Of mountains and mothers.

I shot this photo of Mount Rainier from the back of a Bainbridge Island ferry on Sunday morning.

I’ve been to Seattle about six or seven times since my first visit during a cross-country trip in 1994, and I’ve never forgotten how the locals talk about “The Mountain” (it’s capitalized that way in my head) with a mixture of reverence and familiarity. The weather – and locals’ psyches – seems to be measured by how clearly you can see The Mountain.

I spent six days in Seattle at the beginning of this month, and I can’t imagine six more perfect weather days in the Pacific Northwest, especially given that my friends who live there insist that summer warmth doesn’t truly arrive until July.

The Mountain was truly spectacular during my stay, and I don’t use that word lightly or often. I told the friend I was traveling with that we must have been “living right,” as some Southern relative used to say, to get such perfection.

One night, I got together with a book club friend who moved to Seattle grudgingly two years ago when her husband’s job took them there. Now, she said, she was struggling with the idea of moving back to North Carolina; she reeled off a list of things she loved about Seattle, naming most of the things I would expect (natural beauty, endless things to do, schools, attitudes, etc.).

She finished the list with The Mountain. “I have this sort of odd connection to it,” she said. “I can’t really explain it…”  She trailed off, seeming a little embarrassed.

But I understood, and I’d likely feel the same way.

I’ve been wanting to post this photo of The Mountain everywhere and was trying to figure out how to shoehorn it into this blog. I decided that Mother’s Day was just the right day to post it here, as my personal “Mountain” for 48-plus years has been my mom.

It may sound over-the-top hokey as metaphors go, but whether I can see her or not, knowing my mom is at the other end of a phone line or a road trip has given me the sort of strength and calm my Seattle transplant friend seems to draw from The Mountain.

Happy Mother’s Day, Mom.

Remembering joyful finish lines {in honor of 8-year-old Martin Richard and his family}

When I heard about Martin Richard, the 8-year-old boy who was killed by one of the Boston bomb blasts, the first thought that crossed my mind was that he may have been there to cheer on one of his parents.

As it turned out, that is exactly why Martin and his family (his mother and sister were gravely injured by the blast, but survived) were there – they were waiting to cheer his dad across the finish line.

This struck a chord with me because of my family’s recent joyful experiences cheering and being cheered across a finish line. It was hard to fathom such a happy milestone turning to horror as theirs did.

In the spirit of counting blessings and honoring the importance of finish line reunions (which we can take for granted most of the time, thankfully), and in honor of the Richard family, I wanted to share two short stories-via-snapshots of the two most joyful finish lines that have figured in my family’s history over the past few years.

Finish Line 1 [aka, 'You can teach a middle-aged dog new tricks']

Early one Saturday morning in November 2010, my daughter and I headed across town so I could check a huge item off of my Life Ambition List: Making my status as a  ”real”/bonafide runner official. (For me, this meant being someone who actually enjoys running, does it regularly and can run well enough to sign up/run races).

Since August, I had been slogging, sometimes painfully, through a great 5K training program called No Boundaries (you can try it, too; Fleet Feet Raleigh and New Balance offer it several times a year). I couldn’t believe I made it through the whole program without my lungs exploding – or without quitting. That morning, my fellow trainees and I would cap off our many training runs by running a race together: A charity 5K raising money for lung cancer research.

Here is the story through my then-9-year-old daughter’s eyes as she chronicled my first 5K:

My girl captures my race start…

… then snaps a photo of me coming into view at the end, with my training program running buddy just ahead of me and my Marine Corps barker right beside me.

… and she kept snapping as I passed by her and the rest of my cheering section.

… and finally, a friend managed to capture a photo of my biggest supporter as she snapped a photo of me crossing the finish line!

Afterward, I was as happy as if I had run a marathon, and my girl told me over and over how proud she was of me. She high-fived me for running the whole way without stopping to walk (I wasn’t sure I’d pull that off earlier that morning). She knew this program had been a long, hard road for her non-athletic mom.

Finish Line 2: My ‘Girl on the Run’

Several months later in April 2011, the tables were turned, and it was my daughter’s turn to run her first 5K as the culmination of an amazing, inspiring program called Girls on the Run (please take a minute and read more about GOTR here). Her dad was her running partner that day, and I was the photographer and cheerleader.

Capturing the official start, ready to look for my girl in the crowd…

Found her!
(I have blurred the faces of other kids in most of these photos if they’re looking directly into the camera; don’t think it’s my place to post recognizable photos of other parents’ kids.)

My favorite moment of the day: Girls who had finished made a welcome arch for their fellow runners as they approached the finish line.

Final sprint to the finish line…

A hug from one of her amazing Girls on the Run coaches …

During a team photo, my girl examined her medal with an awe no less intense than if she had won a gold medal at the Olympics.

One line: Flannery O’Connor

It’s been far too long since I read Flannery O’Connor, so I pulled a thick anthology out of my grandmother’s glass-front cabinet the other day and left it on the coffee table where I’d be more likely to pick it up.

Last night, I dove in, and this was the first line that stopped me in my tracks.

“Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him.”

 

Sidelined.

The veteran runners out there will understand this one all too well.

It’s been so many weeks since I went for a real run (i.e., outside on a trail) that I’ve lost count. After wrestling with knee pain and winning for the most part, I somehow ended up injuring my foot.

It’s clearly not a serious fracture; most likely, it’s tendonitis or a stress fracture (if I didn’t have freelancer-level health insurance, I might have tried to confirm that with some fancy diagnostics), but the prescription for a stress fracture is no running for weeks while it heals on its own.

And if there was ever a time I needed my go-to for blowing off steam, it’s now.

The whiner in me has a “Why me? Why now? Life is so unfair…” refrain running through my head every day.

But when my better instincts muscle in, I change my view.

It’s temporary.

There are plenty of other things I can do to exercise while I wait … and if I do that, I’ll be stronger and less susceptible to knee run knee problems when I start again.

It could be worse; I have too many friends with MS, for instance, who would politely tell me to shut up if they heard my whining.

Here’s to perspective.

Amy Hempel, on writing

Not so much a piece of advice as a question to keep in mind, which is the most basic of questions: Why are you telling me this? Someone out there will be asking, and you better have a very compelling answer, or reason.

There are people who have been raised by loving parents to believe that the world awaits their every thought and sentence, and I’m not one of them. So I respond to that. Is this essential?

The question might be, Is this something only you can say—or, only you can say it this way? Is this going to make anyone’s life better, or make anyone’s day better? And I don’t mean the writer’s day.

~ Wise words from an interview with Amy Hempel that I came across online years ago

#writerspace ~ Hemingway’s Key West studio

‘At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling…’

Many years ago, I stumbled across an archive of essays written for the New York Times by a series of revered writers; I printed one by Annie Dillard that I especially loved and put it in a writing notebook, where I have returned to it many times.

I made a decision in the final days of 2012 to finally polish up my children’s novel manuscript and see if it has ‘legs.’ Coming across the essay again on the first “work day” of 2013 somehow seems meant to be.

A few excerpts of the Dillard essay:

The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.

 ***

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

 ***

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

 ***

Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Books-served-up-on-a-cake-plate, 2012 Holiday Edition

Last year, I took a decades-old cake plate passed on to me by my mother and piled it high with beautiful books with red or red-and-white spines in celebration of the holidays; on my first try, I realized that this was too much of a good thing, and I added in a few books with striking black, white or gray-hued spines for contrast.

The books-on-a-cake-plate display is becoming a bookish decorating tradition along with our  picture-books-as-art decor. (During the rest of the year, the color scheme is all over the board.)

So which red & white books made the cake plate this year?  And which contrast books? Take a look.

 

While there are a couple of encore appearances, I tried to put together a new and different lineup for 2012. The stack I pulled from my shelves this year includes grownup novels, kids’ literature, nonfiction … books from years back and books from the past year or so … wildly popular current bestsellers (some I’ve read and others that are on my to-be-read list) as well as flying-under-the-radar titles.

I will know I’m taking this a little too seriously when I begin noting whether the books I’m browsing through at Quail Ridge Books & Music happen to have a lovely red spine.

(One of these days, I’ll snap the photo at just the right time of day to avoid glare and show off each book equally well.)

Working on my form.

[Caballo said] … if I really wanted to understand the Raramuri, I should have been there when this 95-year-old man came hiking 25 miles over the mountain. 

Know why he could do it? Because no one ever told him he couldn’t. No one told him he oughta be off dying somewhere in an old age home. You live up to your own expectations, man. 

 ~ From Born to Run, by Christopher McDougall

‘my’ trail

2012 could be billed as the ‘Year of Character-Building,’ to put it nicely – a long slog of a year.

For one friend after another, 2012 brought awful things. Life or death scenarios for children. Painful divorce. Suicide. Addictions that bottomed out.

The unrelenting stretch of bad news for my friends was hard to take even as a bystander.

My 2012 was a breeze in comparison, but it was an intense year of English-major-running-a-business stresses and solo parenting, which became something far more mind-boggling in August when my daughter started sixth grade. I’m still wrapping my head around how to manage my second go-round with middle school – this one as Counselor/Grownup in Charge/Homework Administrator and Overlord. I think it may be more all-consuming than when I was the sixth-grader riding a bus across town to the brand-new “pod” middle school I helped break in back  in the day.

All of which is to say I’m glad to see the backside of 2012. (Or, as one friend, whose 2012 began with her child’s cancer diagnosis, posted today: ‘You are cordially invited to BITE ME, 2012.’)

I’m grateful to have ended the year with a solo staycation that has cleared my head and left me with a sense of confidence and calm about 2013. On my first staycation day, I was thinking back on the year, and an image popped into my head out of the blue. No idea what prompted it, but it was right on the money.

It was a mostly silhouetted, rough-sketched figure, head down, shoulders squared, wincing and leaning into a headwind, all buttoned up. All resignation and dread. The posture was of someone bracing for what was coming – resigned to surviving it (with no thought of trying to get something out of it).

I think this was my stance in 2012 – or to put it in running-speak, my form. A year is a long time to live your life leaning into a headwind, so I hope to shake it off and begin 2013 with my grandmother’s famed upright posture (purposeful/determined).

And yet relaxed, too – as a slow, usually gasping amateur runner with a deep curiosity about what makes “real” runners tick, I’m soaking up Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run as I head into 2013. Reading about the Raramuri runners is reinforcing the idea I’ve seen elsewhere that the ideal running form involves relaxed limbs … that the most pleasurable running isn’t marked by taut muscles and pounding speed but by a feeling of floating along.

So in 2013, I aspire to run toward adventures and opportunities – instead of just bracing for what may be thrown my way – and to move through the good, the bad and the ugly (of life, business, Middle-School Administration, etc.) with relaxed limbs and mind.

Meanwhile, I’m going to get ready with my final run of 2012 on a trail lined with bare but beautiful trees and brilliant winter skies.

Happy new year.

Postscript: I’m thankful to look back at my friends’ rough year and realize how many of those terrible scenarios played out with out-and-out happy endings and/or awe-inspiring doses of grace (what could rightly be called ‘amazing grace’). 

 

‘Maybe stories are just data with a soul.’

In 25 years of writing for a wildly varying assortment of for-profit and non-profit organizations, I’ve seen the same battle over perception playing out over and over again.

Nearly everywhere, I’ve encountered people who were convinced that if their story was told … well, as a story, with anecdotes or examples and in a conversational style, it would instantly lose credibility. Years apart, colleagues in two very different nonprofits expressed their deep-seated fear that an overhaul of their publication to a more magazine-like format would turn it into People. One mention of the word “magazine,” and all they could conjure up was a celebrity glossy. They were genuinely alarmed and not easily convinced.

These and other intelligent, highly educated colleagues over the years would hold tight to their academic or scientific or industry jargon, their way-down-in-the-weeds, eye-glazing detail and their “just-the-facts, ma’am” approach as credentials of a sort. One academic protested that his work didn’t need examples or more approachable language and explanations because there were only a few people in the world who followed his area of specialty, and they didn’t care about that sort of thing.

If there has been a common thread in my career, it has been this uphill battle to convince people that taking something complex and making it colorful and engaging is a good thing … that everyone, no matter how brilliant or credentialed, likes to be entertained when they read.

I’ve seen stellar short- and long-form writing (from ad campaigns to magazine articles) numbed-down after too many people in too many meetings gave in to this kind of insecurity – to the notion that it is more important to impress than it is to engage.

It’s always heartening to see businesses and nonprofits where the truly creative stuff makes it out into the world, unfiltered by “the committee” – where the creatives are allowed to live up to their job description. (After all, it does seem like a colossal waste of money to hire people with skills you have no intention of using.)

Postscript:

I watched a TED talk by Brene Brown a few weeks after writing this, and I was struck by the story she told at the beginning. An event planner was struggling with how to describe Brown in promoting an upcoming speaking engagement. She thought calling Brown a researcher would lead people to assume that her presentation would be boring, so she suggested calling her a “storyteller.” Brown recoiled at the description. “The academic, insecure part of me was like, ‘What?’” But she came around to the idea. “Maybe,” she thought, “stories are just data with a soul.” She told the woman to bill her as a researcher-storyteller – at which point the event planner laughed and told Brown there was no such thing. “…Stories are just data with a soul” is one of my favorite quotations now.

(“re-blogging” this post from my former business web site) 

Word-crazed. (alternate title: ‘the day I berated a vacuum cleaner’)

In 1972, when I had just started second grade, my 48-year-old father went to the emergency room with chest pain on the evening of Labor Day, had a massive heart attack in the hospital Tuesday and died early the next morning.

What this tends to drill into your subconscious at age 7 is the message that big, terrible, unpredictable things may be lurking around the next corner.

At age 47, that message hasn’t gone away (it tends to be bolstered over time as you see more big, terrible things happen to other people you love), but age and parenthood have thankfully brought me an alternative perspective.

(The star of this tale.)

These days, thinking of both my 48-year-old father (with whom I shared fewer than eight years) and my 11-year-old daughter proves to be a regular, powerful kick in the pants about how stupid it is to spend any significant amount of time on worry and fear.

But I haven’t exactly reached the fully enlightened stage in this cerebral battle, which brings me to the vacuuming story.

***

At my house, the home of two writer/readers, we love words, and we have a lot of magnetic poetry tiles hanging around. They’re supposed to live on the refrigerator downstairs or a metal bulletin board upstairs, but over time, they’ve somehow ended up scattered all over the house.

So whenever I set out on a vacuuming frenzy (one of those rare occasions when I feel ambitious enough to vacuum under furniture and all sorts of unseen spots where visitors would never notice dust), it’s not unusual to come across a tiny magnetic word or two in unusual places.

During my most recent frenzy,  I spotted a tile wedged in between the slats of a basket and pried it out, doing a double-take when I saw what it was.

“Fear” had become stuck in the basket where we keep our games … those things you do for  ”fun.”

I laughed at the irony, put the tiny white tile aside and turned the vacuum cleaner back on.

A minute later, I inadvertently sucked “fear” up into the vacuum.

Horrified, I turned the vacuum off.

“You can’t take my ‘fear’!” I nearly shrieked at the machine, immediately relieved no one was around for that unhinged moment.

Realizing how nutty it all was, I pulled the canister open, carried the nearly full bag out in the back yard and poked a letter opener around in the dusty innards until I recovered my “fear.”

Really.

***

A psychologist or therapist could obviously have a field day with this story.

I don’t have to knock myself out to come up with the obvious armchair psychologist analysis: I clearly need to do just a little more work on that “fear of the unknown” problem.

My other analysis of the Vacuum Cleaner Incident is more rooted in who I am – writer, editor, lifelong journal keeper – than in my  psychological junk.

Words are powerful for me.

… I keep a list of favorite words.

… I’m not very good at meditation and breathing exercises, but when I go for a run when I’m stressed out or busy, I’ve gotten in the habit of concentrating on good words as I breathe in and bad ones as I breathe out (‘fear’ is a big one on the exhaling list).

… And I’m very picky/proprietary about our magnetic poetry tiles; the words that really speak to me are the ones that make their way into nonsensical, semi-racy or inspiring sentences. The ones that bore me become outcasts, pushed down into the word ghetto at the bottom of the refrigerator door.

So I think that crazed, visceral reaction was partly the result of feeling a certain horror at seeing that small but forceful word – one that’s obviously deeply embedded in my life’s vocabulary – being taken away from me in such a literal way.

***

I’ve thought about sticking “fear” back in the bottom of the game basket, where it could take on a more laidback life … Fear of losing one’s empire in Monopoly. Fear of getting sent back to ‘home base’ in Trouble over and over again, just when you have your last peg ready to go into the home base row. And so on. Much more doable fears than the ones that tend to scroll through your head on sleepless nights.

But I think I’ll put it back into circulation on the refrigerator and see what poetic things I can do with “fear” to lessen its magnetism.