The National Book Festival

So there I was, standing with my friend Barbara amidst the crush of people on the National Mall. All of us straining to squeeze out of the rain and into the tents so we could hear authors speak of their craft, read from their work, and inspire with their words. Despite the rain, a light, straight-down kind of rain, and the long lines for food, toilets, and book sales, the National Book Festival of 2009 was a grand event.

The authors, too many to possibly see, represented every genre. We overheard snippets from Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Walter Mosley, and Nicholas Sparks as we wove among the book-reading masses. We were charmed by Jeannette Walls’ claim that she wrote her book imagining how a rich kid would someday read it and understand her life. We were inspired by Julia Alvarez’s fight to keep a Virginia school from banning her book and moved by Azar Nafisi's passion for becoming an American citizen. But being writers, and therefore observers of life, we were often distracted by the antics of those around us.

Having dodged elbows and umbrellas to make it to the first row of SRO at the John Irving presentation, we found ourselves directly behind two women breastfeeding their tiny infants. Given that Irving was discussing fatherhood, perhaps it was appropriate, but the people coughing down our necks only made me think of one thing: swine flu. Why would any mother bring a new baby into such a crowd? She was desperate to hear good writing? Or she was desperate to get out of the house?

We found seats before Marilynne Robinson began to read, but it was hard to concentrate when the couple in front of us was entwined into a single, two headed creature. His head nestled against her neck, her mouth scoured his face, and they whispered incessantly. By the time Tim O’Brien began to read, I figured they would slink away. But no, suddenly they raised their heads, rapt, as O’Brien read his essay. The girl wept at every word, and the boyfriend offered comfort by kissing her shoulder.

I wondered about that weeping girl then, and I wonder about her now. Was she the child of an aging father, which was the subject of the essay? Had her father died? I guess I’ll never know. But I do know what I witnessed. The absolute power of writers to sweep us worshipful readers away. And I say Amen.

Having a Hallmark Moment

I'm a sucker for Hallmark Cards and Kodak moments. It's not a great trait in a woman who teaches courses entitled "Strategies for Subverting Sentimentality When Writing Poetry of Everyday Life." I tear up when I read the human interest stories in the "B" section of my paper. Maybe it's autumn, the beginning of the end of another year. Maybe it's the upcoming Jewish holy days, the beginning of a brand new year in the Jewish calendar. It is a time set aside to reflect back, recognize and acknowledge what went awry, a time to munch apples with honey in hopes for a sweet new year. I think, though, that this jag I've been on started with Ted Kennedy.


"He was the man who read with me. I didn't know he was famous." That was some child in Washington, D.C. I was on Cape Cod the week Ted Kennedy died, was glued to every bit of the coverage. The Cape Cod Times was filled with stories of Kennedy's life in Hyannis. "He waited for his turn in line." The man at the bakery. "He helped us when we were at risk of losing our house to the bank." A couple nearing retirement. "He remembered to call my family every September 11, ever since my boy died in the towers." A Massachusetts constituent. "He was father to 11 extra kids after our father and Uncle John died." One of the late Robert Kennedy's sons.


I was glued to the news coverage of Kennedy's funeral-- newspapers, television, radio. A child of the Sixties, I bathed in nostalgia. Outside, Hurricane Danny whipped the National Seashore lands the Kennedy family had fought to preserve. Two days before the senator was eulogized and buried, the sun had shone on Cape Cod, and people-- natives, wash ashores and first time visitors-- had lined the roadways, stood on the bridge to the mainland with placards. They waited for hours to see the entourage carrying his casket, his family, for a few seconds. They stood in the sun with children on their shoulders, with elderly and disabled relatives in wheelchairs, thousands of "regular people" wanting to bid a last farewell to a man from a family that the press dubbed "American royalty." At night, the senator laid in-state in the Kennedy Library in Boston, I followed his journey off Cape to pick my husband, Steve, up at the airport. Along all roads, construction signs were lit and read "From the People of Massachusetts: Thanks, Ted."

I arrived at the airport red-eyed and full of Kennedy stories to share, but when my husband jumped in the car, the first thing he told me was that he'd started the morning comforting our neighbor, Sue. Sue was pretty distraught, had to put her beloved cat, Sammy, down the night before. When Steve got to work, he stopped in the coffee shop next door to his office for his morning coffee, and saw his usual waitress weeping over the dog she'd lost the day before. "It was a day for comforting people, I guess," he said.

"He accomplished so much in his lifetime," my husband says as he reads the litany of legislation for which Ted Kennedy is given credit. "I'll never do what he did in his lifetime." I thought about all those kids who will remember the old guy who came to their school and read with them when no press corps was taking notes, the Ted Kennedy I've been mourning. I thought of those bereaved pet owners comforted by my busy lawyer husband who has always meant to change the world. "Sure you will," I say.

Feel Young Again

I did something good for myself the other day. I stood up for a cause. I am not going to extol the firmness of my belief in the cause. This is not a political forum.

But I almost didn’t go through with it. I saw the opposition, gathered with their signs and sneers, on the corner opposite the one I was headed for. I saw police. A woman of the opposition goaded me. “Are you honestly going to hold that sign up in public?” I told her I was. And then she told me she remembered the days when… You can flesh out the ellipsis. She held a sign that had a plastic bunch of bananas attached to it and said something disparaging about our President.

I heard someone yell, “Who bussed you people in? There can’t be that many of you.” But there were that many of us. We outnumbered our opponents 3 to 1. I marched on and took my place with the other members of the rally. I stayed out in the hot sun for two hours embracing my right to gather peaceably with likeminded countrywomen and men.

I recommend that you go out and rally for what you believe in. It could be in support of a candidate or of a traffic light at a problematic intersection. It could be in protest of a proposition or a news channel. It could be anything at all you feel must be brought to light and set right.

I felt like I was twenty again. You will, too.

Remembering Hurricane Bill

"Bill's Effects on the Jersey Shore: Lots of Churning, but no disasters." I knew when I picked up the Philadelphia paper that the headline referred to Hurricane Bill, which thankfully did not slam into the coast of New Jersey as vacationers were enjoying the last of summer. This week, fleeing the sticky weather inland, scores of us braved long waits at toll plazas and near accidents in New Jersey's infamous traffic circles, seeking ocean breezes and one last romp in salt spray.

Yes, I knew that menacing wave heights and rip tides under the frothy surface of a seemingly perfect Jersey beach day were evidence of a serious storm out to sea, a storm that has taken lives, a storm that is no laughing matter. Still, as I read news accounts this morning, I couldn't help but chuckle, and I wondered briefly whether my sisters and I had unintentionally stirred up the Atlantic. From four states across the country, my three sisters and I gathered this week. We met up on Long Beach Island, NJ, a place where we spent much of our collective childhood, and we brought a Bill we all knew could certainly make waves when he wanted to. We came to scatter the ashes of our father, Bill, in a place that always brought him joy and a kind of peace he didn't evidence in many other parts of his life. Under a perfect canopy of bright white stars, we four sisters shared memories of our mutual parents and of those always barefoot summers. One recited a prayer, all of us said goodbye, and there was a lot of laughter punctuated liberally by one refrain: "No,no, that's not the way it happened. This is what happened. . ."

As a writer and a teacher, as a person, I've become increasingly fascinated by how fuzzy and indefinable that line can be between memoir and fiction. "Any story told twice," the late poet/writer Grace Paley once said to an interviewer, "is fiction." As soon as we have an experience, we start to frame in our own minds "the story" of what just occurred. We choose, like all good story tellers do, the details to include. We illuminate the feelings we want to convey. I suspect we leave out details and feelings that either didn't register with us, or which don't enhance the tale we've already begun to craft in our minds of the experience. And then we retell the tale and it changes in the retelling. What we remember, where we focus our attention from the first, the details we share, are all colored by our temperment, our age or life stage, our past experience, our moods of the moment.





We stood on soft cool sand on a hot summer night, all of us in our fifties and sixties, and each of us remembered our own Long Beach Island. None of us was sure who was right about what year was the year when-- and who was actually on the beach the year that-- hundreds of starfish washed ashore and we gathered them in buckets and brought them home to a distressed, or delighted, depending on which of us you ask, mother. We all remembered that she made us grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. We couldn't agree on whether the way our father hauled us past our fears into sometimes churlish waters, how he made sure we all learned to swim, was an act of kindness or harshness, though we were all glad we'd become confident swimmers.





And then we let him go, and the man who taught us all to duck under the biggest breakers and back float over the calm rolling waves became part of the Atlantic Ocean we all knew he'd loved.

Nodding Panda

I confess to liking—perhaps more than I should—doodads, gimcracks, and tchotchkes. I even like the words themselves for being so felicitous. Sometimes, though, I attribute unreasonable powers to these objects of my unreasonable affection, and they become charms.

Consider the case of Nodding Panda. I bought him at Mitsuwa, our local Japanese market, ostensibly because I thought my students would enjoy watching the light-activated toy nod away on my desk. And, indeed, they were amused by him all school year long, at which point I brought him home to spend the summer on the desk in my study.

Now that school is starting again, I have a problem. For two months, Nodding Panda has kept me company while I wrote, mused, emailed, drafted, planned, fumed, doubted, despaired, deleted, and recovered. I often looked to his dependably nodding countenance for the wherewithal to continue when what I was doing seemed pointless. His little mechanical head kept telling me Yes, or Keep going, or That was pretty damn good, wasn’t it? He was quiet, encouraging company, and I no longer want to share him in my public workplace.

But, I will share him with you. When you find yourself doubting the enterprise of writing or your ability to carry on with it, conjure up the image of Nodding Panda. He is telling you to finish that paragraph or page, before you go to the refrigerator. He is saying, Good things come of hard work. He is cheering you on, and any kind of light keeps him going, even fluorescent.

Red Leaf Warning

When I lived in Western Pennsylvania, finding my first red maple leaf in mid-August always sent me into despair. Oh no. Summer was coming to an end. The days were growing shorter and the mornings were growing darker. Soon school would start and I would be beset by routines and schedules and commitments. I would lose the lovely sense of freedom and light-heartedness that was synonymous with summer.

Last week I read that optimistic women live longer, healthier lives than pessimistic ones. Optimistic women are less likely to develop heart disease while women with “cynical hostility” are at a higher risk for heart disease and for dying in general. This worries me. Not that I’m hostile. Or even particularly negative. I could likely scrounge up a handful of witnesses to testify than I am a positive person, someone good about dusting herself off and moving forward. But optimistic?

Optimistic people are morning people, aren’t they? Not someone like me, who when roused, prays oh, please God, don’t let it be morning yet. Someone who despairs over a red leaf. Hardly optimistic. Optimistic women are the ones you see in commercials. The ones smiling over their first cup of coffee, smiling before they’ve taken one single sip. The ones doing yoga on the patio as the sun rises. The ones running with their dogs as mist wisps from the meadows. The ones stretching and sighing and gazing out their bedroom window like . . . Well, like they are in a television commercial. The only time I smile in the morning is when I realize I can stay in bed a while longer.

This weekend, back in Pennsylvania for a family event, little red maple leaves littered our campsite. “Oh, look, fall is coming,” I said as I gathered up a leaf. “What a pretty shade of red.”

Perhaps there is hope for me after all.

Wedding on the Ohio River

Marietta, Ohio, is a town filled with history. Named after Marie Antoinette in 1788, it was the first settlement of the Northwest Territory, and its many historical markers honor early forts, shipbuilders, steamboats, and the first white woman to set foot in the place. It is small town of broad streets, lovely old houses, and expansive lawns. The perfect place for a wedding.

The wedding guests drove hours to get here. The ones from Pennsylvania wove their way south and west through Ohio mill towns and farmland, while we drove west and north over at least three mountain ranges. Blue Ridge. Shenandoah. Allegheny. Deep green forests with mist rising from the treetops into the gray, rainy skies. It was a long, wet journey, but one we all happily make when old friends marry off a child.

Fortunately, the day of the wedding was cloudless and warm, and St. Mary Catholic Church, stunning in its size and Old World grandeur, was air-conditioned. The ceremony was so flawless no one could have guessed the behind-the-scenes drama: the bridesmaid’s dress that landed in Vermont instead of West Virginia and the bee that attacked the bride’s mother. It had turned into a perfect day, and we were proud, because this child, this young, beautiful bride, was the youngest of our collective children, the baby we all watched grow up. We had to be there.