OPB

OPB, you know what that means. No? Well, that's because I just made it up. OPB means, 'other people's blogs', today's most important breakthrough. For me. I have finally figured out how to put these blogs right up there where they should be.

A long and narrow road from November to an obvious conclusion: I must click 'save' to prevent these blogs from escaping my clutches. Why don't I know these rules? Because I am blond!

Okay, two blonds froze to death at the drive-in movie. The feature? "Closed for Winter".

My Husband's Autobiography By Me

Jim was looking a little blue last night. It’s hard selling telephony doodads (never did understand what they were) for a doodad manufacturer whose doodads don’t work very well and may be obsolete by the end of the quarter, although we sure hope not since DooDad, Inc., pays the bills.

“Honey, I know what you need,” I said in my wifeliest tone. “You’re bored with my blogging day and night about ME."

No wonder. I’m a bit bored with the topic of myself as well. So I say to him, sweetly, that I’ll give it a rest and begin a new book, The Autobiography of My Husband by His Wife.

"Whatdoya think," I ask.

I hadn’t the heart to tell him right then I would of course be the author because he brightened right up and taking the pen in his right paw, HAND, I meant hand, began to write clearly on a small scrap of paper I keep for making grocery lists. I should tell you we were sitting in the kitchen at the teeny table where we throw poker dice while supper cooks.

Ahem. Here’s what he had to say so far. In MY voice. Like we're some strange duet:

He often seemed to be rational. (Good, very good opener.) I don’t know what pushed him over the edge. (Uh oh, a little gloomy here.)
It all started with the horrific event that changed our relationship. (I'm getting nervous now.) Early on in our time together he mentioned something that I pooh-poohed (did I?) at the time. Wish I hadn’t done that.

(Uh oh.)

Then he put down the pen and pushed the paper over to me. Hey, I was putting the steak on the grill. Buffalo steak, he’s got the heart thing about cholesterol (thank God for spell check here) so we’re eating nature’s-bounty-meat these days. With trips to KFC in between (original thigh, side of slaw) to keep the economy moving. And I’m thinking, like, you going to write this or am I? Are we going to write it together?

But first, Whoa, what the hell event was he referring to? (Bad to end sentence with preposition but at least I recognize that.) Maybe I don’t believe there was any such event. I’ll ask him to tell me.

Tick tock, wait an hour. Here’s his reply:

It’s simple, really. Since it was my autobiography I decided that some of it should at least be “auto.” So I started to write, bearing in mind that is you don’t snag the reader in the first few sentences, you’ve lost him or her. The best snag is a potential sex thriller or murder mystery. Why not drop an innuendo right up front that it could be either? Or both? Or neither?

Hah, Hah! Still don’t know where it is going, do ya? I’m keepin’ it that way, you auto thief you.

Hugh Lyon Sack

You see what I have to put up with?

Doing it After All

You'll never be a writer.

That’s exactly what my mother told me.

Writers have to be crazy people. Writers drink too much, screw around, can’t stay married. Writers never make any money.
And they make people angry.
Great writers have special talents.
Great writers are born, not made.
Great writers are like gods, they speak for everyone.
Ordinary people can’t be great writers. Who wants to read ordinary writing? Who do you think you are? What do you have to say?

Nothing. For years, nothing at all. Just grumbling and grousing in my journal.

Then I felt something so strongly I had to write it and I did, in a hurry before the voice of my mother killed it. I didn’t tell a soul what I had dared to do. I just stuck the pages into an envelope, mailed it off and forgot about it.

One day I got a check for twelve lovely dollars from the publication, a horsey newsletter. They printed my writing—now it was a real article—under my by-line. I was so happy I cried.

Mother was completely wrong. I am not crazy, I don’t drink too much and I am happily married. Well, for the second time. It’s true I don’t make enough money to support myself and my writing has angered a few fatheads.

But I don’t have to speak for everyone, just for myself. It turns out there are lots of people like myself who enjoy reading what they are already thinking or about to think or would have thought if I hadn’t written it first.

I don’t have to write the Odyssey or Gone with the Wind so I write about ordinary life. If you are a woman, a parent, any person who has known love and despair, anger and fear, we have a lot in common. That’s enough.

That was Stage One, sheer delight. Ha ha on Mom. Then the spark I had struck dimmed.

Only the gods can write. Who wants to hear all your troubles? Everyone suffers, what’s the big deal about you?

That shut me down for years while I waited for My Big Life Story to unfold. Long wait. Life Story unfolded but was not big enough for a book. I would never dare write a book. Only gods could do that.

Years passed, one ordinary day at a time, added up to a lifetime of ordinary.

More events pissed me off, I wrote more articles. People who read my articles seemed to think I could write a whole book. A joke, right? One man suggested I write about a 19th century bag lady whose portrait hung in the Pennsylvania Historical Society, long ignored.

What preposterous idea! Then I wrote her story as a radio drama, The Story of Crazy Nora, and by golly National Public Radio bought it and aired it.

Still not a book. Years passed, more articles. One day I said out loud in front of a lot of people, “I’d like to write a book.”

By golly, in one year I had written my first book and that won a prize.

But I still did not believe I was a writer. If I became a writer I would become a crazy, penniless drunk, lose my marriage and piss people off.

Now I am old enough to say, Who cares? I have found a husband who not only puts up with my craziness but pays the bills. I don’t drink any more—or any less—than before. I seem to always piss people off anyway, so, so what?

Many people say they want to be writers. What’s the difference between wanting to do it and doing it?

Giving yourself permission. Accepting that you may become your mother’s worst nightmare, a crazy, drunken slut. Oh, and poor, too. That you will undoubtedly reveal to your readers that you never did have a Big Life. That you weep when your dog dies and burn the onions in the frying pan. That you fuck up, that you are a jerk.

But in between, that you are a living, breathing pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem, just like any other person and that is exactly your value to mankind. Our ordinary words bind us, teach us, support and encourage us to love one another and ourselves. Writing our ordinary lives takes us out of ourselves and back home to our own hearts.

Once you begin, you will find your way.

Chicken Diapers

My legs get cold sitting at my keyboard. Blankets fall off and tangle my chair wheels.

Should I get a dog? A cat? Oh, I’ve had those kinds of animals. Boring!

What I need is a nice, big chicken to sit on my lap while I’m writing. A chicken with a warm chicken body. She’ll cluck over me like a nursemaid. She’ll peck the fuzz off my sweater. Might even lay an egg.

A 5-7 pound broiler, fryer or even an old stewer, I don’t care. She’ll weigh less than as a barky little dachshund or a sheddy cat and she won’t scare away my birds.

She could be speckled, she could be barred, why, her feathers could be as flamboyant as a peacock. There are hundreds of beautiful breeds to choose from. So, no matter what, she’ll be easy to look at. Chicken feathers are smooth to touch. I know she’ll hop right into my lap up at the snap of my fingers. Her eyes will be bright, always open unless she falls asleep. If I ever get fleas, she’ll take care ‘em.

I’d probably call her “Henny” except that was the name of a very dear old lady who just shucked off her mortal coils. Perhaps Beatrice, something Shakespearean, would be more elegant. I would take her for walks down the street, let her scratch for bugs and worms. Let her drive all the dogs crazy.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m crazy. You could be right. Wouldn’t be the first time you thought that.

I can tell you’re also having doubts. You’re thinking, what about when.. you know.. the chicken has to poop?

You people have brilliant minds. Now, follow me here. I once had those very same thoughts. I thought, eeuw, do I want a chicken to poop on my valuable Kelim rugs? Do I want to even hear that horrible, splattering sound?

So I laughed when Sam Blackford over at Sam’s Downtown Feed on San Carlos told me some of his customers have indoor chickens.

“But Sam, how..?”
“Chicken diapers.”

I stopped laughing. I googled up ‘chicken diapers’.

Folks, they are for real. And they’re like just darling little baby bibs! They go around the chicken’s neck, fasten over the back with a little Velcro tab and hang discreetly under the tail feathers. You hardly know they’re there!

These diapers comes in many different colors and patterns. Pink polka dots, blue ones, a very nice greens dot pattern I wouldn’t mind having in an apron. The diaper-y part is lined with vinyl and the you-know-what is really good for the garden!

I’m sure I could do this. There’s a YouTube (www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm_-glNJlns)showing how install this diaper and gently ease the chicken’s wings through the openings. In the video, the rooster—his name is Ben—also wore a little cape over his wings because he likes to peck out his feathers. Some guys! Sadly, Campbell does not allow roosters. Handsome but too noisy.

Although hens talk, too. I like the sound. Cluck cluck cluck. Like someone in the kitchen making cookies. Although I probably don’t want those kind of cookies, now that I think of it.

You may not run right out to get YOUR chickens today. And I might not, either. On the other hand, I just might.

All righty then, at least I’ve opened a new door in your petalorium.

Let’s go even further: imagine your family as chickens. Think how easy it would be to fix dinner! You’d just pick up fifty pounds of scratch at Sam’s Downtown Feed. Shake a little into a bowl on the floor and let ‘em at it.

Rinse out the diapers now and then and wow, easy living.

The River

I loved the Connecticut River. On Friday afternoons it spread out like a flat mirror until Dad hit the throttle and the old boat carved a long, white stripe of foamy wake down the middle as we pulled away from the landing at Middle Haddam. Ten fathoms deep in the channel for the barges and freighters hauling oil and other industrial materials up to Hartford, it was half a mile wide where we began, twenty-five miles inland. As it approached Long Island Sound it stretched out on either side into broad marshes where herons stalked their prey and ducks paddled safely among the reeds.

Just Dad and I headed out for the weekend with a twenty-five pound block of ice in the cooler, breakfast, lunch and supper supplies stashed in the tiny galley. A carton of Old Golds, two rough decks of damp playing cards and our bathing suits were all we needed. The sun was hot overhead but the breeze from the WaWa's speed cooled us.

WaWa, the name for all Dad’s boats, I, II, III and WaWa IV, meant ‘flying duck’ in some Indian language. We laughed at calling the old cruiser ‘flying anything’ for she had only enough speed to get me up on waterskis. Dad couldn’t afford anything fancier and would have preferred a sailboat to a stinkpot but old WaWa’s were better than nothing. Born in Hartford to a boat-loving father, he had grown up on the river himself and knew every shallow, every sandbar and snag.

Yes, the WaWa was plenty good enough for getting out of town for the weekend. Fresh breezes in our hair, no phones, no putting up or taking down storm windows or painting that side of the barn, just the bow cutting into the smooth water, the trance-inducing roar of the engine and soon, salt water at Fenwick Point just past Saybrook.

Mom rarely came along. She preferred her garden, her library books and the Sunday Times crossword puzzle.


Once in quiet water behind the Fenwick breakwater I would throw the anchor over while Dad gently backed the WaWa to set it, just the way a roping horse backs to hold tension on the rope so the cowboy can pigtie the lassoed steer.

Then we dove overboard. Might scrub the waterline with Babo. Might swim ashore, careful to avoid the beach just in front of Katherine Hepburn’s rambling, dark house. Didn’t even put the binoculars on her to preserve her privacy. Being so close to such a celebrity was enough.

As WaWa rode the calm swells that broke their white teeth on the beach, we ate sardine sandwiches and watched the masts of sail boats and tall outriggers on fishing boats come and go in the choppy channel on the business side of the long stone breakwater. I might get a nibble on my fish hook but it would only be some small fry too bony to bother with. We’d eat well tonight in Hamburg Cove. And tomorrow at the Griswold Inn in Essex.

When we were bored with Fenwick, I hauled up the wet anchor line, coiled it perfectly on the foredeck, then planted the little Danforth on top to keep the loops from flying overboard. We headed back up into the rough water under the high Baldwin bridge among the other boats coming and going, some under sail, others speeding past with a wave. We always waved back.

When we saw someone we knew Dad rang the brass ship’s bell that hung beside the wheel. The river was an exciting turnpike, a splashing, slapping water playground. Just upriver of the arched Baldwin Bridge that carried Route 1 traffic from New York on up to Boston, we squeezed between the complicated steel trestles of a low, flat railroad bridge that crossed the river.

Ships too tall to pass under it had to signal with two loud horn blasts to ask the bridgemaster to raise a section like the jaw of a giant stapler. If a train was coming, those boats—we never used the word ‘yacht’ to describe anything less than luxurious and certainly not our own little 'boat'—might have to circle for half an hour.

The WaWa sped through alongside dozens of other small craft going in both directions. The bigger boats made huge waves that fought with other wakes to create a swirling boil. I liked to lie on the highest part of the WaWa, atop the deckhouse, as we passed through the churning waves of changing tides, looking up at the bottom of the train.

Flung from side to side by the boat’s roll, I forced myself NOT to hold on. The train might fall on me. Soomeone might flush a toilet- ugh! I might flip overboard and be run over by some drunken lout in a speedboat. These things could happen. But my father never said No to any of my shenanigans.

This was another wonderful part of the river. And what would come next.

Today's Inbox

A friend writes:

In the Old Days, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up they walked twenty-five miles to school every morning,uphill, barefoot BOTH ways—yadda, yadda, yadda. I vowed there was no way in hell I was going to lay that crap on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it.

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You don't know how good you've got it. When I was a kid we didn't have the internet. See, if we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue.

There was no email. We had to actually write somebody a letter with a pen. You had to buy stamps. Then you had to find a mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there.

Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our asses. Nowhere was safe.

There were no MP3' s or Napsters. If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself.

Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and screw it up. CD players? Ha!Just “tape decks” in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and “eject" it when finished and sometimes the tape came loose and jammed up the player.

We didn't have fancy apps like Call Waiting. If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal. When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was. It could be your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer or a collections agent—without caller ID you just didn't know. You had to pick up and take your chances, mister.

No Playstations with high-resolution 3-D graphics, just Atari 2600 with games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids' where your guy was a little white square. You actually had to use your imagination for that. No multiple levels or screens, just one screen forever and the game kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until, well, I guess you died.

You used a little book called a TV Guide to find the programs. Channel surfing? You got off your ass and walked over to the TV to change the channel.

There was no Cartoon Network either. Only cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying.? We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little rat-bastards.

I can’t believe I’m saying this. I sound just like my parents when they said, You kids have it so easy. That was back in the 80's. Before that is lost in the mists of time.

Speak, Memory

While Nabokov was not a memoirist, like all writers he used memory to express his conscious thoughts. All our ideas and thoughts, even our feelings, begin in memory. As we age, our memories build upon each other the way cities build upon the remains or ruins of ancient civilization.



Why not? If the site was once favorable, by a river, say, or on a hilltop safe from enemy attack, the site is still useful. Digging the foundation of a new building, one might find tools abandoned by previous inhabitants.



Our memories are like middens, those ancient trash heaps archeologists love, full of artifacts that recall long-forgotten stories. When we write memoir, we are the archeologists of our own midden.



You can call it a scrapbook or journal, it's all about the Past in the Present. And it's always a changing process.

Speak, Memory

While Nabokov was not a memoirist, like all writers he used memory to express his conscious thoughts. All our ideas and thoughts, even our feelings, begin in memory. As we age, our memories build upon each other the way cities build upon the remains or ruins of ancient civilization.

Why not? If the site was once favorable, by a river, say, or on a hilltop safe from enemy attack, the site is still useful. Digging the foundation of a new building, one might find tools abandoned by previous inhabitants.

Our memories are like middens, those ancient trash heaps archeologists love, full of artifacts that recall long-forgotten stories. When we write memoir, we are the archeologists of our own midden.

You can call it a scrapbook or journal, it's all about the Past in the Present. And it's always a changing process.

The River
To me, Mother was like weather, always there, everywhere, in the air I breathed, in my clothes and on my skin. There was no part of me that wasn’t also part of her. She did not mind if I ran through the scrubby woods that lay north and south of our house, if I climbed high trees and made secret hide-outs under the overhanging rocks. I could disappear for an entire day with a sandwich as long as I was home by dark.

But there was one forbidden place: the river.

So I went to the river. Down through the woods past the sliding slope, along a little trail some critters had made, not that I saw critters ever, not a fox, not a deer, not a coon, although I tried to walk like an Indian, pigeon-toed and silent. As far as I knew there were no wild animals anywhere in Connecticut.

The hill sloped down and down until it ended at the edge of the water. The winter river was nothing like the summer river. In January it stretched across half mile of broken, yellowed ice, moving with only a quiet hiss, an occasional splash.

At Middle Haddam, the tides pushed the river up every seven hours, then sucked it back down twenty-five miles to salt water at five or six knots. Great chunks of foot-thick, grimy ice, floes big as a house, shards small enough for a glass of iced tea, all ground and polished the tree roots along the banks.

Busted tree trunks and broken timbers raised their dead, black arms for a moment and disappeared under the surface in the inexorable current. The river was so huge, such a force that I watched it the way I watched the moon and stars. The river carried winter downstream according to some planetary laws I barely recognized, nothing to do with humans. I imagined the Arctic Sea, I imagined explorers with dogsleds.

The grinding flow moved on relentlessly and I, my cozy house, the village with its connected lives, its quarrels and summer picnics, my mother in the golden light of her kitchen, my dog wolfing his kibble, were all tiny, irrelevant.

Sometimes a tempting, flat, solid sheet of ice formed in a shallow cove . What about a crossing? Courageous people had crossed icy rivers, I had read that in books. Slaves. Yes, sometimes they died. Sometimes they made it to the other side, freedom, a new life.

I edged out onto the ice a few feet from the bank and stamped hard to test it. Sploosh, cold water filled my boot and I felt no bottom. I jerked back as if my mother had yanked me, found a dry spot to sit and pour the river out. The wind was cold on a wet sock on a dying afternoon. The evening settled on the river in a fine mist.

I headed back uphill, a blister forming on my wet heel. Back through the tangle of scrubby woods, barely able to find the little path. It didn’t matter, really, I just had to walk up and sooner or later I’d come to the two-lane road that paralleled the river. My house, which I had left behind on my great exploration, was rooted securely on that road, either to the right or left, so I could not get lost.

Would my mother know I had put my foot on the ice? I would tell her something else. I would tell her I had found another hide-away, one with vines. No, not vines, this was the wrong season for vines.

I would tell her I looked for an adventure but I hadn’t found it. Although I had. And I would find it again.