Lately, when one of my daughters physically mauls or maims the other – be it in a blameless bunkbed accident or a purposeful fit of rage – the hurter ends up crying harder than the hurtee.

These aren’t tears for fear of consequence ‘though I’m familiar with those, too. (I remember wailing after my sister as she ran toward home to tell about the big kids unjustly clobbering the little ones in a snowball fight.) Nothin’ like the sorrow of being badly busted. We’ve seen our fair share of that kind of ‘remorse’ around here, too.

But these tears of late? They’re genuinely pained distress signals, the awful clarity that comes with the caption “I-can’t-believe-I’ve-hurt-my-sister.” And as sad as it is to witness, I find some solace in the palpable human empathy between them.

There’s debate about whether we all come equipped with an empathic heart or whether it needs teaching, and I think I’ll let the social scientists hash that one out. But one thing I know for certain is that books are the perfect proving ground. There is safety in feeling deeply for the folks we read about; it’s a risk-free way to love and worry, grieve and celebrate. So we do – with less reserve than we might in stickier, more personal situations – and, as a result, we come out the other side with more practiced hearts.

I remember way back, tucking into my parents’ bed for another chapter of Little House, only to be put on hold as the reader, my mother, stopped to cry – for Mary, for Laura, for the bulldog. We’d stare and nudge and sometimes giggle as she gathered herself and began again. 

I’d stopped the nudging and the giggles by the time I read National Velvet, Deenie, Misty of Chincotegue, Anne Frank. The list could run waist deep, I assure you.

Later, when I met my future husband, one of our first important synchronicities was the discovery that we’d both wept over Dan and Little Ann in Where the Red Fern Grows.

What I know now – what I learned in my mother’s bed – is that crying (or laughing) over books is a way of saying, “I’m in tune with the human condition, with the state of the birds and the bees, with this writer and all of her readers. I am in tune with you (daughter, lover, student, son).”

What an affirmation.

So, on that note, I offer up a sinfully short list of some of the good laughs and cries around our house lately:

Tearjerkers

Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery – We were on an airplane when Matthew Cuthbert died and my god, they almost had to drop the oxygen masks for us.

Ruby’s Wish, by Shirin Yim – I’m not going to give away the punch but it’s tender and requires a couple of tissues, to be sure.

Togo, by Robert J. Blake – Did you know the Iditarod sled race commemorates a treacherous serum run made during a diphtheria epidemic in Alaska? Me neither. This is just one of the myriad dog stories out there that’ll get you straight between the eyes.

Miss Lady Bird’s Wildflowers, by Kathi Appelt – That part where a young LBJ sends Ladybird a love-letter and she is “dazzled”? Golly.

When Jessie Came Across the Sea, by Amy Hest – Toil and troubles, true love, a good grandmother and a happy ending. What else do you need?

Gutbusters

Mr. Popper’s Penguins, by Richard Atwater and Florence Atwater – This book about a housepainter and his penguins is hilarious. But don’t take my word for it. Read it. Aloud.

At the Hotel Larry, by Daniel Pinkwater and Jill Pinkwater – Utterly absurd. I literally could not catch my breath for laughing the first time I read one of the Larry books.

Judy and the Volcano, by Wayne Harris – The teacher’s name is “Mrs. Be-the-best-you-can.” Need I say more?

Double Whammies

I can’t help it. Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and all of Kevin Henkes’ picture books make me mist up and, a moment later, laugh out loud, every single time. Praises be!

So, what’re you reading???

…in the life of a book.

A SOCK IS A POCKET FOR YOUR TOES: A POCKET BOOK (illustrated by the amazing Robin Preiss Glasser, published by HarperCollins) has been on the shelves since 2004.

I delight in delivering it to babies, reading it to school kids, signing a stack for generous grandmamas.

Rather than dwelling on the fact that this book really, really needs a sibling (and I’ve got a neat little stack of eggs… errr, manuscripts… just aching to be put between covers), I thought I’d celebrate the highlights of this book, this year:

SOCK is a 2006-2007 Children’s Crown Gallery finalist, along with the twangy BUDDY: THE STORY OF BUDDY HOLLY by Anne Bustard, the lovely WHEN YOU WERE BORN by Dianna Hutts Aston and a bunch of other sweet reads. A very nice tip of the hat indeed.

The book earned back its advance this year – a neat little caper that means I am no longer in arrears to the venerable Harper Collins. (AND that I will get a tuppence every six months or so – a pointed prod to get my other manuscripts in the post, pronto.)

Last spring, I partnered with creative whiz JJ Langston to do a cooking class for kids based on the book. Think pita pockets, fruit tarts, fortune cookies. We greeted the young chefs at Gina’s Kitchen (aka Cookabilities) with bookmarks and baking soda. Trés fun.

In July, I spoke at the monthly meeting of Austin’s SCBWI chapter. I rattled on about the joy of school visits – using my Pocket Presentation as Defense Exhibit #1. What a great day! I learned as much as I lent, and got all sorts of warm fuzzies from local literary luminaries.

I took the book to the little burg of Odem, Texas, in September, as the featured author at their first-ever Children’s Literature Festival. The book-loving folks of Odem had raised a pile of money to build themselves a library, and it was a joy to spend the day there with the Odem Library Board and all the pre-kindergartners in town, reading and rifling through my pockets.

Illustrator Extrordinaire Robin Preiss Glasser was all over the NY Times Best-Seller list this year – not with SOCK, but who cares?!! She could illustrate a toaster manual and make people swoon in wonder. Her latest big splashes are FANCY NANCY by Jane O’Connor and OUR 50 STATES by, ahem, Lynn Cheney.

The wildly productive and generous Cynthia Leitich Smith has invited me to do an author’s interview for her kid lit site. I’m honored, and psyched to reflect and expound. OK, so this technically falls under the heading of 2007 rather than 2006 but what better way to close out last year’s diary.

Moving forward…

ON YOUR MARK:

Inadvertently reinforce procrastinative habits by stumbling upon a Great Idea while surfing the web.

Have two glasses of wine in honor of the G.I.

Fantasize about winning the Newbery or a Pulitzer or both.

Mull over G.I. for a few more days, looking for a good reason not to write it after all.

Clean out silverware drawer.

Consider the merits and/or contraindications of writing a book without caffeine. Drink a lot of expensive decaf coffee drinks during this deep philosophical inquiry.

Admit that you are powerless in the face of the G.I.

Surrender.

Have two more glasses of wine.

Clean out desk drawer, under the influence.

GET SET:

Go to library for research materials. Come home with a lot of cute books to read to the kids.

Set up coffee dates with other writers who know all about wine, silverware and procrastination.

Spend a whole day reading a baby name book and toying with the idea of naming the protagonist Tigress.

Realize that Tigress rhymes with digress and that the storyline has veered off course before it’s even been committed to paper.

Dream, with vivid historical accuracy, about being a nurse during World War I. Realize that it’s easier being a writer than being a nurse.

Open up a whole new document. Stare at the blank white screen.

Do not get up to get a glass of wine or a cup of coffee. Even decaf.

GO:

“Ruth tried to keep her chin up. Literally, tilted toward the top of the stairs as she headed to bed. This is her job, her mother’d said, here at home, with Father off at war. To keep her chin up. Ruth tried, but tears pooled cooly in the wells of her cheeks and she finally dropped her head to let them fall.”

OK, one cup of coffee. But don’t touch the bloody silverware…

It is stunning, the dervish-like recyclable energy that is a child.

I mean, look, I’m no slouch. I stay up late, get up early and generally know how to shake it. There’s precious little time spent eating bon-bons in half-recline on the chaise lounge.

That said, my daughters are tuned to a higher pitch entirely. So driven are they to move that nearly everything on their Christmas wish lists had wheels. Adding Santa’s contributions to what we already had, we now lay claim to bikes, scooters, roller blades, roller shoes, roller skates and a funky little contraption called The Flying Turtle. And nothing gathers dust.

This doesn’t make for entirely restful parenting. One of our girls is long and gangly and capable of tripping herself up, and the other moves through her days at mock speed with an apparently limitless pain threshold. The wild one makes my dad so nervous that he’d like to see her don protective gear before breakfast and stay armored until bathtime each night. Come to think of it, a helmet in the tub might be a good idea, too.

My parents were with us at Christmastime, witness to a lot of movement, and plucky participants in an ungodly bit of it themselves. If we weren’t rolling, we were running. If we weren’t skating, we were climbing. And somehow, on the off moments, crafts were crafted, board games strategized and well-rehearsed variety shows pulled off.

Mom and Dad spent two nights at a hotel and the girls devoted their visits to the glass elevators that were “fancier and faster than the Plaza’s” (nevermind that this was an Embassy Suites).

Is it any wonder that the drive-through lane at Starbucks is host to more than a few gasping mamas in mini-vans?

So we went away together – my husband and I, our kids and their grandparents – to a stone cabin on the Medina River, for a few days of hill hiking, dam building and deer watching. And, just our luck, the road was unpaved so wheeled footware was deemed temporarily obsolete.

While there, on one uncharacteristically mellow, stocking-footed evening by the fire, Mom pulled out some old audio tapes – from when our girls were toddlers and, thirty-some years earlier, my sister and I. Funny treasures, these – sweet croaky little voices lacking linguistically correct s’s and r’s. Off-key renditions of Twinkle, Twinkle and Happy Birthday, dramatic re-tellings of A Day in the Life of a Preschooler.

We were enraptured, all of us, listening to these compelling little strangers. And that was the odd part – my daughters were just as foreign to me as my own child-self, just as distant and unfamiliar. Merely a few dozen months ago, I embodied those voices like heartbeats and now they belong to a tape machine, an ancient and rickety technology itself. If we don’t capture them as MP3s while we can, they’ll be gone for good.

Looking over at my mom and dad listening to me at age five, I see them swallow over the same lump in their throats, the fleeting movement of their children. And here I sit, almost 40, nostalgic for my own babes already.

Now, about that protective gear…

Yesterday afternoon – a chill in the air and the year tightening to its final knot – we rambled across the 1st Street Bridge under a tinkling latticework of handmade bells. The bells hung from simple jute, and shone, like the heavy water below, in the late brassy light. A rower slid by. Ducks rasped in the grasses near shore. My husband lifted our littlest high above his head so she could strike a strand with her gloved hand.

We’d begun the ringing in of New Year.

·

I’d been leaning into this day all autumn, through grief and overwhelm and illness. The usual fresh start of the school year sputtered early – I’d been overzealous in committing my time, and between teaching three classes and parenting, I’d penned myself in. Sometimes, in the early, early dark – on the way to meet my running partner on Town Lake – I’d think, “now is when I ought to write.”

In October I fell behind on work when we traveled north for my grandmother’s funeral and, later, fell behind on grieving when I went to bed for days with a cold gone wrong.

Robbery, always robbery, from one piece of my life for another.

·

Stepping off the bridge into the usually busy intersection of South 1st and Cesar Chavez, we were enfolded by hundreds of skeins of yarn, all being twisted, pulled, tied and tossed over a little grove of trees.

“Is this a peace rally?” one of the girls asked. And it was. A peace rally with nobody raging or ranting or using a megaphone. Without a roll call of the dead. Minus the burning effigies. This was Austin’s New Year’s Eve party, celebrating imagination… offering a tangible way to mark the passage of time… bringing people together with mindful and creative intent. The city becoming canvas, stage, gallery, page. Revelers becoming artists. The old year becoming new.

We joined in the collective web-weaving and later, wrote wishes to add to a circular sculpture in front of City Hall. Already hanging: “I wish my birds weren’t mean” and “Better grades in math,” alongside “A healthy baby now” right next to “No baby now, please.”

“I wish we all spent more time outdoors,” I printed. Our five-year-old added, “I wish people would love each other.”

·

When my grandparents were alive, they hosted a rollicking New Year’s house party each year. All their best friends would come to stay for two or three days of food and cards and jokes and walks on the frozen lake out front. As they aged, they whittled the party down to a single day. Later, as their numbers dwindled, it evolved into a dinner party and, finally, lunch. Still, until the bitter end, those still alive gathered to eat German sauerbraten, sing Auld Lang Syne and toss back a cup or two of kindness as they looked ahead.

As dusk fell last night, we found ourselves lying tummy-down on the pavement, adding our own bits of color to a long ribbon of chalk art that, by the end, crossed the river from north to south. My third eye next to one daughter’s peace sign and her dad’s ouroboro; down the way a bit, a portrait, a waterfall, initials and a huge hopeful 2007, dusty confetti everywhere.

We roused ourselves in time to catch a little street-corner marimba music and revel in a long, hilarious, mardi gras-like parade – complete with stilts and fire juggling, bagpipes and jazz, and a rag-tag bicycle corps disguised as giant ants, preying mantises and butterflies. One group, donning pink hats, capes, socks and tutus, spread Love.

·

I have yet to resolve, in ink or blood, to DO anything this year, but here’s some of what last year taught me. I oughtta say yes and no to the right things. No to anything that requires laborious nighttime meetings; yes to anything that requires cards or dice, my kids and my love, and can be played on the living room floor. I ought not to rob from myself. If it’s time to run or write, sleep or grieve, everything else can wait. I ought to wear a little pink and invite all my best friends over for sauerbraten. Or salmon. Or something.

·

Cold and bleary-eyed walking home, we still had the juice to help spread a few of the hundreds of tea lights that had been tucked into origami stars around the grassy shore. The city skyline hung, a shimmery backdrop. Look, there’s a movie of a living eyeball on the water tower! And there’s a hip hop troupe taking a moment of silence for James Brown. And there go the fireworks. And there we go home. I take my blue cheese and crackers and a glass of champagne to the hot bath. It’s only 8:30 at night but boy oh man, it’s a new year already. Cheers.

Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All….

When you’re devoted – head and heart – to absorbing the cultures of the world, it is damn hard being a non-Jew during Hanukah. At least that’s what our elder daughter thought. So, last Thursday, we insinuated ourselves into a friend’s celebration. Our mishpacha and theirs, together.
(That means “whole family.” Pretty fancy Yiddish, hunh?)

Here’s a little taste of the other lessons we came home with:

1. The candelabrum shedding light on Hanukah is called a chanukiah. A traditional menorah, it turns out, bears just seven branches instead of the necessary nine.

2. Adam Sandler’s Hanukah Song reaches heights of near-holy hilarity when listened to ‘round a laptop under the glow of candlelight.

3. Hebrew voices ‘round the piano reach heights of near holy. Period. Actually, strike the near.

4. Pink champagne tastes waaaay better than it did in high-school.

5. “Tater-totish” (copyright Robin Chotzinoff 2006) is an adjective of praise for the softest and most delectable latkes around.

6. Hanukah may be a ‘lesser holiday’ for Jews, but it does celebrate a pretty awesome victory by a few small guys over The Man, so what’s not to love?

7. Like so many other holidays, the deep pleasures of Hanukah rest in good friends and family breaking bread together — or potato pancakes as the case may be. What good fortune.

Shalom, y’all.

This week, rescuers on Mount Hood gave up hope that anyone from a missing climbing party might be found alive. I can’t imagine the gut wrench it must take to stop looking – even when all logic says you ought to.

I was mid-way through my teens when I realized that not everyone in the world strove to summit peaks and climb ice walls with picks and crampons. Growing up in the Rockies meant knowing a certain type of folk, attracted to the siren-call of steep. Our neighbors and teachers, babysitters and busdrivers had come looking for Big, More and Fresh. And they lived to tell about it – mostly.

Most adventurers have some pretty scary scrapes, some great stories and a day job. But the danger is real, and not an insignificant part of the thrill. As kids, we eavesdropped on worrisome calls about avalanches and wind sheers and inclement weather up high. We knew the heroes – ski patrolmen, search and rescue folks, and docs – and we listened breathlessly to bawdy wakes in our living room when, in the end, things didn’t go as planned.

Later, at college in the flatlands of Wisconsin, I met a man (from the flatlands of Wisconsin) who possessed some recessive mountaineering gene gone awry. It was, I’m sure, what attracted me. And it was what killed him in a New Zealand avalanche a few years later. In my grief, I was fatalistic. These are the people I am bound to know.

I’ve climbed more than a few peaks in my day, but I’m cautious (which is just a dignified way of saying chicken). On fine days, with clear skies and a good map, there’s almost nothing I’d rather do than push upward, burning lungs be damned. To scrabble through scree and over boulders, to rest near icy streams, to witness the raw enormity of a mountain. But risk is not one of my governing organs. Once, near the top of a fourteener, I watched an approaching electric storm pull my sister’s hair on end. We were back below tree level before the first drop fell. Mine is a lust, but not an overriding passion.

What I think I understand about the people who’ve made it – or almost, or not quite – is that their passion gives them something the rest of us can’t know. A tangible knowedge of the earth’s beauty and her danger. A complex sense of power and vulnerability, of thrill and meditation. A pure and perfect high. It’s something that I, for one, have been known to envy.

Blessings on Kelly James, Brian Hall and Nikko Cooke and their families. And blessings of gratitude for the brave and thrilling people I am bound to know.

My sister-in-law’s been nearly a week without power, thanks to a nasty windstorm up in Seattle. When we spoke yesterday, she and her clan were on a mission – seeking a cooked breakfast and a re-charge for her cell phone. Later, off to a matinee to get warm.

This is a hearth-loving homeschool mama with a big dog and a vigorous boy. It’s been tough, there’s no doubt.

But in the midst of my sympathetic murmurings, she interrupts me with songs of praise for her neighbors. They’d been spilling out of doors, gathering in the streets, checking on one another…

“It’s been really good for us,” she said.

And I’m reminded of an autumn, eight years back, when flash flooding washed us from our home, along with many others on our street. Within a day, we were crying in each other’s muddy garages, sharing cinnamon rolls and insurance woes. A couple months later – water receded and sheetrock re-hung – we were a changed community. Before, we’d shared a mail route and the occasional stick of butter. Now, we were friends, companions, family.

Odd to think that one needs backyard fences swept away or windows blown out by gale-force storms to realize who we live amongst.

These days, we all seem to spend more time emailing or phone-calling from our cars than chatting with the folks next door. There are myriad excuses, many of them reasonable at first glance: We are busy. So are they. Streets aren’t safe for crossing. Everyone needs a little downtime (or privacy, or space). We need fences for our dogs. We need fences for our kids. Maybe after we clean up/fix up/add on/remodel. And (my personal favorite) THEY (capital T-H-E-Y) are strangers. Well, duh. We all start out that way.

But then, one day, we’re not. Our children venture into each other’s yards, we help lift something heavy from the hatchback of a car, we happen upon someone laughing or swearing or weeping OUTSIDE, for all the world to see. Or, that someone is us. And almost in spite of ourselves, we begin the wrapping up of others into our hearts.

“Good fences make good neighbors” made sense, back in the day. There were herds to keep track of and crops to keep safe. But in our tidy little urban and suburban lives, good fences do nothing more than keep us apart from those whose daily presence should be a stable comfort. I say bring on the wind and rain. Blow open the doors and windows. See who’s home next door.