My Witch Baby

My eldest daughter is fifteen. She is the queen of our family. She makes healthy choices. She gets all A's in all Honors and Advanced Placement classes. She cooks for us, takes care of her little sister. She takes care of everything. She is careful about the things she does and says. She knows how to have fun, but she's definitely an eat-your-broccoli-before-your-ice-cream kind of person. I wish I was more like her.

My youngest is a different kind of girl. She is still smart, studious, polite to strangers, helpful, kind, irreverent and silly, all just like her sister. But not just like her sister.

I call my youngest Witch Baby because she reminds me of Francesca Lia Block's character Witch Baby in the Love is a Dangerous Angel series. Her hair is crazy. She makes it crazy. She slept last night with a tiny wet ponytail in her bangs so she could wake up with a cowlick. It gets so tangled in the back that wild faeries could be living in it and you would never know.

Witch Baby is seven. On a drive today her sister tried to discourage us from going to McDonald's for dinner. Witchy ripped the headrest off the top of her seat.

"You don't deserve a headrest," the Baby said. "You're not the boss."

"Your sister is the queen of the family," I said.

"She is not. Nobody is the queen of the family. Well, maybe Daddy is," the Baby said.

After dropping off her sister, Witch Baby climbed into the front. When Gimme Shelter came on the stereo I explained about Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. I thought it worth noting that Kieth Richards and I have the same birthday.

"Are you the same age as Keith Richards?" she asked.

"No, he's about twenty five years older than me," I said.

"Woah," the Baby said. "So he's ninety?"

I changed the song. We sang at the top of our lungs all the way home. The Beekeeper. Tiny Dancer. Ring of Fire. Witch Baby knows all the words.

Flo rida's song came on. You know the one. "Oh hot damn / this is my jam."

"Woah," the Baby said. "This song requires lipstick."

She went into my purse and took out a shimmery pink. She applied it in a mirror. Someone swerved in front of us on the freeway.

"Christ," I said.

"Don't use the Lord's name in vain Mommy," the Baby said.

"I can if I want. I'm grown."

"No you can't," the Baby said. "That's like saying a person you really really love's name in a really mad way. It's not nice."

She's right about that of course. I turned up the music so we could sing along. It warms up our voices so that we can sing in church tomorrow.

Army Dreamers

Steven, one of my former advisory sons, came by my classroom to visit after school today. He graduated high school four months ago.

"I'm thinking of the armed forces," he said.

Steven is an accomplished soccer player and football kicker. He landed some poetic field goals in his football career. I cheered him from the sidelines while he did it.

This is a young man on his own. He has no support besides what he can rustle up for himself.

School was never Steven's thing. He hates the thought of going to college. He graduated on time but sitting in those desks all day was torture. Through high school he displayed a certain physical courage and a lack of fear of pain that freaked me out. He did jumping off of stuff tricks a lot. He hurtled himself through space a lot.

I yelled at Steven a lot.

"Why the armed forces?" I asked.

"Because I don't know else what to do," he said.

My pacifist heart yells at Steven not to go into the service. He might end up in war. He might come back broken into pieces, one way or the other.

My rational heart yells at Steven that the service is a great idea. At least the service will give him some direction, a place to live, regular income, some discipline, some skills, some training, some physical activity to do besides diving head first from one picnic table to another, aiming for the space between the bench and the table. Yes, he did this.

But I hate the thought of Steven or any young person getting skilled in killing, training for war.

"I'm confused," he said.

"Confusion is sacred at this time of your life," I said.

Steven blinked, clearly remembering why we always fought.

"Look," he said. "I can't even find a job right now."

So we made a list of options. He came up with Army and Army Reserves. I suggested National Guard and California Conservation Corps. We looked them up online and found some phone numbers for recruiters.

Meanwhile, a current advisee and the poetry club hung out in my room. My new advisee is a musician and wanted to show me pictures of his guitars on his phone. He loves guitars. He sings like an angel. My poetry club sat in a circle on the other side of the room and shared poems and wrote poems and talked about their next slam when they would perform their poems.

I'm thinking, will I be advising the musician to consider calling a recruiter in two years when he is out of high school? Is there a poet in that poetry circle who won't have a place to stay or a job to work when he graduates?

Steven finished up with the recruiting information on my computer, gave me a hug and left.

I wish for circuses, traveling shows, damn it even The Rockettes as an alternative for Steven. He kicks like an angel. Surely that must be good for something.

Young people who have limited resources have limited options. Maybe the Army isn't the worst thing for Steven. Then I look at the thousands and thousands dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and think maybe it is.

The world outside my classroom is not angels and guitars and poetry and hugs.

I hate that about the world.

New Love

I love this stage of something new. Everything is pure and exciting. The entire world is a full sack of possibility. Every tree, every cloud looks extra sharp and pretty. Everything is possible. Everything is perfect and just how I want it to be.

I have not yet written a word.

I love myself when I am with a new project. As the writer of this book, I am thirty pounds lighter with muscled arms and a flat stomach. I wear black tank tops over loose trousers. My hair is long and perfectly white. I look smart on my book jacket.

My time is my own.

I give witty interviews to Terri Gross on NPR. I rule book signings in my old neighborhoods with a beatific smile. My 25th high school reunion will be the bomb. “I saw you on the Morning Show,” everyone will say, sorry they didn’t invite me to snort cocaine with them in junior year (I would have said no anyway).

The climactic scene in the desert is perfect. The imagery and the metaphor are perfectly interwoven to create a pathos that is not too pathetic, just perfect. When people ask about it I lower my eyes and say it just came out of me that way like an egg just perfect.

Other writers will wish they were me.

I’ll get a letter from an unsuccessful writer: I have written six novels, and no agents want me. I’m overworked in a stressful job that I need to pay my bills. All I want to do is write. All I do in my spare time is write. What can I do?

In my bare feet I will walk across the hardwood floors of the million dollar Berkeley home I just bought with my latest Hollywood movie option dough. I will look out the window at the Bay. I will send a message through the wire.

Keep writing, I will say. As if you could stop.

Dead Battery

Stephen King said in an interview that teaching is not a good job for writers. He said that teaching is like having battery cables attached to your brain all day long.

This is the truest thing ever.

Literary Tuesday - It's Kind of a Funny Story

So I just this second finished It's Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini. They made a movie out of it, which I haven't seen. My friend Tricia gave it to me to read and it was good.

It's Kind of a Funny Story will help me be a better teacher to my high school students. I teach AP and Honors, and many of those kids are depressed, just like this character. In fact, the author wrote it in the month after he was discharged from a hospital psych ward for suicidal depression. The story puts you right in the character's head. It is full of the best description of depression that I've ever read.

Here's a line I like: "It's when people compliment you that you're in trouble. That means that they expect you to keep it up." So true. Simple, but true. Good thing to remember when you are working with teenagers.

Another thing of merit about Vizzini's novel is that like Melissa Marr, he is honest about human sexuality. He manages to be both respectful of his characters and truthful about how important sex is to them. Not too many authors achieve this balance, especially in Young Adult.

The character's voice was absolutely consistent and developed throughout the story. I always respect that in a writer, the ability to embody a voice.

I've written two books from the POV of teenage boys, and they are the only two that I believe in unequivocally. Whenever I reread a part of one of those books, I always wonder who wrote it. It isn't me at all. It's like I channeled the spirit of a boy. I get along with real teenage boys really well too. Maybe I was a teenage boy in another life. It would explain a lot.

Now back to Anna Karenina.