleaning my house, I discovered a spider living under a potted plant. “What is your problem?” I scolded as it scuttled away from the sudden light. “How do you expect to make a living here? You expect a mosquito to crawl under this thing and snare itself in your web? You expect a volunteer fly to zip by? Haven’t you ever heard of market positioning?” It wasn’t interested.

I’m trying really hard not to be that stupid spider, but it’s hard going against your own nature. Being an extrovert isn’t the same as tooting your own horn. And most writers tend to be observers—we might be chatty, but we generally like to hang back some; schmoozing too much interferes with that. The famously reclusive J.D. Salinger had no Pinterest boards, we all know that Jonathan Franzen hates the internet, and I assume that my heroes Annie Proulx and Toni Morrison employ their own crack publicists. But last time I checked, I’m not quite as well known as those folks.

But this is serious. The book I’m launching today, Love and Death in a Perfect World, must succeed, or why would I bother writing it? You don’t send a kid to college just so she can hole up in a dorm room and sleep for four years. It’s time for this book to make its way in the world. So here goes.

Love and Death in a Perfect World is available today on Amazon. It’s a great book, a book that will make you wonder why you think what you think and feel what you feel. A book that, through an authentic portrait of a woman named Rosemary, explores the baffling gift of life, the mystery of love, and the burden of death. It will make you laugh and cry.

But don’t take my word for it. Buy it. Request it at your local bookstore—it’s available to them through Ingram—or buy it on Amazon.

And let me know what you think!

My head is full of children.

I’ve heard hundreds of their voices this week. Brilliant, sincere, thoughtful voices. Bland, benighted, sarcastic voices. They were all there at this year’s AP Reading.

I’ve just returned from Kansas City, where 1,449 high school and college instructors were summoned to score nearly 1.6 million English Language and Composition exam essays. Yes, 531,000 exams, with three essays each. Of these I read something like a thousand, all on the same question, which asked students to develop a position on the value or function of polite speech, such as “Nice to meet you” and “Hi, how are you?”

The best way I can think to describe this experience is that while in my classroom I am tuned to the frequency of my own students, at the AP Reading the dial’s needle spread to capture every frequency. Thousands of voices broadcast their claims to the vast listening audience: a few trembled with conviction, some held forth with prosaic observations, and many lay limp with vapid utterances. But they were all “somebody’s precious little angel,” as another Reader at my table often reminded us.

And then there were the Readers themselves. (Yes, the word is capitalized, thank you very much.) We were from all over the country, men and women ranging from their mid-twenties to their late-seventies, from inner-city high schools to Ivy League universities, some in jeans and T-shirts and some in hajibs, some naïve and some jaded, but all of us shivering in the air conditioning and trying to remember that to every one of these young writers, their ideas were fresh and original, even if we’d seen the same lines of reasoning all week: polite speech makes people comfortable and is therefore good; polite speech is fake and is therefore bad.

My head is also full of teachers. As an extrovert, I love meeting new people, but even I have my limits.

Let’s talk scale here. First, in addition to the Lang. and Comp. folks, hundreds of other Readers were in the same building scoring exams in other subjects. (In Louisville and Cincinnati, there were thousands more.) It’s amazing how the College Board pulls this off every year, with all exams still scored by humans—not artificial intelligence—and all of us in one room.

And it’s amazing how the Kansas City Convention Center can accommodate all these humans. The room we were in—just that one room—was the size of eight football fields. (When’s the last time you were in a room that required motorized transport?) Each of the three essays had about 500 readers devoted to it, in areas demarcated with curtained dividers. To hear the directions of the Chief Reader, we wore headsets.

A funny remark would elicit a roar of laughter that boomed toward the 42-foot ceiling, thundering like the shouts of the elves in The Polar Express when Santa gives the first gift of Christmas. On the first morning, while we were quietly receiving instructions, I heard the sound of metal screeching and juddering nearby. It sounded like a bunch of people were shoving a train across the concrete floor. No one at my table took any notice of it. Finally, seeing my confusion, an experienced Reader whispered, “That’s another group getting up for a break.” That screeching and juddering was the sound of 500 chairs being pushed back all at once in the next area.

Then there was the food, located on another planet downstairs—nearly a ten-minute walk—in the banquet hall: 24 buffet lines, 12 salad bar lines, several tables of desserts and drinks, and 16 massive coffee urns, always pumping.

But this extraordinary scale wasn’t confined to the workday. There were teachers everywhere in downtown KC, between the convention center and the nearby hotels. On “eat-out night,” when we were all given a break from the cavernous banquet hall, teachers completely filled the restaurants near Union Station. At the Green Lady Lounge, a wonderful jazz venue (a bar with no TVs!), the waitress, after taking our orders, asked, “What subject are you reading?” I even spotted several Readers at the Royals game, amid a crowd of some 33,000.

One evening, after several of us had half-filled an elevator in the hotel lobby, the elevator stopped at the fifth floor and a boy about nine years old, wet from the pool, began to step in. He took one wide-eyed look at us and said, “I’ll wait for the next one.” We roared.

“My God,” someone said, “is it that obvious?”

“Poor kid,” said another. “Guess this elevator looked like the ninth circle of hell to him.”

I felt like a hayseed who’d had her first taste of the big city, but instead of craning my neck to see how high the skyscrapers were, I was craning my neck to see the people who fill my particular teaching niche. I wish I could have met more of those teachers—my tribe, those exhausted, caring people in sensible shoes.

And I wish I could meet some of the kids whose voices I still hear in my head.

I’m looking forward to next year.

(The opinions in this blog are my own and do not represent the opinions of ETS.)

What’s funny about the title of my novel, Love and Death in a Perfect World, is that while it’s the first seven words a reader encounters, it’s the last line I wrote. The way I finally arrived at this title is a humbling tale.

Over the seven years it took me to write the book—through planning, drafting, readings by friends, editing, and even the proofreading process—the book had no name. It remained title-free until 24 hours before it was sent to the printer.

At first this lack of a title had a groovy, breezy quality. I bopped along assured that I would hit upon the title any day, that it would come unbidden, trailing clouds of glory and all that. But after expecting that blessed state to arrive for the better part of a decade, I somehow accepted that maybe, just maybe, I would have to try something different.

First I brainstormed alone, tapping out notes on my iPhone any chance I got, composing prodigious lists of terrible ideas. Then I took the least terrible of those ideas and tormented my friends with group texts, asking which might entice them to pick up the book, what the titles made them think of. (Hey, uh, sorry about all that. . . .) Then, just as I would finish tabulating their responses, I’d decide I hated all those ideas anyway and start over.

Next I decided to share the love and torment my editor as well. Marty would trudge through the door, I’d hand him a glass of wine, he’d eye me sternly and say, “Today,” and I would promise, “Yes, today.” By the end of each meeting I’d feel sure we’d nailed it, and for hours after I’d triumphantly proclaim the title aloud over and over, the way teen girls used to place their crush’s last name after their own, imagining it as their married name. (Yes, I did that as a teen.) But then I’d wake up the next day and think “Yuck,” as if I’d spied that cute guy picking his nose on the bus. And I would be decidedly single again.

This went on. And on. As the deadline loomed (I wanted to get an advance copy to my mom for Christmas), I became truly panicked. And I felt really, really stupid.

In early December, my dear friend Sheri Sinclair—embattled by my endless texts—sent me some ideas for creative exercises I might do to spark my title-process-turned-angst in a new way. Of course the jaded English teacher in me thought, “Oh, please, I’ve seen all these gimmicks before.” But I was desperate, so I tried them.

First I did a free-association bubble thingie. No joy there. Then I turned my main idea into a poem—fun, but no great shakes. Next I drew a spiral on a sheet of paper. Writing from the center outward, I filled the spiral with words and ideas associated with the book.

I kept writing, turning the page until the spiral was full. Then I looked to see how random words aligned from one ring to the next. As if the spiral were a clock face, I looked at the words stacked up on the hourly “wedges” of one o’clock, two o’clock, and so on. “You might get some poetic combinations,” my kind-hearted and ever-supportive friend had said.

And whaddya know? There it was. Stacked up on the nine o’clock wedge were, among others, the words “love,” “death,” “perfect,” and “world.” Hmm
 . . . as Bugs Bunny once said, now we were cookin’ with gas.

I connected the words in a phrase on a new sheet of paper, looked away, and looked back. Made a cup of coffee and returned to the words. Went for a walk and returned to the words. Blasted some music and returned to the words. No, this was not a crush, not a date, not even a bestie. This was the one.

Such ordinary words. (I had liked the idea of a weird title, with a word that might hook itself like a curious barb in a reader’s mind.) No place names. (I had expected the title to reflect the book’s setting—Joshua Tree National Park, Twentynine Palms, Santa Fe.) No sensory words. (I had especially clung to the idea of using words one could see, hear, touch, or taste.) But this was it.

Love and death in a perfect world: The words rolled off the tongue. In iambic tetrameter, even. It featured no strange spellings, no intricate punctuation, no unconventional capitalization. A title ordinary in every way, yet grandiose in scope. Who could ask for more?

I loved it and the thing was done: my book’s last—and first—seven words.