The conversation goes like this…

My husband and I are in the car on the way to his mother’s house. It is my husband’s birthday. I’m driving.

He calls his to tell her we are about half an hour away, and I hear mention apple pie. When he hangs up, I ask, “She made apple pie for your birthday?”

“Yes,” he says.

I think about this and go through the 16 years I’ve known him. “Do you like apple pie?” I ask.

“No.”

Well, of course. Our son doesn’t like pie. And she is diabetic and can’t eat pie. I’m going to have to eat a lot of pie.

It reminds me how I feel when I go home and my father asks me if I want iced tea. “Hey,” my father says, “you might’ve changed your mind by now.”

*

When I read guidelines for magazines, journals, agents, et al, I turn to my story and try to figure out if what I’ve written is what they mean. The editors are telling me what they like, and I still don’t know.

Do editors ever feel like my husband on his birthday–he’s always made it clear he likes cake. He really likes cake, but is handed a pie.

Surprise!

I saw who the email was from and sighed. How will this rejection be? I wonder and click on the message, face slightly turned away, wincing.

We would love to have your story appear in our 13th issue, scheduled for publication in May 2011. It will be another week or so before I can send out the contracts, but this offer is firm. If that is your artwork you’ve sent with the story, I’d love to have that on the site as well. Please let me know if this is acceptable.

What? My sharp intake of breath got my husband’s attention. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

I read the message again. And again.

My husband stepped closer to me. “What is it?”

I half believed that if I told him what I thought I was reading, I would look back and be proven wrong.

The shock of acceptance–here in May!

Curtains and Mind Tricks

a view from my father's house

Memory is a trickster. Your memory is likely not what you think. Mine doesn’t half tell me what I want to know, and sometimes it holds my present mind hostage.

You may know that old post of mine about the man at my window. Like with many life stories I’ve posted here, I did not included every single detail. Some details dragged a story down and didn’t not add anything to the telling. Some details made no sense or would be so tedious to explain, I didn’t bother.

Now, as my obsessive mind goes back to that night (or very early morning), there is a detail that bothers me that I’d often left out of the retelling because it made no sense to me and I could not see how to include it in a concise and interesting fashion.

When I woke up that insanely early morning (between 4 and 5), what I really noticed first, what made me think something wasn’t right, were my curtains. My grandmother had made them, and she made them with these two-inch wide tiebacks made from the same cloth as the curtains. I think that is what you call them. Whatever they are called, I used them to keep the windows open. Since it was a Florida summer night and I wanted as much of the slight breeze as possible, I had used the long strips–each with a plastic circle at the end to hook to a nail in the wall–to keep the curtains open while I slept and also so that if the curtains should flutter in an ever hoped for breeze, they wouldn’t hit me in the face.

But when I woke up, the curtains were hanging straight. The tiebacks had been removed.

And as hard as I try to remember, I can’t remember if the tiebacks were still hanging from their nails, dropped onto the bed, or gone all together.

All I remember wondering was–why would a burglar untie the curtains and take the ties?

I did tell the police the man had undone the curtain, but they acted as if curtains were definitely unimportant. And I often left the curtains out of many retellings because they made no sense–a thief who bothers with curtains. Absurd.

But the curtains are bothering me. All these years, and you have to wonder why I need to think about those tiebacks at all. And perhaps I am imagining things. Maybe my writer’s imagination is making a fool of me.

Why should anything from so long ago disrupt our dreams now anyway?

The New Year and the Old Years Long Ago

a Florida childhood

New Year’s Eve I finished reading Girls of a Tender Age, a compelling and disturbing memoir.

Mary-Ann Tirone-Smith writes about her childhood and the murder of a childhood friend. The story would’ve caught me even if a classmate of mine* hadn’t been murdered back when I was in the eighth grade. She was not my friend, but her death helped shape my childhood.**

Reading this memoir about death and arriving at the end of the year, brought this past to mind, and all the death that edged my narrow world in central Florida.

My mother’s grief at the death of her favorite brother, our dog shot by a passing motorcyclist, my mother’s attempted suicide, my mother’s boyfriend who taught classes on death and dying and who punched holes in the wall, the classmate murdered, the man at my window in the very early morning dark, the step-mother who kept a folder of dead-girl news stories, the best friend whose aunt was murdered, and the steady stream of stories of serial killers in Florida (an orange grove is a great place to leave a body), and a fascination of murder mysteries.

And the shooting at the grocery store my dad goes to, the destruction of hurricanes and sinkholes, the alligators…

All turns the writer’s imagination.

And now I’m finally reading Alias Grace–more murder for the New Year.

And why, by the way, is Margaret Atwood such a brilliant writer?

Well, in this year I think I’ll be posting much less. At least until something worthwhile comes to mind.

Enjoy the New Year and the stories it brings.

—-

*I thought about not linking to the page about my classmate’s murder. Seemed morbid to do so. But at the same time, her death mattered. In a recent episode of Doctor Who (a show that deals a lot with death), the Doctor said, “900 years of time and space and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important.”

**I’ve written here before about when I woke up to a man at my window, which was level with my bed, the bed pushed against the low window so that I could get a breeze in the heat, and that the man stood with his hand near my face and watched me. This was four months before Tina was murdered. And now it was an uneasy feeling to read that her suspected killer used to break into homes and stand over girls’ beds. Tina lived to the south of me at that time and her body was found to the north. It is foolhardy to jump to conclusions, but hard not to.