True Stories

My Sacramento writing group is a shape shifting organization. The latest configuration is led by my stalwart inspiration and fairy tale goddess friend Tricia. Our newest member is Rucha, gorgeous and talented West Twin of blogging fame. Both of these women can write and I’m not kidding. We meet a couple times a month at Tricia’s house where we drink tea and eat some wonderful thing Tricia made and talk about our work.  

(Pause #1 at this moment for a prayer of thanks for the friend who knows your tea type and makes it for you without asking.)

Today the first chapter of my latest book was on the block. Rucha and Tricia had swift criticism about the scene where a woman of an unclear age gets a man of unclear danger out of an unclear shower at an unclear homeless shelter.

The rest of the chapter flows, they said. It’s just the beginning that’s out of context, ambiguous and confusing. 

(Pause #2 to bow down to the friendship of intelligent women.)

The scene that I wrote where the very young woman is the only one in the homeless shelter with the courage to get the schizophrenic man out of the shower happened.  I was the volunteer. The sick man was the resident. Everyone was afraid of him but me.

The scene fails where it is written from memory and picks back up when pure fiction takes over. This is not the first time a critical reader has noted implausibility in a story that I have based on a true adventure of my own. 

In case I didn’t get the message this morning, later this afternoon the outstanding and ravishing Cynthia Reeser, editor of the literary magazine Prick of the Spindle, had a copyedit note for me on a story of mine that she has accepted for publication. 

The story features a seventeen-year-old college student and drug addict stranded at a bus station.  “She’s in college?” the comment reads.  “Need to adjust timeline.”

I really was a seventeen-year-old college student vagabond stranded at midnight at a bus station in a miserable part of a city far from home. My response to the edit: That character is nineteen now.  Timeline adjusted.

(Pause #3 for an interpretive dance of joy that Cynthia Reeser is paying attention to my work.)

When I write from true adventure I forget to think about my readers. The point of fiction is to tell a story not to write a letter to myself.

Remember the time when the homeless fellow reached for you in the steam? Remember when you were seventeen and riding the roads for love? 

Now I revise my novel with my readers in mind. I sand down every sentence, paying extra attention to the parts gleaned from life. It is in the true parts when I stray from truth. In revisions I take extra care to tell the beautiful lie that uncovers the thing I mean to say and tells the truth in a way only an untrue story can.

Tricia loves me this I know because the Tazo tells me so.

Stop Talking

"You're so interesting," my students said to me today.

"I'm not," I said. "Not compared to the person sitting next to you."

"You are," they said.  "You are the most interesting person in the school."

Only in the moment when perhaps I'll tell a story rather than opt for barreling through the curriculum objective I planned for the day am I interesting to my students.  I might tell the story of the time I got in a car wreck the night of my junior prom.  Or the time I stayed up all night with a tow truck driver I'd just met until we jumped a junkyard fence and stole an alternator for my car so I could get going again. Anything would be better than building a thesis statement telling how motif reveals theme in order to support a ten-page paper.  I mean yawn.

Most of the time when I decide to lecture, my students pretend to listen because they are well-mannered young adults.  Old children. But when I can I shut the hell up.  Let them do the talking, little bird.

One Sunday at Mass my youngest daughter disliked the priest.  A babbling type he was.  After too long of listening to his slightly insulting jibber jabber, Margaret took my hand and opened it.  She wrote STOP TALKING into my palm with her finger Helen Keller style.  She closed my hand and the priest stopped talking.  Just like that.  Maybe wherever he is the man still finds himself at a loss for words.  That would be awesome.  Let someone else stand up and do the talking for once. Maybe a little girl for once.

What is your story, I ask my students.  Write it down first.  Then open your mouth and talk. Shut me up entirely.  Make me obsolete. Your turn is now. 

Like Water

I don’t recognize myself in photos anymore.  My hair is gray and white.  My eyebrows need coloring in and my face needs makeup and even with these attentions my face washes out in a pale oval that could be pretty or could be ugly.

People never recognize me when we meet again after time has passed between us. Their eyes go muddy when I say hello. I’m always fatter or skinnier or have different hair or different style.  I’m a shape shifter.  If I ever had to go on the lam, no one would ever find me.

Today the parent of a student sent a photo of me that she took while I announced names for the junior ring ceremony.  My shirt is starched. I wear a peach blazer made of Irish linen.  My heels are high, my lipstick dark, but none of it matters as I am the color of a water glass. 

The older I get the more amorphous I become. A while ago a colleague of mine had a conversation with two of our students about our school's Black Student Union, of which I am the moderator. It's interesting that the moderator of our BSU is white, my colleague noted.

“Oh no that’s Mrs. Wanket,” the students said.  “She’s black.”

That’s happened to me before, especially with young people. I’ve also been Mexican.  Filipino.  White. It depends on who is looking at me.  Maybe I’m the color of a mirror.

My age switches around as well. Once a young woman with eyes for my husband asked if he and my daughter were brother and sister. She thought I was my husband’s mother. Last year a student said that I have a young soul. But just yesterday someone else asked if I would pretend to be his sick grandmother to get him out of rugby practice.

People always think I’ve gained weight.  People always think I’ve lost it.  Then they blink and look again.  No.  I’ve definitely gained it. But those wrists.  Maybe I should eat some pie.

It’s difficult to take a flattering picture of me. I look good only from certain angles.  I used to be best from the left, but these days it’s more the right. Take a photo and flattering or not, I’ll look different in a week anyway.

Maybe I’m wasted as a high school teacher.  Maybe I should try my hand at investigations. Stakeouts would be a cinch. Blending in with the surroundings would be no problem.

 Shape shifting is great for my writing. Two of my best novels are in the voices of teenage boys.  Disappearing is a powerful tool towards understanding another person's point of view.

In teaching I think about the water of the Tao that lies low and does not assert itself but seeks instead the lowest place. Lying low I can serve student learning needs to the individual boy and girl without asserting my own notions into a student's experience of the material. Students can then write their own thesis statements, fill journals with their own original creative ideas and when they are ready, tell the truest truth they can find within and through that story set themselves free.

Meanwhile I am on a quest for stronger lipstick. 

Fenix Drum and Dance Company

The first time I knew my daughter Margaret was inside me I was sitting in a theater in Oakland, surrounded by a wall of African drumming.  I had taken my parents and then seven-year-old daughter Ciara to a dramatic symposium of dancing and music of the African diaspora.  The first performance was a long parade of djembe and congas that began outside. The sound gradually increased until the marchers flowed down the aisles and onto the stage and it felt like we were in a room of drum, in a womb of drum. Like we were at the dawn of time and the end of time and beating along with the heartbeat of the universe.  Dramatic I know, but that was how it was.

And then there was inside of me a quiet beating back. I must have been about three weeks pregnant.  I didn't have any symptoms yet, of course.  But I knew.  I placed my hands on my belly. You’re there, I said.  Welcome to the drums.

When Margaret was an infant, my teacher DeLisa Branch-Nealy in Berkeley held her as we danced in class.  Margaret used to lie down and press her cheek to the floor to feel the drums.  When she began to walk she bounced up and down in perfect rhythm. Then we moved to Sacramento and left dance and drums behind.  Until this year.

Why have I waited so long to write about Fenix Drum and Dance?  It has been seven months from the first time my Margaret and I tried our first class.  Since then we've spent almost every Saturday night in the studio and performed in public twice. Now Margaret has decided to do the drum class too.  Her favorite is Djembe.  She wants one for Christmas.

Margaret has no fear in dancing and drumming. She jumps into the circle at the end of class for extemporaneous solo numbers.  She loves performing on stage.  Now she loves drums as well.  She sits in a circle among her classmates, mostly grown-ups, her face fixed in concentration as she learns to slap, bass, tone.  Last Saturday guest teacher Lansana Kouyate from Guinea taught the class a complex rhythm called Tiruba. She learned how to do the dance in the next hour.

When we go to the studio and enter the drum sound nothing matters but music.  Do you understand what that means? Nothing matters but music. That moment when we cross the threshold into the studio is the sweetest moment of my entire week. Anxiety is nothing.  It can’t even get through the door. Why haven't I written about this before? Because I wasn't ready yet.  Because it feels a lot like church.

Fenix Drum and Dance Company is run by Angela James and her daughter Olivia Yasmin James.  Check out the website here. They welcome beginners and have a beautiful way of making sure all ability levels have fun and are challenged at the same time.  You should come dance with us.  It's a bargain for all you get and you would like it.  Bring your son and daughter along too.

When we first started taking class I was looking for some exercise, something to share with my kid, a return to the uplift I remembered from African dance and music.  I never expected to receive such a quality education in dance and culture.  I never expected to meet so many new friends.

I am grateful to Fenix for bringing my daughter and me together again over drums. Now she begs me to take drum class with her.  She holds out her hands and says, Come on Mommy.  Welcome to the drums.

That's Margaret in the green head wrap. Thank you so much Miss Angela James for the photo.  

An Eight-Year-Old's Workout

I brought Margaret to the doc last week for a check up.

"How many minutes a day does your daughter exercise?" the check-in lady asked me.  Clipboard in hand.

"I don't know.  She's eight years old.  She plays."

"We suggest an hour a day." The check-in lady didn't want any of my lip. I conceded to an hour a day.  Sure.  My baby works out an hour a day. More or less.

On our way out I noticed signs for an obesity prevention workshop for the twelve and under crowd.  You could sign up your kid to spend an hour sitting around a table with a bunch of other kids while an adult talked about exercise.

It's easy for me to be snarky about an obesity workshop for kids because my kids are skinny.  We eat healthy foods most of the time but I'm not one of those no junk food moms.  Not by a looooooong mile. My daughters eat what they do want (within reason) and don't have to eat what they don't want.  It's a simple philosophy that costs me very little by way of parenting effort.

Still, that exercise question bothered me.  How many minutes a day does my little one exercise?  I didn't really know the answer.  I am her mother and I should know the answer to a basic health question.

So I decided to find out.  My husband and teenager are on a five-day backpacking excursion too strenuous for an eight-year-old, so it's just Margaret and me.  Hanging out.  Spending time.

I now know the answer to the exercise question.

On Saturday, we went to Yoga in the park for an hour.  I thought that would be enough exercise until dance class that night, but Margaret disagreed.  We had to go to the local public pool.  We have to go when they are open or else we'll be sad on days when they are closed, she reasoned.  So we went to the pool.  Margaret swam for two hours straight, practicing the butterfly stroke.  Which she kept making me demonstrate for her over and over so that she could see how to do it.  Mommy demonstrating.  Margaret practicing.  Demonstrate.  Practice.  Back and forth across the pool.

"I'm getting ready for the Olympics," she said.

We got home in time to dress for dance and go to the studio.  We take African dance together.  I thought she'd be too tired for a rigorous class, but no.  She practiced and danced like a crazy and then volunteered for a solo. So then I decided to do a solo.  It was a lot of dancing. 

For dinner she wanted McDonald's, so we went for a treat.  We can only go when her sister is out of the house because my teenager gives us such a hard time for eating fast food that it just isn't worth it.  Then we had to watch the Olympic trials before bed.  Margaret likes watching people exercise.

She had her post-Mass Sunday donut this morning, and then insisted on roller blading for two hours (the dog and I trailed after on foot in the flames of her wake). As I write this she's out in the living room jumping around and dance practicing while watching t.v.  In a minute she'll go play Dance Dance on our friend's Wii for an hour.  Or more.

Keeping up is hard to do.

Tomorrow she wants to skate more.  Maybe bike ride.  On Tuesday, she tells me she needs to go swimming again. She also needs to practice shooting baskets so she can be really really good next basketball season.  She needs to practice dance.  She needs to take long walks to practice for her own backpacking trip with her dad.  She needs to needs to needs to be moving.  All the time.

You want to know how many minutes a day Margaret exercises? A million minutes a day.  My daughter exercises a million minutes a day.

I should know.

I'm exhausted.