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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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October 1, 2021: Bonnie Tsui

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Bonnie Tsui calls her 2020 narrative nonfiction book Why We Swim, “a love letter to water and to her lifelong relationship with the water and swimming.” Bonnie is a journalist who’s passionate about swimming, and I discovered her writing thanks to the series Readings by Writers hosted by Writing by Writers. During her reading and conversation, she said she was “way more interested in other people’s stories than my own.”

In Why We Swim, Bonnie tells the story of the Bajau nomads, the water-dwelling Moken, and the Icelandic swimmer Guðlaugur Friðþórsson. She tells the story of the samurai swimmer Midori Ishbiki and the story of Kim Chambers, who after a fall had to learn to walk again. There are stories of teams and practices and Olympic swimming. From the story of Dara Torres, here’s an excerpt that highlights Bonnie’s wonderful storytelling style.

Competition kept coaxing her back to the edge of the precipice, as Edgar Allen Poe called it. This time, the precipice was lane four.

Why We Swim is divided into five sections: survival, well-being, community, competition, and flow. About the last section, Bonnie writes, “Swimming is about the mind, too. To find rhythm in the water is to discover a new way of being in the world.”

But we do get a little of Bonnie in Why We Swim, enough to understand her deep connection to the water and to hold together a book on the stories of others who also love the water. Bonnie was born in Queens and raised on Long Island. Her parents met in a swimming pool in Hong Kong. Everyone in their family of four swam—until they were no longer a family. Bonnie is the only one who kept swimming.

I swam through the divorce. I swam through college. I swam from Alcatraz, on a dare. I swam as rehab from knee surgery. I swam across a lake at my wedding…Three decades of swimming, of chasing equilibrium, have kept my head firmly above water.

In the first chapter, Bonnie dives for abalone and surfaces with a six-pounder. “In my backyard later that day, I clean, trim, and pound the meat tender—yep, with a rock—cook it up over a flame, and feed my family of four a meal I’ve prepared entirely with my own hands and breath and body.”

Why We Swim is one of TIME magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 and is currently being translated into eight languages, but it’s not even Bonnie’s most recent book. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about big-wave women surfers, was published a few months ago, in May 2021.

Before Why We Swim, Bonnie’s book American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods won the 2009-2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. She has won awards for travel journalism and food journalism. She helped to launch F&B: Voices from the Kitchen, a storytelling project from La Cocina that shares stories from cooks and kitchens that are less often heard. Most recently, she received a 2021 Mesa Refuge writing residency and was selected for the 2021 Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellowship. Bonnie’s writing can be found in The New York Times, and Bonnie herself can be found at Pop-Up Magazine and other live storytelling events. These days, Bonnie lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Come back on OCTOBER 1st to read how BONNIE TSUI spends her days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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September 1, 2021: Greg Changnon

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Greg Changnon is a writer who is also a superhero reader. Currently, he’s a book-club facilitator for over thirty Atlanta-area book clubs. Which means he helps the clubs choose books, and then he reads the books, prepares discussion notes, and steers the conversations so all readers have a meaningful experience. It makes me want to be him AND be a reader in one of those groups. Ironically, I met Greg not in Georgia where we both live, but in Positano, Italy over a decade ago when we both attended the Sirenland Writers Conference.

For years, Greg wrote reviews and guides for the “Reading Room” column of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Here’s an excerpt from his November 2005 discussion of Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys. 

Is it possible that Spider and Fat Charlie represent two sides of a single person? What does Neil Gaiman seem to be saying about the duality of human nature? Possessing a mixture of wisdom and rebellion, the trickster figure, common to a variety of primal religions, represents the combination of good and bad. If Fat Charlie is the obedient and passive brother, Spider exists as the more spirited and conniving doppelganger.

Greg was featured in the 2013 September/October issue of Poets & Writers magazine for his innovative work infusing theater and playwriting into his classroom at The Paideia Schools in Atlanta where he taught for fifteen years.

Changnon, who graduated from SFSU with an MFA in fiction in 1977, started writing plays for his students a few years ago when, looking for a play they could work on, he realized that most of the scripts that would be appropriate for his students forced them to play adults. At the time, he was teaching Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451, so he wrote a loose dramatic adaptation that transformed Bradbury’s adult characters into teenage ones his students could comfortably portray. The result was so successful that he decided to write a new play for his students every year.

In Encore Atlanta, Julie Bookman mentions Greg’s 2015 play and goes into great detail about Slur, his 2016 play.

In 2015, the classes read William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and created a piece called Only Us, about unsupervised students stuck in a school building during a “snowpocalypse.” Slur began with George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, about an Englishman’s efforts to turn an unrefined Cockney flower seller into a duchess.

Come back on SEPTEMBER 1st to read how GREG CHANGNON spends his days.

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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May 1, 2021: Jeff G. Peters

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Jeff Peters is a writer who is passionate about so much. He’s the most extroverted introvert I’ve ever met. And it’s difficult to find a photo of him where he’s not surrounded by friends he loves. Whatever Jeff does, he does with his whole heart.

You will also enjoy his piece on eclectic London-based artists, Gilbert and George.

Gilbert & George call their art, sculptures, though they may not appear in the manner you might think. The artists have presented themselves as living sculptures in museums, galleries, pubs, public streets and a host of other locales. So they aren’t traditional sculptures forever frozen in time, but instead appear as vibrant, real three dimensional art.

Jeff was also a writer and producer of Run Across Cuba, which was released in 2017. Run Across Cuba follows Alexis Garcia as he runs more than a thousand miles from the eastern most tip to the western most end of Cuba. This journey takes Alexis back to Cuba, which he had fled by kayak twenty-three years earlier. As part of the documentary, Marlene Guerra-Garcia interviewed people all across Cuba providing a window into the daily lives of the Cuban people, the power of the Cuban spirit, its natural beauty, and historical significance. It’s an inspiring story about hope, courage, and freedom.

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But these days, Jeff rarely has time to write as he is the owner of the magical independent bookstore East End Books Ptown where he curates a collection of books in print, ebooks, audiobooks, vinyl albums, really cool magazines and journals. I swear he’s read everything in the store. Jeff is also an enthusiastic board member of the Provincetown Film Society.

As if all that weren’t too much already, Jeff has recently started East End Literary Arts (EELA), a literary nonprofit that will publish East End Arts Literary Review, a select list of books, and hold an annual East End Literary Arts Book Festival. This project is so new the website is still under development. Here’s the mission statement:

To bring together readers and writers to create diverse communities, and to expose participants to new ideas and authors in order to inspire a life-long love of books and reading.

If you’re looking for a good cause or an independent bookstore to keep in business, please consider making a donation to East End Books Ptown.

And I want to leave you with this event, which is Jeff personified. He has organized a private literary salon to benefit the Provincetown Film Festival that will take place June 13th featuring Christopher Castellani and Matthew Lopez. And there are a few tickets still available!

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On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

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February 1, 2020: Emily Arnason Casey

Once while spending a rare weekend at the cabin when I was sixteen, my mom stood beside her bed in the loft, her back to me, spreading out the sheet. I walked up to fish a book out of my bag and find my swimsuit. She turned to me and said, “Sometimes, when I’m standing here, looking through the window at the dock and the lake, I forget where I am and it’s like for a second I’m a young mom again with small children.
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I know the feeling. We travel along the surface of time and then suddenly the layers give way and we are in another year, another body, another place. We’ve dipped down into a different layer on the geological map of life, and for a split second we really are the other self again. (9)

This excerpt is from Emily Arnason Casey’s Made Holy, her debut collection of essays from the University of Georgia Press. Throughout the book, just as here, Emily will take us in close for a scene and then float us out to stretch our hearts even more. “Now, as I run, story lifts its wild heart from the trees, stringed together on the wings of blackbirds, of berries, of dreams.” (178)

It’s true that these twenty essays tell the stories of Emily’s family and their struggles with addiction. “Even now, years into recovery, this disease rips apart my carefully stitched seams on certain days.” (39) But she doesn’t leave us there. Just as Emily does with the paragraphs above, she starts close in and lifts us up and out wide wide wide. And who wouldn’t want to follow her there.

Emily and I share obsessions–things, houses, self or selves, leaving, and the passing of time. And then I think, there might so much in these essays that each of us will find shared obsessions inside her sentences.

At the beginning of the book, Emily thinks of her grandmother’s old oak dresser, which is for sale, as a link between the women in the family. “How the objects in our life extend such meaning, I’ll never know, but the history of things gives joy.” (21) Sixty pages later, Emily revisits this theme in an essay devoted to the subject, where she is writing about her husband’s baseball cards. “Collecting wards off ending. His objects refuse to let the past slink away, to let childhood dim into remnants of something lost.” (84) In the last paragraph of this essay, this line. “Objects are the antithesis to letting go.” (88)

About her grandparents’ house in Minnesota, she writes, “I will not return again, and the house will fall to memory, to the unguarded parish of nostalgia, but the myth and story of it remains growing stronger with every year.” (32)

Early on, Emily writes about trying “to put together a solid self.” (11) Later, about her childhood, she goes deeper. “I started to divide. What was really me remained folded inward, a secret, different from the me I presented or let be observed.” (65) Still later, she writes, “But perhaps longing becomes a pleasure all its own, and we are merely an amalgamation of all our selves–all the girls we once were and the lands beloved.” (135) Which sent me in search of these words from earlier. “If nostalgia is the desire to return, to know again, to relive, longing carries the want for nostalgia over the thing that never was.” (109) This back and forth makes me think of my childhood self weaving a placemat with ribbons of paper, picking up the next strip and taking it over and under the others. It makes me think this book may have started out as twenty essays, but it turned into one.

About her move from Minnesota to Vermont, Emily worries. Maybe she is “living the wrong life,” but here is the thought that floats up. “I needed other landscapes. I needed the distance that myth is made of and a sky fortressed by mountains.” (139)

Not only has Emily written these gorgeous essays, but she had the brilliant idea to invite artists to be in conversation with one of them. “The Essay Exhibits” is a show of eight Vermont Artist’s work in conversation with “Beneath a Sky of Gunmetal Gray.” This exhibit is currently touring Vermont libraries. Next stop, Brandon Public Library, where there will be a Reading & Conversation on Tuesday February 11th. For more information and future dates and locations, please check her website.

Emily is a faculty member at the Community College of Vermont. Her work has been published in the Rumpus, the Normal School, upstreet, and other journals. We met at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Come back on FEBRUARY 1st to read how EMILY ARNASON CASEY spends her days.

I was born in 1957, the oldest of what would turn out to be five of us, and my mother needed help. In those days, she referred to Fanny as a maid. These days, I use the word housekeeper. But in the way that household help often is, Fanny was so much more. My favorite memory is our sitting on bar stools in the kitchen in 1966 waiting to find out if I would have a fourth sister or finally a brother.

In Maids, Abby Frucht‘s enchanting slim volume of 87 pages, we meet Ida and Della and Cynthia, and our childhood. From bullfrogs to brooms, from The Grenadines to Finland, from twin beds to the color of our skin, from then into the future and back again. The epigraph by Geoff Manaugh reads, “Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it.”

This book is described on the back as being “in poetic form,” but I have to say I never once thought poems. Perhaps it’s the prose writer in me, but Maids reads (and I’m not alone here) like a collection of linked stories.

Whatever you call it, the short pieces, long sentences, and lack of commas were a masterful choice, conjuring a different place and time–the blur of childhood and the haze of young adulthood. The lack of commas in particular slowed my reading, often causing me to reread a sentence, after which I’d come away with a jolt of meaning I’d missed the first time around.

[C]ommas bug her because they cause a divide between halves of a thought parts of a recollection…”

In this excerpt from “What Is/Was Her Name Again The Pretty Maid From Finland,” note how the lack of commas contributes to that feeling of wait a minute, is she saying what I think she’s saying.

For instance once Aunt Stella said but when I got back to the telephone the caller was gone. Of course he didn’t say he was he wouldn’t why would he but I could tell by the sound of his voice he was by how he sounded when he asked is the house still available he was but all I said was excuse me for just one minute I need to get this same meatloaf we’re eating out of the oven but when I got back he’d fled he had hung up the phone he was extremely polite he was very well spoken I felt/feel lousy about it except I have to imagine it’s best for the neighbors.

Abby uses details to conjure people. From “Mirrors,” “the bottle of Windex she carries and the dangling rag.” And details to conjure time periods. From “Sheets,” “Swanson’s foil trays.” She uses repetition of themes and threads and language–all of which contribute to the cohesiveness of this book but more than that they create the feel of those mysteries that start in childhood and linger into adulthood and even now make us wonder. From “Occasionally,” “Also is it wrong to hope to imagine Cynthia’s feelings?”

I will leave you with this line from “Broom,” where the puppy Truman is watching the nightly sweeping. “It’s the thing he believes she is tussling with not the thought behind the spine of it…” The end of this story is pure delight.

Thumbs up. Maids out today from Matter Press.

How We Spend Our Days: Abby Frucht

2015: Back in Provincetown, I sit still and stare at the water. The last couple of years, all my writing efforts have poured into this current novel and apparently all my self-worth as well. When I see people, they ask if they can buy one of my books yet. I lose my voice. I slip further away from me. The true me. What matters. I come up with a plan to recover myself. I will post #1truething about me every day for a year. When I’m in Georgia, I spend Wednesdays in Atlanta visiting and helping my parents. I begin to revise my novel again, but the one true thing project takes precedence and that feels right. In March I wake up one morning not believing my eyes–huge pieces of sea ice/ice floes/icebergs cover the Provincetown harbor. My hair is thinning and my nails are breaking. My endocrinologist says my numbers are fine. I cut my hair short and turn it red. Columbus is coming into its own with the longest urban whitewater course in the U.S. and a zipline across the Chattahoochee. For my birthday I step off the platform into nothingness and slide across a cable form Georgia to Alabama. Hillary Clinton will run for president. Bobby and Claire are expecting a baby! A couple of years ago I started going through our photos and digitalizing them. No real progress until now when I decide to tackle a year at a time and to finish by December. In addition to the generative workshop in Boulder in the spring and the Tomales Bay workshop in the fall, Writing by Writers adds a boot camp for completed manuscripts. We take our family beach trip to Sarasota for Memorial Day week. For our 30th anniversary, Cal and I take our first trip to the Caribbean, to Petit St. Vincent, where we raise and lower a flag outside our oceanside cottage if we need anything. Until now I’ve shelved every book I read. I begin to cull. I don’t feel that great. I don’t have my normal amount of energy, and when I get sick, it takes forever to get well. Perhaps it’s because I eat too much sugar and cheese and not enough vegetables. Cal and I go back to Canyon Ranch in July. I do a whole 30 but feel terrible the whole time. Throughout the year, there are visits from family, visits to family. In September, Baby Ro is born! And the nights become magical again–filled with little peeps and scratches, little fingers and toes. Only 34 books this year but so many that rise to the top: Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, Joy Castro’s Island of Bones, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Jeanette Winterson’s Lighthousekeeping, Miranda July’s The First Bad Man, Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (736 pages), Rebecca Solnit’s The Faraway Nearby. 72 songs on my Spotify playlist–Joshua Radin’s Worlds Apart, Lucius’s Wildewoman, O.A.R.’s Peace, The National’s Gospel, LP’s Into the Wild, Distant Cousins’ Fly Away, Andra Day’s Rise Up, and Nate Ruess’ Nothing Without Love… My agent sends my novel out to 4 more editors, and either something’s missing or it’s too literary or it’s too commercial or just nothing. 92 days in Provincetown.

2 days to 60

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She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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2013: One week a month in Provincetown. Space is opening all around me. I plan ahead, run the dates by Cal, and start booking flights. In January, I stay at The Watermark Inn. It’s closed. But I’ve stayed here before and it’s Provincetown. So just me in an entire inn. At first it’s a little spooky and then I love the darkness and the sound of nothing but wind and waves. I start a new novel. Blank pages everywhere. February is AWP in Boston and my last writing group in Provincetown. Even the universe is trying to help. I visit Jack, who’s living and working in LA. A week later, at the beginning of March, while Kathleen and her family are visiting, Jack calls to say his stomach hurts. Within hours I’m headed back to California–he’s having an emergency appendectomy. Kathleen is pregnant again. For my birthday, Cal comes to Provincetown for the first time–and he likes it too. Pam asks me to be on the board of the new nonprofit she’s creating with Karen Nelson–Writing by Writers. It feels like progress to be on the other side of a writing workshop. In May, the Days Cottages at the top of this blog, which are just outside Provincetown in Truro, open back up. I drag a mattress from one of the adorable tiny bedrooms into the den and plop it on top of the pull-out sofa so I can sleep looking at the water and the Pilgrim Monument. Cal and I go to Canyon Ranch–his 1st visit, my 14th. All my writing efforts pour into this new novel. No stories or essays. Very few blog posts. I start reading a Shakespeare play a month, beginning with Henry the IV, Part One, thought to be his first. Everybody comes home for a visit in July. Before Davidson starts back, I take Sam and his girlfriend to the beach. Lily is born in August, and just like I did with Mack, I spend a week helping Kathleen–doing one of my favorite things–getting up with the tiny baby in the middle of the night. The first Writing by Writers workshop takes place in October at Tomales Bay in California, and over the Golden Gate Bridge I drive again. On the way home I add a visit to Jack. Cal and I visit Sam in North Carolina and Bobby and Claire in Alabama. I’m now on some drug to prevent migraines, but when I head to Vermont to be on a panel–Building Communities of Readers and Writers–at the Brattleboro Literary Festival, there’s no doubt the drug is making me crazy. I hand the car keys to Pam and call the doctor, who tells me to stop taking it. My mother turns 80, and I fly to Sarasota for her birthday–taking 80 candy bars (each one numbered). Everybody comes home for Christmas. 35 books this year with the highlights being Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and Robin Black’s Life Drawing–each one short but sweet. My agent sends my third novel (no one except for me likes my second) to 11 editors, and some love it but no one enough. I’m spending more time helping my parents. By way of Spotify, not albums or CDs–I listen to Motopony’s King of Diamonds, Fleet Foxes’ Montezuma, Mumford & Sons’ Winter Winds. And a new thing to count–80 days in Provincetown.

4 days to 60

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She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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2011: In January, I finish up winter residency and fall under the spell of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. February is AWP in Washington, DC, where I spot Josh Ritter in the bar and actually talk to him. In March, Contrary reviews are due to me, I go to Fort Worth for Kathleen’s baby shower, and Cal and I go to New York. I apply for the position of Assistant Fiction Editor at Hunger Mountain, VCFA’s literary journal. I don’t get it, but they ask me to join the staff as Art + Life Co-Editor with Claire Guyton. Together we revitalize this section of the journal and give it a new name–The Writing Life. We spend so much time on Hunger Mountain, it’s crazy. In April, Sam and I go to Florida for his spring break, and a week later Jack comes home for his. In May, Mack is born and technically speaking that makes me a grandmother, but it will be years before I’m able to use that word about myself. I’m blown away by Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water. Bobby graduates from St. Andrews and moves to Birmingham to be with his girlfriend. In June it’s more reviews to edit, another residency, and another anniversary (#26). During my grad school years, Cal and I are apart for three new year’s eves and two anniversaries. The fall brings another writing group trip to Pam’s ranch, more reviews, the beginning of Jack’s senior year of college, and the beginning of Sam’s senior year of high school. I can almost see the end. On September 12th, my to do list includes reading over 5 pages of my novel–every day, 5 pages. In October, “Mackenzie,” a short short, is published in Gargoyle, Pam and I take a trip to Napa, and Steve Jobs dies. I’m now in the thick of preparing for my graduating residency–working on my lecture and my reading, which will be from the opening of my novel, Love Like This. In December I sign with an agent who finds me by way of my blog and who loves my first novel! Bobby and Claire get engaged! 34 books this year–20 novels, 3 books on the craft of writing, 3 story collections, 3 essay collections, 2 poetry, 2 nonfiction, and 1 memoir. I start using Spotify and listen to U2’s One, Otis Redding’s Try a Little Tenderness, and The Band Perry’s All Your Life.

6 days to 60

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She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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2008: I start the year excited about returning to Italy–this time to the Sirenland Writers Conference. It’s the perfect storm of writing conferences: Dani Shapiro plus Hannah Tinti of One Story plus Le Sirenuse–where Cal and I went on our honeymoon and where we returned on our 10th Anniversary and on our 15th. Dani’s husband Michael persuades me to join Facebook for access to the Sirenland group there, and just like that, I fall into Facebook. In February I begin my career as chauffeur to the stars by driving Richard Russo from Columbus, where he was speaking at the Library Foundation Dinner, to the Atlanta Airport. Then it’s off to Zion National Park in Utah for Pamfa–Pam’s writing group. In March my first novel is one of ten finalists in the Emory Goes Novel contest. I’m in Dani’s workshop at Sirenland, and I submit a section of novel #2. One day, as we climb 1700 old stone stairs to lunch, a sudden rain sends torrents of water cascading down beside us. And I’m not a foodie but oh, the food… Kathleen gets engaged–we will be adding another Sam to the family! Jack graduates. Cal and I see Allison Kraus and Robert Plant in concert at the outdoor amphitheater at Chastain Park in Atlanta. In August I go back to Pam’s ranch in Colorado. In the fall we settle Jack into Chapman University in Orange, CA, where he will study digital arts so he can create video games. And… we are down to one. Sam begins high school dreading four years of individual scrutiny. He continues the football thread as a backup quarterback. I start the countdown to no children at home. I also begin a conversation with Cal. I’m tired of living in Columbus. And I want to spend more time near water, at the beach I think. I write all the time–working on the new novel and on stories too. And I decide to start a blog. Within 24 hours of making the decision, it’s up and running. Which is unlike me. On September 29th, the stock market crashes–falling 777 points. I sit in my car at Publix listening to NPR as one bank after another fails. Amandah and I and the husbands hike the 23 miles of the Pine Mountain Trail not knowing it will be the last time. 51 books this year with so many highlights: Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather, Light in August by William Faulkner, and The Gathering by Anne Enright. In December “Into the Woods” is published in Storyglossia. When Coldplay sings Viva la Vida, I want to bounce up and down.

9 days to 60

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She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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2007: Turning 50 gives me pause but not much. To celebrate, I want to go somewhere I’ve never been before. Cal and I plan a trip to a private island in Belize where we have a one-room villa with walls that can disappear to make it all open air. In June the iPhone becomes available but only with AT&T. In Provincetown, Pam and I take a walk on the breakwater. I begin to shed things–shoes, jacket, backpack with computer… She will write about this in Contents May Have Shifted. Pam invites me to join her private writing group. We’ll meet twice a year–once at her ranch and once somewhere else–we’ll exchange manuscripts four times a year, and we’ll read a book a month and have an online chat. In August, Jack starts his senior year and Sam starts 8th grade. In September I go to Pam’s ranch, taking 40 pages from a new novel I’m working on. The other women are from all over, but I’m the only one from the east coast. We hike and eat and talk reading and writing. In October Cal and I visit Bobby in Scotland. Early one Saturday, Cal and Jack make a 36-hour trip to California to look at Chapman University. Football fever takes over as Brookstone wins game after game. Jack plays offense and defense, and in a state playoff game, in as a defensive end, he intercepts a pass and scores a touchdown. It surprises me how excited I am. For the only time in my life, I enter a scrapbooking store and spend more time than you can imagine making him a scrapbook. Cal and I listen to Alison Kraus and Robert Plant’s Raising Sand over and over again. Stick with Me Baby… On Christmas Day, when we arrive in Atlanta around noon as we usually do, instead of finding my mother and father in the kitchen, I find only their breakfast dishes. My parents are in the bedroom having coffee. Because my mother continues to drink coffee, I head to the kitchen to clear the counters, get out the warmers, heat up the ovens, find the paper plates. I put out the food as people bring it. Cal carves the turkey. My mother doesn’t say I’m done with the kitchen on Christmas–in fact she says nothing at all about her stopping and my taking over. It’s past time for my turn, but this is so weird. There are 29 of us–my parents, 5 children, 5 spouses, and 17 grandchildren–and we all show up for a late lunch on Christmas Day. 50 books this year, the highlight being Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life. In my car, the Dixie Chicks sing Wide Open Spaces…

10 days to 60

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She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

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