Fly, ladybug, fly!

God, it's Monday again - hardly seems possible after the social whirl of the weekend. Oh all right, I went to one party. But it was a humdinger. Nothing can equal a granddaughter's birthday for sheer shrieking fun.

The only thing more heart-touching than seeing a sweet little blondie, just turned five, flying on a swing set with her honeyed hair in a blur behind her is seeing her sister, not quite three, taking a violent header down a slide, landing hard on her bum, standing up, brushing her hands together and calmly walking on to the next activity.

That's Lauren. When a child has a serious illness, parents like to say things like, "It was meant to happen" - not that the child was meant to be sick, of course, but that they were especially chosen to be the recipients of a peculiar sort of daily blessing, one that sometimes relegates them to the outer fringes of so-called normalcy.

This little Lauren was diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes at age 15 1/2 months. Her parents knew something was terribly wrong with her, but the doctors kept insisting it was flu. By the grace of God, Mom kept putting her foot down and saying, "No. No. It's something more serious, and you'd better find out what it is NOW."

When they finally found out, they rushed her to Children's Hospital in Vancouver post-haste, and admitted her. A baby with this disease is in mortal peril, and when my son phoned me with a shaky voice and said, "She'll have this for the rest of her life," nobody knew exactly what that conclusion was going to mean.

Let me quote a statement her Mom wrote to promote the 2010 Walk to Cure Diabetes in June: "Lauren is a trooper; she receives insulin needles every day and has her fingers poked by a lancet 5 to 9 times daily to test her blood sugar levels. She eats food that is calculated so the food carbohydrates match her insulin dose at set times of the day. This is necessary to keep her blood sugar levels in check to prevent dangerous highs and lows. This is everyday life when living with this disease."

We're never unaware of diabetes when Lauren comes to our house; she needs to be "checked" at least a couple of times, and fed according to her levels. But by the same token, we're never unaware of her spirit, her bust-out laugh and merry blue eyes and sparkly smile, and her incredible steadiness in the face of something that might emotionally flatten a child with a whiny disposition or even an adult.

I know I wouldn't be this gracious about it; in fact I'd probably be complaining loudly, or slowly turning bitter. Of course, one can say that she's still too young to really know what is going on. Next month she'll turn three, and she won't be able to eat her own birthday cake. Her parents aren't sure how they will handle issues like that in the future. One step, one day at a time.

She will be using an insulin pump in the next few months, but contrary to popular belief, that doesn't automatically take care of the problem. Myself, I don't trust technology and wonder if it isn't better to monitor this thing by hand. But then, she's not my child. She is my beloved, my irreplaceable grandchild, yes. But I don't make the major decisions (which is probably just as well).

When we go on the walk, we'll do it as a family at the Greater Vancouver Zoo. This will be our second year. Lauren's team is called the Ladybugs, and I've already made ladybug pompoms (Lauren loves what she calls "bum-bums"!) for the occasion. Last year the event was beyond fun: it gave us a sort of glow, quite indescribable. All these walks for this and that, which sometimes seemed a little extreme, suddenly made sense to us.

Nobody expects serious illness to invade their family, least of all in a child. But if it has to happen, one couldn't do better than to see this plucky little girl, a girl who literally seems to bounce when she falls down and almost never cries, courageously living with a difficult, scary condition.

She'll never really be able to eat with total pleasure and abandon. She'll have to keep track of her "levels" and pay a lot of attention to how she feels. For the rest of her life. Meantime, she has made more than a good start, and inspired all of us with her valour, her good humour and her joy in living.

She has always reminded me of those Disney cherubs in Fantasia. Like bumblebees, there's just no way they could fly with wings that tiny. But they do it. They do it because no one told them that they couldn't.

The girl with the flaxen hair

I have to admit off the top that this photo is way out of date. That little girl, one Erica Morgan, is now turning five, a momentous age that represents a developmental leap, and

a new readiness to read and write and sit still long enough to attend classes.

Plus she still breaks the cute-o-meter every time.

Erica Morgan is a princess from tip to toe, from her tossing curls to her crystal-blue eyes,with the longest eyelashes anyone has ever seen. They're like fans, for God's sake. When she flutters her eyelids, there's a breeze.

All my four grandkids are wondrous to me, representing the upspringing of new life in the midst of a very dry wasteland. My disillusion with the writing business (NOT with writing itself, which was still compelling) had parched my insides into those flakes you see in the desert, you know, in National Geographic or someplace.

Erica made her debut at such a time, and I will never forget rounding the corner in the hospital room and seeing her for the first time: she looked like a tiny, pink, compact, living rosebud, and she had that ineffable sweet baked-biscuit smell of the newly-arrived.

It's a fascinating thing watching any baby become themselves, evolve into

who they are going to be. I remember reading somewhere (maybe one of those myths we all ascribe to, like "you remember everything that ever happened to you" and "we only use 2% of our brains") that our personalities are basically set by age two. Yikes. Parents who've made any mistakes at all must shudder at such a statement.

But such is the fluidity and surprise of human nature that even the worst two years can cause the plant to grow around the obstacle. Cedars abound here, and many of them grow too near power lines. Often they have to be trimmed in a weird-looking circle. I saw one recently that had put out a lot of new branches, but they all came straight up within a couple of inches of the power line. The tree "knew".

So what does this have to do with Princess Erica? Even the best life in the world is burdened. If nothing else, it's burdened by turning on the TV (guaranteed to depress anyone) and finding out about oil spills and plane crashes and little children dismembered by fiends. Who can fail to feel something, not hopeful, but horrific?

We need to say to our kids and grandkids, it's all right, there are terrible things out there in the world, but here, in your own home, it's not like that. The odd emotional explosion clears quickly for the most part, and it's back to the twinkly, shrieky fun of two little blondies tearing around the living room.

I love them beyond endurance, sometimes, and I do worry about the sort of earth they will inherit. Is violence escalating, or is it just reported more accurately (the old saw that journalists fall back on)? What about the stress of a madly-accelerating world, with gadgets replacing real human contact and people swelling in gross obesity due to grabbing the easy drug of junk food?

It wasn't supposed to be that way. I remember back in the '60s, there

were all sorts of reports of Xanadu, the World of the Future, of a lean, fit population (all that low-fat cooking, remember?) only having to work three days a week, spending the rest of the time in creative and recreational pursuits.

(Oh, and remember those dumb-ass domed cities, like something out of the Jetsons?)

It isn't going to be that way for Erica, my little blondie. I hope she will manage. Acceleration tends to lead to more acceleration, unless stopped by a crash. Like the frog slowly stewed in increasingly-heated water, we just don't notice it, until we see the alarming increase of depression and addiction and autism and. . . fat.

It's doubtful Erica, in her sparkly little tutu and candystriped tights, will be anything other than sylphlike. I want a happy life for her, want it more than I want to live. I have the tremendous opportunity to love her without reservation, without the burdens of parenthood. I can be the fun nanny who chases them around the room, plays Barbies and PlayDoh and paper giraffes.

Sometimes I ask myself: What good will it do? Won't they forget? Is any of this banked in the psyche? How much do we remember?

No matter. Maybe it's for me, as much as them, and I will remember, remember every single sweet blessed day that I get to love them.

Eat Pray Love God Food: And Oprah Created Women

Is it my imagination, or does Oprah regularly decide to Change her Life by slavishly following a new guru, then replacing him/her once she gets tired of them and the bloom is off?

I just remember people like Sarah Ban Breathnach (who?), a lifestyle coach who used to come on regularly (but, unlike the male gurus, didn't get her own show). I wonder if she's still around, coasting on all that former glory, or languishing in remainder bins next to John Bradshaw.

OK, so this time Oprah tells us she has Found the Secret to weight loss and "food issues". And this time, boy, she really means it! I mean, really really really. It's all in this book by Geneen Roth, a formerly fat self-help/bestseller writer who has revealed an astounding fact: overeating, and food/weight problems in general, are often connected to larger emotional and spiritual issues.

Never having heard it before, Oprah was all over this idea like a mess of mashed potatoes with sausage gravy. In fact, during her "interview" with Geneen Roth yesterday, she monologued for 15 or 20 minutes about her own food problems, while Roth sat there nodding and saying "yes. . . yes. . . yes. . . ", her face arranged in what she hoped was a compassionate expression.

Food is tied to emotional issues? Ack! Oprah isn't the only one drooling over this thing, which is selling wildly, much as Women who Run with the Wolves did about a decade ago. (Take another look at that one and see if if it doesn't embarrass you.) Someone has been paying well-known self-help authors to salivate all over this book, or they wouldn't be praising a rival like this:

"Geneen Roth does it again! Women Food and God is absolutely mesmerizing. And loaded with insights which can change your life." - Dr. Christiane Northrup, author of The Wisdom of Menopause

"This is a hugely important work, a life-changer, one that will free untold women from the tyranny of fear and hopelessness around their bodies." - Anne Lamott, professional confessor/so-called counsellor/recovering sitdown comedienne.

OK, so obviously I don't feel very good about this book. Actually, it's not the book, and it's not even Oprah telling us the book has led her to "epiphany after epiphany" about making the connection between eating and emotional stress.

It's the fact that we've heard it all before, ad nauseam. All the elements get scrambled around, and the face of the author (usually compassionate and spiritual - and by the way, none of them are fat) changes with the seasons. Oprah leads the parade, beating her vast drum and insisting that this book, this author is the one who represents the one true religion about fat.

I feel sorry for Oprah, I really do. I think she is a sad woman who lost touch with herself long ago, and is now trapped in a kind of bizarre media godhood (goddess-hood?). What she says, goes. My prediction is that she will soon enter politics, and if a B-movie actor or a peanut farmer can make it to the Presidency, so can she.

I've been rather guiltily reading another best-seller, the Kitty Kelley tell-all bio, Oprah. It's not particularly charitable, but at the same time it's believable: the Big O has become a media behemoth, her ambition fuelled by a desperate attempt to outrun her traumatized past.

Much has been made of the fact that O has never had therapy, insisting that public confession is enough to heal her wounds. Her Kirstie-Alley-esque weight-bounces are beside the fact. But then again. . . Why this thundering response to a book that seems so self-evident? The Oprah who used to preach sermons when she was three (oh, maybe five) has stepped up to the pulpit again, insisting that THIS TIME we have found the answer. Not by dieting, not by agonizing or weighing, not even by joining Jenny Craig (like a lot of her "successful" guests). But by becoming spiritually aware. By realizing that we need to embrace the things we hate and fear the most.

OK: I have a few things that are hard to embrace.

Environmental meltdown. Oil spills. Random, vicious violence. All those little school children hacked to death in China. Drugs. Waste. The capricious, often horrendous turns of fate that can derail a human being for life. Cancer. Suffering. Pain of all kinds.

Global warming? You get the idea.

Even the things that lurk in my own psyche (jealousy, lust, anger, violent mood swings, loneliness, despair) are pretty gol-dern hard to embrace. I can't really see how embracing them will help. But then, I don't have a book on the bestseller list.

I predict that within one year, or maybe two, Oprah's miraculous weight loss under the Roth banner will have bounced again. And she will once again be fishing for people who insist they have discovered The Secret.

Speaking of, wasn't there a book by exactly that name that Oprah touted not so long ago? Its main premise was that you can get anything you want - anything - just by wanting it badly enough. A woman wrote in to Oprah claming that she had cured her breast cancer this way (prompting the producers to send her a frantic note).

Then came the news headline: this particular guru, James Ray (no relation to James Earl Ray) had been performing endurance tests on his disciples, including an extremely hot sweat-lodge that caught fire, killing several people.

The answer? I'm not even sure I know the question yet.

Didja ever send an e-mail to a dead guy?

OK. This entry just about shows you where I am spiritually, not to mention on the friendship level: I just sent an e-mail to a guy whom I am almost certain is dead.

I mean! Can't I do something silly once in a while? Can't I grasp at vapour, send arrows into the void? For this guy, maybe.

It was one of those wildly unlikely friendships that sprang up overnight, and it was during one of the most trying, even overwhelming times in my whole life. We would meet at Starbuck's, and very soon his sardonic humour (often blacker than black) would make me laugh myself teary-eyed.

(Excuse me - have to go grab a cup of Red Rose tea. This post has nothing to do with anything.)

Anyway, this guy, he kind of had everything wrong with him. His health, I mean. He carried it around with him, and I worried. But he didn't talk about it much. Preferred to make gruesome cracks about the joys of depression and the futility of visiting psychiatrists, who would say things like, "You look fine to me", when you were obviously at death's door.

Hey, my friend, at some point a few years ago, your e-mail didn't work any more, and I had your phone number but was afraid to ask your wife, "Is Raymond still alive?" I still have a book of his, it's in my front room cupboard right now waiting, for what I can't say. Friendships like this blow in with force, then melt in the fog of inevitability. Don't they? This guy knew Sylvia Plath (not personally!), and when I handed him my version of the poem Daddy (called Daddy II), he winced, and guffawed, and groaned in all the right places. He "got" it.

To be loved is lovely, but relatively commonplace. But to have someone "get" you - I mean really "get you" - how often does that happen in a lifetime?

So what's the deal here? Is he dead? Is he? I just tried about seven potential addresses and e-mailed him to ask if he was alive or not, and am waiting for it to bounce back at me, as everything seems to bounce back these days.

Where does everything go? Where are the people? I look around me, and my life seems as white and bleached as a pure untouched sheet of paper.

Raymond?

Ducking for apples, or, the queen of the quotes

Yeah, I know, posting quotes from famous writers is pretty cheesy, and maybe I could think up a better idea if I weren't so preoccupied with finding an agent to represent my (third) novel. It has me dancing on a bed of needles, my nerves jumping at every turn.

So let's think about something else, shall we? Meaning, one Dorothy Parker, a writer known for her sardonic poetry and even more sardonic quips ("One more drink and I'll be under the host", "You can lead a whore to culture, but you can't make her think.")

Parker was brilliant, but she was also lightning-quick, fast on the verbal draw. She and her buds sat around a big round table at the Algonquin Hotel and drank their lunch every day. Quips flew like ping-pong balls, which is kind of surprising because these guys (all guys, except Dottie Parker) were so inebriated they could barely stand up. But then, this was the Jazz Age, and drinking was forbidden, a little naughty, and necessary fuel for the writing life.

Some of her best quotes seem to come out of the air, meaning they were likely part of a larger conversation. Such as the one about ducking for apples: "There but for a typographical error is the story of my life." And how did that sweet little debutante injure her leg? "Sliding down a barrister."

You don't get paid for these things ("a girl's best friend is her mutter"), so Dottie really had to scrape hard to make a living. She wrote grand short stories, as well as the kind of whimsical verse made popular by Ogden Nash - except that it went like this: "Three be the things I shall have till I die,/Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye." Book reviewing kept her afloat, and books were piled everywhere in her messy apartment, along with empty bottles, leftover cheese sandwiches, eviction notices, and assorted poodles.

Parker had a soul-friend named Robert Benchley, a humorist who was kind of like Bennett Cerf (God, why do I know about Bennett Cerf??). They never had sex, or at least I don't think they did, but they loved each other in a special way. I once considered writing a memoir of my crushes on men, titled Searching for Robert Benchley. (Don't anybody steal that, I might still use it.)

Poor Dottie. Though she lived to be over 70, she became increasingly bizarre and snappish with the years, so that her league of loyal friends thinned out. She could still get off a good one now and then ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."), but as the years passed, her life was loneliness, booze, TV game shows and messy old dogs.

What's the point of all this? Dorothy Parker is incredibly famous, but what exactly did she contribute? A few slight plays, even slighter verse, short stories that were memorable but not great. She was a personality, a package deal, and when you think about it, all writers need to be that way: a walking advertisement for their work, if not for themselves.

Writers are the delivery device for what they write. They must get out there and live it. Work it! And try not to get too drunk in the meantime.

Does it have to be that way? Does it?

Glumday glumday

I'd say this is how I looked this morning when I opened my eyes, but I couldn't open my eyes.

Oh it was a great weekend, yessirree, a nice weekend in which I ate nine pieces of bacon at a Mother's Day brunch.

Then came the day of reckoning, the day I had to suck it up and start approaching (with a whip and a chair) literary agents to "represent" (I hope) my unpublished novel to publishers.

I've gone through this before. Yessirree and Bob. It wasn't exactly my idea of a good time. Unfortunately, my agent and my publisher got so tight with each other that they forgot all about me. It was too sad. I felt burned, not listened to, and sadly sunk back into my cave with scales falling off me.

Fortunately, during this time I wrote three books (two novels and a book of poems). The third one, I think, is the charm.

I wrote this book with the lifting heart of a lover, or of gull's wings scudding the horizon. I almost ran to my computer every day to work on it. Jesus, I loved this book! And given the fact that I had two "well-received" (read: remaindered) novels to my credit, I thought it would be a breeze to sell this one.

That is, until I began the process of trying to get noticed, and slammed into the same brick wall I first encountered in about 1987.

This is not to complain about my lot as a writer. Jeezly, no! What could be better! What could be more fulfilling than pouring out your soul on a piece of paper! To expect people to actually read it, then to expect to be paid for it is the height of arrogance, is it not? Yes, except for J. K. Rowling and Stephen King. We like it that they're famous and rich.

This is just the Mondays, the moondog-days that always follow after nine pieces of bacon. No doubt that many nitrates poison the brain. Are dreams punished in proportion to their majesty? Could be. Why do I keep on doing this? Because I'm good. Oops! Here comes the gorgon. . . arrrrghhh. . . aaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!

Wallflower

You know how they say that to be a real writer, you're supposed to be able to paper a wall with rejections? I guess I did it wrong. I papered my garbage pail.

I papered my soul with disappointment. I fell, and tried again. I must have been nuts. What is it about this so-called art, this obsession? So many of us want to be writers. Right. I have heard that the writing itself is about 25% of the process. But 25% of what? Of "success". Of "making it", of becoming a literary star.

I once had a friend ask me, "OK, Margaret, if you're so obsessed with all this, tell me. How do you get on the bestseller list?" I went completely blank. I had no idea. I knew it had very little to do with the quality of the work. I had been reviewing books for 20 years. Some of the best books I read were published by tiny literary presses and probably sold 1000 copies, tops.

And then there's the phenomenon of mass-market paperbacks and fat hardcovers that ride the top of the lists for months, even years. How do they get up there, stay up there when the quality is so uniformly awful?

I don't want this blog to be whiny. But I want it to be more focussed than my last one. (Whew, don't ask me about my last one! I was run out of town for being too original. Or for something. Whatever it was, it was pretty vicious.) And I want to try to explore just why I do this. For in a sense, I already achieved my goal. After a lifetime of extreme, obsessive yearning, my first novel came out in 2003. Reviewers said things like "fiction at its finest" and compared me to some of the best-known writers in the country.

And I sold 1000 copies.

The publisher called me to tell me how disappointed she was. At first I thought, oh, she' s emphathizing with me. Then I realized: she's disappointed in me. I was somehow supposed to make a zillion-seller out of this novel, all by myself.

Didn't work. I had been given a book called Guerilla Tactics for Writers or something like that. Every time I tried one of those tactics, I was called down for it, told I shouldn't be doing it.

So why do I keep at this? Jesus, maybe it's because that (by now) I'm not much good at anything else. Since my second novel came out in 2005 (also lavishly reviewed, also sitting on shelves collecting dust), I have written two more novels and a book of poems. I believe these represent my best work.

I'm not sure if it's from bad sales or what, but nobody's interested. I'm not the sort of person who can go on and on writing books and stashing them in a drawer. Hardly anyone understands this (they call it "ego"), but the storyteller needs people sitting around the fire to listen. A concert pianist is not expected to play in an empty hall. And etcetera.

Am I bitter? Some days, maybe. Today I am extremely frustrated because yesterday I was turned down again after allowing my hopes to rise. I just don't know what the fuck to do now.

Am I crazy? I sent out my "first" novel (which was actually my third) sixty-five times, and received sixty-five rejections. Most of these publishers told me it was really quite a good novel, original, and that they were sure it would do well with someone else.

Maybe I shouldn't write on days like this.

I'm like, iconic

Sometimes I think I'm being left behind so swiftly, the people around me are a blur. I'm turning into one of those grannies that picks at grammar and parses sentences.

Or something.

I was never taught to write, not exactly, but reading a gazillion books when I was a grubby little kid taught me something about respect for language. I kind of soaked it in. It hurt me when someone mangled the language, especially in print.

I'm aware of the phenomenon of catch-phrases, words or clumps of words that catch on and become so common that no one notices them any more. The big one right now is "I'm like".

I challenge you to count the number of times each day that you hear "I'm like" (or "he's like", or "they're like," etc.) Everyone says this now, often several times in a sentence. Even Oprah and Katie Couric say it. Does anyone stop to think what it means?

"Like" means, well, either you like something, or you resemble it. "I'm like" seems to be saying, "I don't feel this way, but I feel something like it." It's all happening at a remove.

And don't get me started on "icon/iconic". It proliferates like a cancer. Maybe icon started with computers, who knows, but iconic (which for some reason reminds me of some sort of verbal ice cream cone) has long departed from its original meaning: a person or thing that is representative of an entire culture, a focal point for humanity. (It can also mean, in its original form, a religious object like a statue that becomes an object of veneration.)

Everything's iconic now. Pop singers are iconic. Pants are iconic (if they're Levis). I wince when I see it. Is it one of those words that people think makes them look intelligent if they use it? The worst, but only so far, was an item related to Sex and the City: cupcakes. Yes. Cupcakes are iconic. Or at least, a certain variety sold in New York are iconic.

Maybe some people or things are iconic, like Bogart and Bacall. But they only come along every so often, and usually aren't recognized until after they're dead.

So what's the point of all this? Shit, I got another lousy rejection the other day, and it has me smarting. And aching. I've already published two novels that I am very proud of, but neither one was a hot seller. Since 2005 I've written two more novels and a book of poetry. And I get brushed off everywhere. Agents won't look at me. Why? Maybe because I write in complete sentences! Cupcakes aren't iconic, and I'm not like anything, I am.

The casual mangling of language has become the norm, and if you're like me and care about how to put a sentence together, you're obsolete. Or so it seems right now, after the latest kick in the head has been delivered. I won't quote her exact words, or the Agent Police will get after me.

So I should maybe retitle my latest novel? What should I name the baby?

How's this: "I'm Like, Iconic, Cupcake."

The big rock candy mountain

It ain't been so sweet. But full of rocks, for sure.

When I was a kid, a little girl with a dirty shirt and the knees out of her jeans (or were the knees already out? These were passed down twice from two older brothers, and held together with a safety pin), I wanted nothing more than to burrow myself into a book.

A book with a cover already dusty from use, with the threads of the binding beginning to show through, with that musky smell paper used to take on (and how will we reproduce that smell on all those Kindle readers?). . . a book I wanted to literally dive into to escape the bleakness of my days.

Misty of Chincoteague, The Black Stallion, King of the Wind, all those splendid horses of the mind! And when I wasn't tearing along the beaches of Chincoteague hanging onto the Phantom's mane, there were the children's classics, so much more vivid and frightening than the Disney versions: Pinocchio's stern morality tale, and Bambi with its casual bloodshed and violence, as if to tell juvenile readers, "This, my children, is the way of the world."

It occurred to me, one magical morning, that Someone must have made these mysterious portals happen. Someone must have conjured them, or found them under a cabbage leaf or something. It took a while before I realized that someone must have actually written them, brought them into being.

And then, that was all I wanted to do - all I would ever want to do.

I wanted to make books happen.