Redux for Debut: When the Moon Is Gibbous and Waxing

The opportunity to repeat a past post couldn't have come at a better time. I just got line edits for my novel, and the publisher wants them returned this week, so I don't have time to write a brand new post. (Yes, I'm a slow writer. You probably suspected that, since my posts usually come in barely under the wire.) So what better post to repeat than the first page of said novel? 

When Natalie recorded the final reading for the blood she had drawn from her guinea pigs that afternoon and looked up from her meticulous notes, she realized how quiet the lab was. No wonder. The clock over the door read 11:30. Once again she’d lost herself in her research so completely she’d stayed far past the building’s official closing time. She sighed. If she didn’t leave soon, the janitors would be knocking on the door to chase her out. They got a little testy when students interfered with their work.

She quickly gathered all the slides she had prepared and cataloged them for later study in case she found something she wanted to revisit. When she slipped into her denim jacket and walked out of the lab into the dim, silent hall, the hands on the clock were nearly touching twelve.

As Natalie stepped out of the building, the moist south wind clutched at her jeans and the long braid of her hair, making her struggle for balance. Dead leaves skittered around her feet, then escaped into the darkness across the parking lot. She glanced up and shivered. The full moon always made her anxious. When she was a child, her grandmother sometimes sat up with her until she finally drifted off to sleep—often well after midnight.

            Natalie's eyes misted over. Grammy had died six months ago, and Natalie felt foolish still getting weepy at every thought of her. But Grammy had been Natalie’s only family, and her sudden death left Natalie feeling very alone.

            The feeling of aloneness hovered over Natalie as she walked toward the ‘78 Omni at the far end of the back parking lot. The ten-year-old Plymouth was the only car left. Back here, the full moon's silver light was lost in blacktop, leaving only swarthy ponds created by lights in widely spaced medians.

            Then the feeling of aloneness was gone, replaced by an eerie presence of evil behind her and to the right near a clump of trees. Fear tightened her stomach.

            Natalie walked faster. She glanced back over her shoulder. You're being silly. It’s just the full moon. But her heart continued to pound, and gooseflesh crawled up her thighs. Absorbed in her fear, she stumbled over a pile of damp leaves. The musty smell nearly made her gag. Light glinted off little patches of moisture on the blacktop. She glanced back again.

            Two men had stepped out of the trees and were following her across the parking lot. She gasped and started to run. Get to the car. Just a few seconds. That’s all I need. But now they, too, were running. She could hear their breathing as they drew closer. She reached for the door handle.

            The car was locked. Frantically she tried to open it, but the keys slipped from her shaking hand. As the crash of their fall reverberated in her skull, she smelled the men's excitement and knew they were reaching for her. She sobbed.           

            Then her fear grew cold, and colder, until it became anger and turned to heat that ran through her body like fire, and she realized she had nothing to fear as she turned to meet her attackers.

When the Moon Is Gibbous and Waxing by Angela Parson Myers is scheduled to be electronically published about the middle of next month by Etopia Press.

Now That I'm Not Trying to Write About Home

I‘m sitting at my dining room table, which has somehow morphed into an office (we eat here only on special occasions), spending more time looking out the big glass doors to the deck than I am writing. The skies are overcast, and the wind is spinning the CDs our neighbor strung up to keep deer out of his garden. I’ve given up writing a blog on “home” because another Sunday has brought another subject, and I still can’t decide what “home” means to me.

I actually started thinking about this shortly after my husband and I retired and he brought up the possibility of moving “home,” meaning the area where we were reared. (We grew up not 10 miles from one another.) I told him I’d miss him.

The house where he grew up no longer stands, yet he feels some kind of deep connection to the land. I do not. Many times I’ve driven past the house where I spent most of my childhood (photo left) and asked myself what I’d do if it was put on the market now that I’m no longer required to leave my house to work. I don’t think I’d feel the need to act.

I can’t help but wonder if the vagabond nature of my very early life caused me to grow such shallow roots. I spent more time on trains than on terra firma the first couple of years, then lived in rented houses until after I started kindergarten. My husband was brought home after he was born to the same house where he and I were married twenty years later.

What does he feel that I lack? I think the concept of “home” must be of a magical place where you feel you belong and are at peace. The house I live in now (photo left) is the fourteenth place my husband and I have lived since we married. It’s a humble but comfortable house with a good vibe, and I like to come back to it after I’ve been away. But it lacks that magic, that peace. I’ve felt that only one place in my life—at the old resort in the Missouri Ozarks where my family sometimes spent long weekends.

And that, my friends, is a blog for another day.

They Say It Skips a Generation

You can fill in the “it” blank with any number of things. Let’s use—oh, say—dancing.

My mother, I’m told, was a heck of a jitterbug dancer as a teenager. My younger daughter took every kind of dance class she could find and excelled in all of them. Guess where that leaves me?

Yep. Middle generation. Two left feet.

Back in the dark ages when I was in middle school (they called it junior high back then) ballroom dancing was part of the PE curriculum. The only requirement was that I learn to move my feet according to pages the teacher handed out. On the pages were pictures of feet connected by dotted lines with numbers showing position one, position two, etc. I can close my eyes and still see those patterns. What I had trouble with were the numbers. This led to some interesting moves on my part and some very unhappy, wounded partners.

There was also this thing about leading that I just didn’t get. If we both memorized those pictures, why would one person have to lead? And why did they call it leading when the “leader” usually was actually pushing. And, by the way, what’s with the leader being the guy, anyway? Why didn’t we at least take turns? That seemed fair, though I knew without a doubt we’d both do much better if girls led. Eventually I learned, though, and developed enough grace to earn a firm C on my report card.

I justified my clumsiness by telling myself I just took after my dad, who had never danced a day in his life. Then, as he and my mother neared retirement age, she finally talked him into taking ballroom dance lessons. My memory of my father from my childhood was of him in khakis and ankle-high work boots, resisting dance classes with every bone in his body. Now in his 50s, he bought dress shoes with leather soles to slide over wood and brightly colored dress clothes to go dancing. He got so good, in fact, that other couples would stand aside to watch him and my ex-jitterbugging mother sweep over the floor to the tune of “Dance Across Texas,” which became “their” song.  I was orphaned, left-feet-wise.

Still, I wasn’t really bothered. I hadn’t needed to dance so far and probably never would. Then, as I approached middle age and had given birth to two kids, I started putting on weight. I knew it was time to put aside my distaste for sweat and find that life-long exercise program I had so carefully ignored to this point. And the studio where my daughter took dance was offering belly dancing…oops…make that “Middle Eastern tribal dance” lessons. Sounded like fun, and at least nobody had to lead.

We learned hip movements first: vertical figure 8, horizontal figure 8, around the world… No problem. I could even roll my stomach and shimmy. I’d finally found a form of dance I could do! Then we learned arm movements. Nothing too complicated: arms in kind of a hula position, arms in front, click those little finger cymbals. Cool!

Ok, now move the hips and arms at the same time... Say what? The lessons ended and I still could dance with my hips or dance with my arms, but I could not dance with both at the same time. For years I looked back at that experience with some bemusement. An anomaly, surely. After all, I can pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time—even rub my head and pat my stomach. Although—that is just hands…

Then, a year or two ago, I tried my hand at tai-chi….

Yeah, it definitely skips a generation.

My Mother's Mirrors

When my mother started talking about “that family in the next room,” I knew we had a problem. The “next room” she was referring to was the mirrored closet door in her bedroom.

            My mother had Lewy body dementia. Lewy bodies are the abnormal round structures that are deposited in the brain when people have Parkinson’s disease. Although people with Lewy body dementia sometimes develop physical symptoms similar to Parkinson’s, the first symptom is usually an inability to separate reality from—what? Dreams? Misinterpretation of sensory stimuli? It’s the second most common type of progressive dementia after Alzheimer’s, yet most people have never heard of it.

            My mother had been diagnosed only a few months earlier because she called me while I was on my way home from church.

            “Where are you?”

            I could tell by the tone of her voice that something was wrong. “What’s going on?”

            “Well, I might need your help later. I just wanted to be sure you were around in case they didn’t leave.”

            “In case who didn’t leave?”

            “Oh, there’s a man and a woman. I guess she’s his wife. An older man—her father, I think. And some kids.”

            “What are they doing?”

            “Just looking around. They pick up stuff and look at it and put it back down. I asked them what they want, but they won’t talk to me.”

            I wasn’t more than fifteen minutes away, and I wasted no time getting to her condo.  When I arrived, she seemed a little frightened. Her eyes darted nervously around the room—which looked exactly as it had the last time I visited her—nobody there but her, and nothing out of place.

            “Did they leave?”

            “I don’t know where the others went, but the older man went into the bathroom. He must be sick, because it really stinks now.”

            The bathroom door was nearly closed. Half afraid of what I might find when I pushed it open, I was nevertheless emboldened by my inability to smell anything more than my mother’s favorite air freshener. Cautiously, I peeked in.

            The bathroom was empty.

            I spent the next two hours trying to convince my mother to go with me to the emergency room. Worst case, I feared she’d had a stroke; best case, I knew she’d suffered hallucinations several years ago when she had low blood sugar.

            And I did convince her. But four hours in the emergency room produced no explanation for her Sunday “visitors.” In fact, she was surprisingly healthy for her 84 years—her blood pressure and cholesterol were better than mine!

            “I must have dozed off and had a dream,” she said, by way of explanation.

            I didn’t buy it. She’d been awake when I arrived, yet she was convinced one of them was still around. And I discovered later that another of them, a boy about eight years old, stayed behind and kept her company. She named him Peanut. She enjoyed his company, but she wasn’t as sure about the rest of the family, especially the father. She didn’t trust him.

            When my brother-in-law and his family came to visit at Christmas, they covered the mirrors with pretty stick-on paper, thinking that maybe if she couldn’t see the reflections, she’d realize they were simply closet doors instead of a portal into another world where people lived that only she could see. 

             For a while, it seemed to work. But the hallucinations started being triggered by the bathroom mirrors, and they became more frightening. Because she seemed to fare fairly well during the day, I started spending the night with her, but soon realized she needed someone with her who was awake and alert 24 hours a day. The complex she lived in included a section for assisted living, so she moved from her condo into an apartment.

            There, too, she was convinced she was seeing people in another room through her mirrors, but they didn’t come into her quarters as often as they had. For a time, she would buzz for help or walk down to the dining room and help the staff fold napkins if she became frightened at night. Then one afternoon she called me to come get her because she wanted “to go home.” I found her outside the building, waiting for me at the curb. Usually that wasn’t a problem. Residents came and went as they pleased, and she had often met me outside when we were going out to eat, which we did at least a couple of times a week. But this time she was outside because my father, who had died three years ago, was working in the attic, and he and his crew were making so much noise it was giving her a headache. She wanted to go home, meaning my childhood home, which they had left when I started college. If she had started out to try to find it before I’d arrived, she could easily have wound up on a busy highway. We had to move her into the memory unit.

            The memory unit had fewer mirrors. Although she had fewer visits from the family—even Peanut was absent—she started having visits from relatives: my niece of 15 years earlier, a cousin of 30 years earlier. They always needed her help—help she was unable to give. Then one night she was convinced that she was a visitor in someone’s home, and while the attendant stepped out to let her change into her pajamas, she decided to shower in order to free up the bathroom—her private bathroom—for those who needed to shower in the morning. Unattended, she flooded the bathroom floor, then slipped and fell when she stepped out. Her spine, like chalk from osteoporosis, crumbled, leaving her nearly paralyzed below the waist.

            Her room in the nursing home had no mirrors, and she had no invisible visitors during the week she was there. The day she died, she was more alert and lucid than she had been for months. Then she just drifted away, staring into space. At almost exactly midnight, a week after her 86th birthday, she took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and just—stopped.

            Going through her things, which had accumulated in my garage as she moved to progressively smaller quarters, I found a small looking glass set in a carved wooden frame. It now lies on the vanity in my bathroom.

The Strangest Christmas Gift

I’ve tried all week to come up with a list for the blog assignment. Sure, I make lists. I have a grocery list in the little notebook I carry in my purse: milk, toilet tissue.... I have a list of tasks to accomplish in my day planner: write another scene for my next book, critique chapters for my writers’ groups… Yeah, I make lists, but they’re about as entertaining as—well—reading a grocery list.  So what have I done that would make a list anybody would want to read?

Nothing.

For some reason, though, my thoughts kept returning to a Christmas party I attended while I was working for the Fortune 500 corporation.  I was seated at table with the vice president of the division, his wife, my supervisor and her husband, who was a factory manager, and a department manager and his wife. I was the lowest person on the totem pole at that table, there only because my job had high visibility in the division and in the community.

Needless to say, I sat quietly and listened to the conversation—something I’m quite good at because I’m a devoted introvert. Somehow, that conversation drifted to listing the strangest Christmas gifts we’d ever received. I can’t remember all the gifts that were added to the list. I was just trying to keep a low profile because, really, what could I say that would top a Porche?

But then all faces turned to me.

And I just blurted out the gift my husband had given me last Christmas.

“An atlatl and three spears.”

I won.

Furnace Troubles

Troubles was a dog of completely nondescript appearance. Nothing about his floppy ears, bobbed tail or pudgy body alerted an observer that here was an animal with a remarkable ability to act dumb.

     Yet it was an act. And he was so good at it that even we, his family, fell for it. Well, the adults did. My sister and I knew better all along. For example, the three of us—me, my sister and Troubles—liked to play a game in which my sister and I ran and he tried to catch us by the heels, causing us to trip and skid across the polished wooden floor of our living room. (My mom wasn't as fond of this game as we were.)

     Troubles knew that he had to grab our shoes, not our heels above our shoes, or he'd hurt us.  We learned that he knew this and would yell ouch to get him to let go. And he always did! He was smart, but he wasn't willing to take the chance that he might have a little Achilles tendon in his teeth. When we laughed because we'd fooled him, he'd sulk until we scratched his ears and shared our penny candy with him.

     It was a simple case of revenge that finally tipped off Mom and Dad. He was a housedog—a people house dog, that is. Outside he had a doghouse that he refused to use. If we left him out and it happened to rain, he'd sulk for days. 

     But in our house we had a utility room with a concrete floor. Even if we were gone longer than we intended to be, and he had an accident, he couldn't do any damage.

     He didn't have accidents. He'd wait all day—even 10 or12 hours—to avoid using the papers we so conscientiously put down for him.

     Then one day, when he was a middle-aged dog, he must have had enough. Maybe we'd been gone too often or stayed too long. Whatever it was he was definitely pissed off. (No pun intended.) And in that indestructible room, he found the one thing he could do that would really, REALLY get back at us.

     He peed on the furnace filter.

     We came home to an entire house that reeked of dog urine.

     Of course, my parents thought it was just an unfortunate accident—the first time. After about the third time he did it, even they caught on. And yes, they were upset. Very upset.

     But my father, though not so nondescript as the dog, was no dummy either. And he was determined that no dog was going to outsmart him. Chuckling as he worked, he connected one end of a wire to the metal honeycomb that held the filter and the other end to a battery. "This'll teach even a dumb dog like you a lesson,” he informed the dog.

     Troubles watched intently. And the next time we left home for the day, leaving Troubles in the utility room... Did you guess? Troubles did NOT pee on the furnace filter.

     In fact, he NEVER DID pee on the furnace filter for all the months my dad left it wired to the battery. The day after my frustrated father took his invention apart and we left home—yup, you guessed it. Troubles peed on the furnace filter.

     My dad stood in our highly perfumed house with his hands on his hips and said, very seriously, to the dog, "OK, you win this round. But if you don't cut it out NOW, you're going to find yourself out in the ice and snow next time we have to leave town."

     And Troubles never peed on the furnace filter again.

Time--Running Out of Somedays

I was listening to one of my favorite songs the other day….

Yeah, one of my favorite songs is sung by a frog. You got a problem with that?

So I was enjoying the part about following your dreams and how you hear destiny calling your name when I heard it:

Someday I’ll find it—

The rainbow connection—

The lovers,

The dreamers,

And me.

And it hit me. Crap! I’m running out of somedays!

No, I’m not ill or anything—I’m just getting old. (I refuse to accept that I’m old now, but I will admit I’m progressing in that direction.)

Not sure what made me so introspective that day, but it got me thinking about how many people run out of time before they realize any of their dreams. Of course, as the rock star said, our dreams change as time passes, but more often we just give up on them—convince ourselves that we’d really do this than that anyway. But when we abandon our dreams like worn out refrigerators, they (the dreams, not the refrigerators, though the thought of being haunted by a refrigerator is amusing in a surreal way) come back to haunt us like bittersweet nightmares.

When I was a child, our mother used to entertain my sister and me by drawing pictures of our favorite comic book characters. She had real talent. Only months before she died, my mother mentioned how she’d once dreamed of becoming an interior decorator, but had instead married young and decorated only her own homes. Did she regret it? Not really. But the dream never died, and she wondered “What if?” all her life. I think many people suffer that same fate. Is it because we choose dreams that are too far above us? Perhaps we just aren’t willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve them. Or do we just drift into other things and let our somedays play out without ever moving toward our goals?

When I took my brief detour into melancholy, I had already realized several of the dreams I’d listed when I graduated from high school:

1.     Be first in family to earn a college degree—check.

2.     Become a staff writer for a newspaper—check.

3.     Work for a large company writing and editing their publications—check.

4.     Write novels—check.

5.     Become a published author—oops.

That last one eluded me. But since I’ve cut about 40,000 words, my first novel appears to be on track for publication. I’ve finished a novella, started two more novels, and have plots for three more novellas.

Ok, so I worked for a regional newspaper instead of a national one, for a division of that large company instead of headquarters, and I didn’t get a big advance on my novel. I still feel a little like that country song, “Why Me Lord?” because I can’t think of one thing I’ve done that makes me deserve even to come close to fulfilling so many of my dreams.

Now I find that I need another dream to inspire me through the rest (may they be many) of my somedays. But I did have a Number 6 that I haven’t told you about, and I kind of suspect it’ll be enough to keep me writing as long as I can sit at a laptop—or even croak words into a mike. What do you think?

           

6.     Win a Hugo. *

(*author’s note: Please be aware that the author realizes that her chances of winning any award, much less a Hugo, for her novel are nil to none. The author will be ecstatic if a few people admit they enjoyed reading it. ( - : )