I’ve decided to give up writing.

This was not an easy decision. It came the week after the bathtub began leaking through the kitchen ceiling. This was the second leak since we moved in a year earlier, the first one coming from the toilet and spreading across the ceiling above the kitchen sink, puddling in the cabinet where I keep the boxes of pastas and bags of rice.

My decision came a week later, several days after the 250-lb television slipped from the hands of my son and husband and landed squarely onto my husband’s right foot, cracking three metatarsals which prevented him from being able to drive to the various schools where he teaches.

 Did I mention we have no health insurance? Adjuncts receive no benefits. All the money I had squirreled away for bathroom renovations, or ceiling repairs, or the off-chance that one of our children would decide to get married, went to pay for x-rays and casts and crutches.

Luckily, in addition to the freelancing I do regularly for a local periodical, I had just sold four articles and a short story, and my novel manuscript was just accepted by a major publisher. Said Caroline Rock never. 

“It’s time to stop living a fantasy. Reality is right in front of us, and it is spelled M-O-N-E-Y.”

This was the argument I made to my husband as he lay on the couch with his bulbous foot elevated and tried to dissuade me. Guilt me, really.

 “So you’re just giving up?”

“Yes.”

“You’re just throwing away your God-given talent?”

“Not all of it. Just this one part.”

Never mind that he felt the pinch much sooner than I and took a part-time job in a bookstore over the Christmas holidays. We both worked in a bookstore decades ago. In fact, we met while working in a bookstore. So it was highly romantic that he chose to take a job in a bookstore instead of, say, a shoe store or a soap store.

Now I’m job-hunting. This is more challenging than I imagined. It is not that I am too proud to take a job in a soap store or a shoe store or even a fast food restaurant. It’s just that I stand in front of my students and admonish them daily to stick with their plans, to keep up with their studies, to earn that degree if they ever want to get out of the retail rat-race. I would lose all my credibility if I had to suggestive sell fries to someone I had just scolded for not turning in an essay.

Another thing that prompted me to make this choice was that I turned fifty. Just like that, out of the blue, I woke up Sunday morning, and I was fifty years old. Shouldn’t I already have success as a writer at this age if I were truly meant to be a writer? Successful writers all say they have been writing since they were children, they can’t remember a time when they weren’t writing. I remember long periods of time when I wasn’t writing. I was teaching, or having babies, or homeschooling, always thinking I SHOULD be writing.

 My decision is made. I want to teach my classes, go to my new job, and come home to watch television like normal people. I’m tired of having in the back of my head the thought that I should be doing something else, something more, something important. It’s too much pressure. It distracts me from what I am doing right now.

As soon as I decided this, I felt a great relief. I was released from the “tyranny of the should.” I began to enjoy my classes. I no longer dreaded grading essays, essays that previously reminded me only that I should be writing my own essays. I liked the feeling of knowing my work is complete and there is nothing lingering to be done, nothing new to be started or revised, no unknown world to develop or person to create and destroy.

 My only New Year’s resolution was to learn to live the Sacrament of the Moment. I believe this decision is a big step. By releasing the speculation that comes with writing, I have regained appreciation for my talent as a teacher or even as a housewife, whose rewards are immediate and tangible.

 I will find a second job, or maybe I will do as my husband does and extend my adjuncting to more colleges. Then I can rebuild my little nest egg and see about getting the plumbing fixed. And I will continue to admonish my students to get a degree and find that dream career, only NOT as an adjunct.

 Meanwhile, I am driving my husband around and waiting in tiny lounges with my laptop. Now and then I get a thought and jot it down. Not because I am a writer. I am not. But because sometimes I have no choice but to write.

On the Death of Robin Williams

            I like to think that most people do not think about suicide. I like to think that most people, and by ‘most’ I mean nearly all, wake up each morning not needing to will themselves out of bed or coach themselves to carry on. They just do, and most have a reason to, whatever it may be.

            But this week I am thinking about suicide, and I would venture to say, so is most of the world. This week the king of comedy chose the path of tragedy and ended his life. ‘Why’ is a question as much clichéd as it is rhetorical, but we are still trying to reach the answer. Why would a man who was loved so deeply by his wife and children, who was hailed world-wide as a genius and a success, who had the respect and esteem of his peers and icons, who had purpose in philanthropy and charity, why would such a man need to escape the world in so desperate a manner?

            Rob and I disagree. His contention is that those who are highly intelligent and creative are more prone to depression and suicide than the rest of us ordinary people. There is something in the creative mind that causes one to think differently from others, and this difference is so alienating that it wears the genius down. It is exhausting to not fit in and to have to spend one’s life trying to get the world to understand and approve of your peculiar way of thinking. He cites David Foster Wallace, Kirk Cobain, Spalding Gray, Ernest Hemingway. He quotes Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh shouting, “It’s impossible!”

            It’s a very romantic notion, but I disagree. Depression and its by-product suicide are universal. A blue collar worker who dropped out of high school can feel that same alienation. A housewife who never considered college or the arts can perceive herself as misunderstood and unappreciated. I cite the teenage boy who shoots himself after being bullied at school, the distraught mothers who usher their children into the afterlife with them, the elderly who feel they are a burden to others. Anyone can feel desperate. Everyone feels misunderstood. The intelligent do not have a market on depression, nor does creativity require suffering.

            Apparently, studies on this are inconclusive, but they lean in my direction. About fifteen years ago, Scientific America published a report suggesting that men with lower IQ’s are far more likely to commit suicide than those with higher IQ’s. The speculation was that people with lower IQ’s also have a lower ability to problem-solve, leading them to see suicide as the best solution in overwhelming situations. Additionally, men with lower IQ’s tend to have more exposure to violence in childhood. This violent history is ostensibly a factor in many violent deaths. And as for creativity, there is no link to that and mental illness either. In fact, a more recent study by Simon Kyaga  in the Journal of Psychiatric Research concludes that “individuals with overall creative professions were not more likely to suffer from investigated psychiatric disorders….” (The only exception to this is writers. Go figure.) Interestingly, the study also found that siblings of those diagnosed with mental illness are far more likely to have a creative profession in the arts or sciences than their brothers or sisters with mental illness.

            The majority of intelligent, creative people are happy and healthy. They have an outlet for their unconventional thinking, and, I surmise, couldn’t care less if the world appreciates or understands them. They do not fit in, and they are happy to keep it that way. Why would a creative, intelligent person feel desperate at not fitting in with Kardashian-lovers or mass market paperback-readers? Why would a creative, intelligent person decide that life is not worth living because people prefer television to art, rap to music, video games to books? Such resistance is part of the quest. It is essential to the mystery of creative life. It builds a new purpose into the creative process.

            Robin Williams was a good and generous man. Examples of his altruism and selflessness are coming to light as each day passes. He was also plagued by the consequences of his bad choices. We can speculate that his addictions had something to do with his decision to end his own life. We can hazard that the decision was made more to spare his family than to spare himself. But we should also not shy away from saying that it was the wrong decision. Some are being villainized for saying Mr. Williams’ suicide was cowardly. But, as Rob said this morning, one cowardly act does not make a coward, just as one idiotic act does not make an idiot, and one brilliant act does not make a genius.

            No one saw it coming. Suicide is frequently a shock. Despite Rob’s theory, we simply can’t assume that one type of person or another is more likely to take his own life. Anyone can hurt. It seems there is no describing just how much people can hurt inside, and how many different things can drain a person of his objective and joy. It has made me aware of how brutal and lonely life can be, not just for the genius or the creative, but for every living soul, if he or she does not have hope. In The Noonday Devil, Father Bernard Basset wrote, “Because each of us is, in a sense ... utterly unable to communicate even a fraction of our inner selves to others, we cannot by ourselves, unaided, escape such loneliness.” He continues, “We are cut off from the world… sealed inside ourselves.” God alone can reach those sealed-off parts, but we can always be more compassionate, more patient, less self-centered. We can always look a little harder past our own trials and burdens to those of someone else. This reminder might be the flicker of good that comes from a life well-lived and badly ended.

Critters

The groundhog was mangy. It had bare patches on its head and side, and it scratched incessantly as it sat on the deck railing right outside our home library. “Disgusting thing,” I said aloud to convince myself that it wasn’t cute, that it didn’t remind me in the least of the three cats I loved so dearly, that I would be happy to see it gone before it emerged from its den under our deck with a brood of new mangy groundhogs.

            We bought a trap, a humane trap, and researched the best places to release a groundhog to the wild. I had read the trap instructions and knew what bait to use, how to place the bait under the cage, and where to place the trap for best results. I also read with a shiver the warning to check the trap daily since it would be inhumane to leave even a mangy, disgusting animal lingering in a cage without food or water for days at a time.

            Despite the advice to place the trap near the den opening and to camouflage it, we put it right on the side deck, out in the open. This was where we had seen the brazen thing and were confident he would bumble right in. This is exactly what he did. Within hours, I heard the crash of the trap hatch dropping. But by the time I had gotten up from my desk and to the window, the rocking cage was empty, and the beast was thundering off the side of the deck and back to the safety of its den. The groundhog had foiled the trap.

            Stunned, we relocated the trap to darker regions just under the deck. We set it with fresh cantaloupe, and, as the directions advised, I checked it every day. But from that moment when the trap door dropped on the groundhog’s tail, we did not see another sign of it. The bait withered and composted. I stopped checking it, figuring the groundhog had gotten lost or killed on the roads. Occasionally, when I bent under the deck to turn the hose on or off, I stole a glance at the expensive and useless cage and consoled myself with the fact that it had ultimately rid us of the beast without the bother of putting the stinking thing into our vehicle.

            Some months later, like clockwork, the sky began to darken on a Tuesday afternoon, and warnings sounded from our cell phones, desktops, and local television stations. Another storm was coming, a dangerous storm from which excited meteorologists urged us to take shelter. There was no exaggerating the storms we had endured already that summer, and it was only the beginning of July.

            Winter had been bad, too. Mondays were the days we could expect snow, ice, or bitter cold so bad the schools and businesses closed. But once the weather turned hot, Tuesday became the day of reckoning. We had already dealt with tree limbs crashing to the ground, transformer fires and power outages, and hail dents in our siding and on the roofs of our cars. Now that the ground was saturated from the weekly downpours, we faced flash floods and soggy basements.

            Rob and I hurried to the back yard to gather the garden tools I had been using earlier that day. He carried the tall, paper bags of yard waste to the shed, and I rolled up the hose and stashed it under the deck. I reached up to make sure the spigot was off when my eyes fell on the groundhog trap. Next to the trap, crying piteously, was a small black kitten. It saw me and scurried away leaving behind its hapless sister who cried and fumed to be free from the cage.

            “Check your trap daily!” I had been warned. Now this tiny kitten, no more than a month old, cried from inside the wire box. Who knows how long it had been there. I remembered the night before, sitting on the deck with my husband as we grilled and ate supper, swearing to him that I was hearing a cat, and concluding it was just the mockingbird who must have picked up the sound from somewhere in the neighborhood.

            Thunder rumbled and the wind gusted around the house. I snatched up the trap to carry inside to safety. The little demon inside hissed and cried, throwing herself from end to end of the cage, and I giggled at her fury as I ran ahead of the rain.

            My three male cats fled to secret nether-regions of the house when I placed trap on the floor in the living room. Our daughters and their boyfriends had converged on the house to wait out the storm, and they gathered around to gasp in wonder at the terrified creature.

            She was a beautiful brown tabby. Her impossibly large ears flicked and flattened as she warned us that her ancestors had eaten alive our ancestors, bones and all. We took some deli turkey from the fridge and offered it to her in small pieces. She consumed it without chewing and pressed her nose against the cage for more, hissing, crying, and gulping at the meat. I slid a small dish of water into the cage, but she did not know how to drink from it and kept dropping her nose too deeply into the puddle.

            Finally, we managed to get a small towel wrapped around her, and we removed her from the cage. We took turns holding her, passing her around, letting her drink droplets of water from our fingers. We stroked her and spoke softly to her as the storm raged outside. Rain dumped relentlessly onto the house and yard, and the streets flooded with water searching for a tributary. But in the living room, we snuggled the tiny life who miraculously fell asleep in our arms.

            Hours passed as we tamed the kitten. It was as if she had been born right there in the living room. She played with our fingers, ate from our hands, even nuzzled our noses, and never once, even in her delirious panic, did she scratch or bite us.

            “Well,” Katie said, “I suppose we’re keeping her. We are keeping her, right?”

            I looked at my husband who had so patiently allowed me to have a kitten or three for the entire quarter century of our marriage. His expression told me that it was a given. We were not letting go of this precious cat.

            “What should we call her?” I asked. “What’s the funniest word you know?”

            Joyce, our youngest, has the drollest sense of humor in the family. She considered for only a moment before exaggerating the word, “Moist.”

            We doubled over laughing, imagining the vet calling her name when we took her for a checkup.

            We added the name “Maloo” in honor of our favorite local restaurant, and declared her to be Moist-Maloo.

            The storm eased, and I went to the back door to see if there was damage. I was shocked to see that our little yard was submerged in a foot of water right up to the foundation of the house. The dark area under the deck where the groundhog trap had sat for months was under water. If I had not peeked under to turn off the house before the storm hit, Moist-Maloo would have drowned in the cage. My heart aches when I consider what my carelessness might have cost.

            Moist-Maloo is the darling of the family now. Our older cats are warming up to her one at a time, mostly intrigued by her better-tasting kitten food and new toys. She is insatiable for human touch, rolling onto her back like a puppy for a belly-rub. She greets us with a hiss each morning, then apologizes with adorable squeaks and a purr like a freight train.

            We were tempted to put the trap back out to catch Moist-Maloo’s sibling, but we never saw it again after that night. Besides, the trap is now safely closed and stashed on a high shelf in the basement. Despite this fact, I check it every day. 

EN 099

When I say I teach writing, I really mean that I teach auto mechanics. I teach grammar, showing which words are subjects or verbs, how to correct run-on sentences, how to avoid fragments, how to show respect for the mighty comma. Semester after semester, I am amazed at the verbal calisthenics students undergo trying to make their writing sound intelligent. They seem to believe that it is not about communication, not about making every word matter. It is about stringing as many words together as humanly possible, regardless that the meaning of the sentence has been left on the road with treadmarks across its belly. But it is job security for me, and I like to imagine that once in a while a student has an epiphany and decides to drop the nursing or computer programming class to become a writer.

Today is the last day of Spring Break. While I did not write every day as I had planned, I did accomplish two important goals. I applied for an SCBWI grant, and I finished the rough draft of my MLA project. The first is a long shot. I really have no chance since there are probably thousands of people applying, many of whom have much more experience applying for grants. But why not? The second is looking sweeter.

My mentor, Edith Hemingway (Road to Tater Hill and Broken Drum) is excited about my story, and that makes me even more excited. My revision includes tracking the arcs of each character, rounding out the main character, and smoothing out one of the minor characters who ended up being a little creepier than I intended. Then we look for someone who wants to publish it.

Meanwhile, midterm essays come in for me to grade this week, and the semester plows ahead.  I try not to let the auto mechanics suck my soul dry. This semester’s schedule has be brutal since I teach at least one class every day of the week. When I get a chance to write, I find myself writing fiction in an essay mindset, then re-reading to find that none of my characters use contractions. It’s like listening to a bunch of Spocks having a conversation. What helps is to read good fiction. I read Rebecca Stead’s Liar and Spy, and I loved it. I confess I was not at all a fan of When You Reach Me, but I expect to re-read it this summer to see if I missed something. Currently I have Three Times Lucky on my nightstand, as well as Lisa Graff’s Tangle of Knots. For my morning walk I have Seraphina on my iPod. Reading a chapter or two every day, sometimes stopping in the middle of writing to read, helps to raise me above nuts and bolts and refresh my sense of poetry.

How I wish my students would read. It’s so obvious that they don’t. (It is so obvious that they do not.) They write sentences like, “Being an only child is good because there is no sibling bribery, and one does not have to wear hammy downs.” They write the way they hear, then click on spell-check and accept the first suggestion, even if it is “defiantly” wrong. See what I mean about the sucking of my soul?

The most frustrating part is that I am not even molding future readers of my own books. At this point in the semester’s program, they detest reading and writing so much that they are willing to do whatever is necessary to succeed just so they never have to read or write again.

So it pays the bills. It is a job that allows me to write, that may even allow us to buy a house where I will have a room just for writing. And for that, am I willing to do whatever is necessary to succeed? Defiantly.

Robin Gibb is dead.

 I wearied quickly of reading headlines about the death of the disco king and tasteless jokes about trying to remember which Spice Girl he was. I have to remind myself that these come from people who do not know what I know. I have to remind myself to feel sorry for them and not to take umbrage.

In my Bee Gees iTunes playlist I have 106 songs. This is pitiful, I know, compared to the thousand or more that actually exist. But I forgive myself by thinking of the additional stack of Bee Gees CD’s I own, the VHS recordings of their TV specials from the 1990’s, and my instinctive need to watch Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when I am sick or depressed.

"Jive Talkin’" is not on my playlist.

Neither is "Stayin’ Alive."

Neither is "Too Much Heaven."

It is not because I do not think these songs are great. (Well, to be perfectly frank, I have never liked Too Much Heaven. It is so full of clichés and came so soon after the moving “How Deep is Your Love” that I cannot take it seriously.) I do not have these songs on my iPod because, unlike the rest of the world, I heard these songs in their day, enjoyed them, and moved on to the next album. The rest of the world kept listening to them over and over and over, thinking these were the pinnacle of the Gibb body of work. Fools.

Even now, when I mention that I am a Bee Gees fan, I can judge the Gibbtelligence of my listener by his or her reply.

“Oh, I LOVE Saturday Night Fever!” Idiot.

“Oh, yes, I remember them from the 1960’s. They were twins, weren’t they?” Moron.

“I love the Bee Gees, too. I thought ‘Size Isn’t Everything’ was a great album, but ‘One’ is my absolute favorite.” Soul mate.

The day after Robin died, I went to Maloo’s with Rob-in. (I’ve taken to calling him “Rob-in” lately. He doesn’t mind.) Rob-in put some money in the juke box and played a mix of REM, U2, and Cake.

“Where are the Gibbs?” I asked him.

 “You know they don’t have any Bee Gees.” They do have “Jive Talkin', but Rob-in knows that doesn’t count in my esteem. The tavern owner, a nice man who remembers me from high school, offered to play some Bee Gees from his bartender’s iPod.

“What do you like? What’s your favorite?”

My favorite? Robin was my favorite. But I stayed my moroseness and considered. Probably, nice as Mike is, he meant for me to pick my favorites from among the SNF collection, with “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” thrown in for good measure. So I shrugged and said, “Anything. I love them all,” which was true at that moment. Rob-in, helpful as always, informed Mike to skip “Too Much Heaven.”

“Run to Me” began to play. Not only that, but the old man at the other end of the bar lifted his chin and sang along.

“Now and then, you need someone older, so darliiiiiiiiiin’, you run to me.” 

After that, “Nights on Broadway,” Rob-in’s favorite.

Then a selection from Still Waters.

One after the other, from early decades to the later albums, the Bee Gees played.

The couple next to us at the bar began discussing this loudly.

 “One of them just died, didn’t they?” the woman said.

“Yeah,” the man replied. “I think so. I think it was Robin.”

“They was twins, wasn’t they,” she said. “Him and...what was his name? Maureeece?”

“Maurice,” I corrected her, though she was not talking to me. I simply could not let the ignorance go uncorrected. “It’s pronounced Maurice. Like the cat.”

 She squinted at me. “Are you sure?”

I laughed, not a happy laugh, but a laugh of absolute astonishment that this woman had the audacity to question my knowledge of the Bee Gees. “Yes, I am sure,” I said slowly, so she would understand. “It is pronounced Maurice. They are British. That is the British pronunciation. Maureece is the French pronunciation.”

A light went on, and she nodded. “Ah! That explains it,” she said. “I’m French!”

Of course you are.

We stayed for a long time. No one, not even the regulars, challenged the continual stream of Gibb melodies by starting up the juke box. No one shouted, “Turn that crap down!” In fact, they sang along, or at least nodded along, and occasionally commented that they loved this or that song, and did not realize it was the Bee Gees.

It was a weeknight, and the place closed early. One by one the guests began to leave.  By eleven, Rob-in and I had the place to ourselves. The music continued to play in the otherwise quiet room as Mike wiped the tables and arranged the chairs under them, blowing out ambiance candles and turning the lights down. We paid our bill, and I thanked my old classmate for his generous understanding of my grief. Rob-in and I drove home in silence, not even listening to the Bee Gees compilation that was in my CD player.

I felt a peace imagining tonight’s bar patrons driving home humming the tunes they had heard at Maloo’s, maybe searching for them on the radio or making a mental note to download a few. I felt I had done my part to honor Robin, and I wondered if, all over the world, taverns, restaurants, and other businesses were honoring him, too.

“Go on with your song, bird. 
 You can’t go wrong, my bird. 
You will go on and on, bird, through the open door.” 

I lied. I totally have “Stayin’ Alive” on my iPod.
Duh.

Teeth

I broke a tooth Monday night biting into a Snickers Bar. I felt something hard in my mouth and thought, “Man, that is some kind of peanut.” But what I pulled from my mouth was a piece of me.
It was the nearly-back tooth, number 19, the first molar on the bottom left side of my mouth. There was no pain, only the sinking feeling that something life-changing had just happened with the bite of that candy bar.
Earlier that day I had decided I would fast. It was the first Monday of Advent, and I wanted to see how committed I could be to the season, despite the fact that most Catholics no longer feel Advent is a penitential season. So I had not eaten much that day—a yogurt, some salad, and a hot dog before I left the house for the college library where I wait while my daughter takes a class.
Sitting in the library, having accomplished all the work I had planned to do that evening, I decided God would not mind if I treated myself to a little chocolate. Well, apparently he did mind. In fact, he made it very clear that he, too, wants to see how committed to the season I can be.
I texted my husband. “I just broke a tooth on a freakin’ Snickers bar!”
After inquiring about my level of pain and the seriousness of the damage, he promised to find me a dentist first thing in the morning.
Still feeling no pain, I began to realize what had happened. A part of me had just fallen off doing what it is created to do. The teeth are the hardest part of one’s body. I take care to brush mine several times a day, floss them periodically (Don’t judge me! You know no one really flosses!), and avoid opening bottles of beer with them. Still, there was that period of time when I was a voracious ice-chewer. For months, maybe years, I chomped on ice, craving it in the middle of the night, demanding particularly shaped cubes that felt just right in my mouth. I learned later that I had an iron deficiency, and the cravings for ice disappeared after I began taking supplements. Still, apparently the damage had been done. The quarter-inch shard of molar in my hand was evidence of that. Now I knew I could no longer rely on any part of my body to do its duty. What if I stepped out of bed and my leg broke out from under me? What if I sat down to read a book and my eyeball rolled out of its socket and onto the page? What if I were working at my laptop--writing this blog, for instance--and my fingers began to snap and split?
I could not bring myself to eat. It was irrational, I know, but the thought of feeling another piece of tooth rolling around on my tongue, clacking up against its brothers and sisters, was unbearable. I went to bed hungry.
Tuesday, while my husband called around for a dentist, I slipped tiny bites of yogurt between my lips, remembering my dreams of the night before of my teeth shattered and jagged in my mouth.
“You have to eat something,” my husband said.
“No, I don’t.” I told him of my dream.
“Honey, the rest of your teeth are not going to break.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded. And he could not answer.
Did you know that dreaming of teeth is the most commonly reported topic of dreams, according to those to whom we supposedly report our dreams. Dreaming of broken teeth can symbolize a variety of afflictions:
--anxiety about being separated from someone you love
--guilt over having told a lie
--feelings of loss of power or control
--fear of losing one’s youth or beauty
Or, in my case, terror that one’s teeth will break off and fall out.
My appointment was for 8:30 A.M. today. I was squeezed in since broken teeth are apparently considered a minor emergency.
I was escorted to the X-ray room by a sweet lady who said, “Nice to meet you, Caroline. My name is Hilda.”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Caroline.” Of course I am. That’s what she just said.
She invited me to open my mouth and show her my broken tooth.
“Ah!” she said. “Let me guess. Mashed potatoes?”
I did not know what she meant.
“You broke your tooth eating mashed potatoes?”
“No,” I said. “I bit into a Snickers bar.”
“Oh!” She giggled. “Most people say they took a bite of mashed potatoes or applesauce and the thing just exploded in their mouth. When it’s time to go, it goes!”
This was not comforting to me.
My dentist was a soft-spoken young man who looked like Josh Groban. He said he was “excited” to tell me that he could save the tooth by removing the old filling and putting a new filling in that would cover and protect the broken area. This would save me a root canal or an extraction, both of which were ghastly options, in my opinion.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
He repeated that he was excited. I was happy for him.
I sat in the chair for an hour and a half while Josh Groban drilled out the old filling and replaced it with new. The drill was not the squealing, horror-movie kind that I remember from when the filling was first implanted back in the 1970’s. It was a gentle whirring drill that could barely be heard over the suction. At times I thought my jaw was going to dislocate, but he had numbed me very well, and it hardly hurt at all. Finally he stepped back.
“There you go!” he said.
“Hooway!” I said.
“Huzzah!” he replied.
The tooth looks good, a wonderful improvement over the old, blackish-silver filling that he removed. Sadly, however, there are six others still in my mouth with that old, crumbling filling. Heavy, heavy sigh.
When I got home, I stretched out on my bed, weary and hungry, and dozed while the numbness wore off. And I dreamed. I was walking through the neighborhood with Josh Groban. He was singing. I smiled. None of my teeth fell out.

Ironically, pursuing a graduate degree in writing has assured that I have not written a single word in over three months. This, of course, does not count the toss-off paper my history prof assigned so he could have at least one grade for us before the term ends. Nor does it include the massive interpolation of Plato’s theories of Forms as it compares to the Logos of St. John’s Gospel for my "Ancient World" class. While both of these exercised a reasoning muscle I had long ago allowed to atrophy, neither will be added to my resume.

One course which did provide some genuine writing was the "Nonfiction for Children" course with Dr. Mona Kerby. This was an online course, sadly, and I would have greatly enjoyed face to face interaction with my fellow writers and Dr. Kerby. I did learn a great deal, every bit of it useful information. (I feel certain I will never have to defend St. John to a sophist anytime in the future.) We studied the catalogs of various publishing houses, as well as the few children’s periodicals still in publication. Then we wrote and submitted.

Meanwhile, the chance to teach writing at the community college has helped me add to the family budget while polishing my grammar skills. I won’t say it polishes my writing skills because what I teach is very formulaic—teaching to the test in the most blatant manner! But it is an easy gig, now that all the planning is done, and next semester should be much more flexible.

One thing I was able to do these past months was to read many Newbery-worthy books. Gary Schmidt’s Okay for Now still has my vote for the gold medal. In fact, I went ahead and purchased it for my collection—that is how confident I am that it will win something. I was very excited to see that Inside Out and Back Again, by Thanhha Lai (also one of my favorites this year), won the National Book Award, and the runners up included the nonfiction Flesh and Blood So Cheap, and Frannie Billingsley’s Chime, as well as Okay for Now. These were all books I enjoyed immensely, and have high hopes for them in January. I especially recommend listening to the audio book of Chime. It is exquisitely narrated. I haven’t read the other runner-up, Edwardson’s My Name is Not Easy, but that is on my list for this holiday. Newbery season is creeping up, but I feel pretty confident this year. I will not be caught off guard!

Speaking of my Newbery collection, I was able to add three just in the past week or so. Honk the Moose! Can you believe it? It is a well-loved old copy, but such a cute story! I nearly squealed when I saw it on the shelf at Wonderbook. In fact, I probably did squeal. Then the other day I found The Golden Name Day by Lindquist, and Like Jake and Me, by Mavis Jukes. So the collection is shaping up, although I still have about 108 titles to find—not including the ones about to be announced.

Back to work for me. There is one more set of journals that need to be graded. And of course, there is Plato.