Home and Away

Being laid off was the best thing that could have happened to me, despite it occurring within weeks of the birth of our daughter and the purchase of our house.

1. Because it forced me to finally take sides in an argument I had been having with myself for a long time: do I want to be a serious writer or do I want to be a ______ (fill in an occupation, and precede it with the word soul-sapping).

2. Because it allows me to wear sweatpants and the hand-me-down slippers my mother-in-law gave me. (I have little Sally feet, like my little Sally hands. They came as a set, in fact)

I was laid off in the fall of 2006 after two years as web master. Great job. Great pay. Great benefits. Great co-workers. Translation: I was miserable.

That is to say, I was comfortable, which means I was not writing. Which further means that, deep in the well of my soul, I was a disappointment to myself. No, not that self, the other one. The one who didn't want to be a writer, he HAD to be a writer. I was pretty good at self-loathing, if you will. A daily mantra my conscience would whisper to me as I showered and dressed: "Stephen King published HIS first novel when he was not yet 30. But hey, I see you're busy getting ready for your important job, so I'll let you get back to it. Nice tie, by the way."

The voice in my head - the one dogging me about not growing a pair and actually striking out on my own to be a writer - has always been there. It was always needling me. Goading me. For years. Until the day I was laid off.

My boss at the time sat across from me in his office and said the magic words: "We're not funding your position after this fiscal year."

A quick calculation in my head put the end of "this fiscal year" at 30 days from that moment. I was further told that I was not expected to work for the next 30 days, if I didn't want to.

My reaction surprised even myself. I was elated.

Okay, yes, of course, I was stunned too. I mean, getting laid off is a form of rejection. You can't help but feel like someone is pointing at your acne and laughing. It, you know, kinda sucks.

But I got over it fast. I remember saying "Well, that's too bad."

That was it. No indignation. No feelings of betrayal. No rumblings of sudden, deep loss. Honest to God I felt free. At the time I really didn't recognize where the feeling was coming from. Why did I feel like a prisoner being released? I liked what I did for work there. I was proud of my accomplishments. I got along with everyone. And yet, when I left his office, left for the day before noon - only to return for a few more days to help train - it was like I had been let out of school and told I didn't need to return.

I didn't worry about getting gainful employment. I did not rush home to check out the classifieds. I just didn't sweat it.

It was Corrine, actually, who made me realize why I had been so cavalier about just losing our meal ticket. She said four words.

"Now you can write."

The words - the verbal permission slip - I had been wanting my whole life to hear.

At the moment of being laid off I had been freed to make a decision. I didn't have to quit a good-paying job, it had been decided for me. I was given a clean slate, and Corrine had green-lighted it by her show of support and understanding.

And it has turned out to be everything I had expected: financially tough, but creatively enabling. A trade off, to be sure. But one I will take any day, now that I know what it feels like with the shoe on the other foot.

I don't loathe my days anymore, or myself for enduring them.

That, in a nutshell, is what has made it worthwhile.

If I Had A Hammer

My father will be 70 in April. I had to write it down and look at that number because of the unreality of it for me. It has this ethereal quality when you put it in the same sentence with "My Father".

I am not one whose annual birthday has bothered him over the years as an adult. I've never cringed at admitting my age to anyone. In fact, when I turned 40 last March I felt no middle-aged flutter of the ego. No desire to buy a sports car or jump from a bridge. I remember thinking "Okay, it's just a number. A nice, round, even figure."

But my father turning 70 is bothering the hell out of me.

I could wax maudlin about "The Man Who Raised Me," or "My Dad, My Hero." There are a million words to be written about one's father and I won't lay them out here for you. There's too much histrionics involved between Arthur Ralph Turner and his youngest son to do any justice to the impact he has had on my life.

There usually is for anyone talking about either parent or grandparent. Mom or Dad or Nana or Grampy. An essay is a cruel sort of injustice, I think, to a doting parent. The high school "What Does Your Father Mean to You" kind of sap is a worthless endeavor.

But why 70? Why is my father going to be 70? Why can't it be 60 and stay there? Or better, 50, when I was 20 and out of my acerbic, confrontational teens and on the verge of becoming a father myself? When our conversations were constructive and friendly again, the way they were before I became Mr. Know It All.

This past summer he came to our house with a toolbox, perhaps the single collection of objects I will always associate with him forever. My father's lifelong occupation was as a public educator, first as a teacher of science, then a principal, and finally as a curriculum director. He ended his career, happily, one step away from superintendent, a position he swore against pursuing because of its political entanglements.

But his affinity for fixing things is what I like about him. He was raised in Farmington, Maine, and grew up on a dairy farm throughout much of his youth. He would rise early and milk the cows, go to school, play sports, and return home for more farming chores. A real, honest-to-god, uphill both ways in a snowstorm to get to school kind of childhood.

So, by association or familial osmosis, he learned how to use a hammer, and other tools of carpentry, from his own father. He also learned how to fix motors and to diagnose most household mechanical anomalies.

So he showed up this summer at our 1850 farmhouse to repair the decrepit front porch. The part of the porch that suffered the most footfalls and whose boards were rotting away.

And with him he brought his toolbox, along with a collapsible table saw and a couple of handmade sawhorses. The familiar sawhorses he's had kicking around the house forever.

And for the better part of the muggy summer day he measured and cut, hammered and leveled, fitted and refitted until, at last, we had a new porch floor and a healthy pressure-treated substructure beneath to absorb the heavy traffic.

I, as ever, stood by dumbly and watched, every so often handing off a tool the way a nurse hands off a scalpel to a brain surgeon.

I loved this, to be honest. It's been a long time since I stood by my father and watched him work like this. Not since I was a kid, frankly. I hovered and paced and asked questions and he answered patiently, even when a certain joist wasn't fitting properly or he had to crawl in the dirt beneath the porch to hammer a queerly angled nail into a two-by-four.

At nearly 70.

Do I regret not ever learning how to do these things myself? Sure. Of course I do. It would be handy to have, given that we live in a house built by Moses himself. But I have to tell you, had I known, then I would not have needed to ask him to bring his toolbox.

70. Jesus Christ. That's a heavy number.

70.

Love in the Time of A Home Heating Crisis

Last winter, in early March, I believe, we got a bitter taste of Maine reality. Winter had decided, in its cruel way, to hang around beyond its welcome.

It stormed all day on a Sunday and straight into Monday, and when it was all over, we had been nailed with 16 inches of snow. School was out. Which means all of our kids were home and all of the daycare kids. The house was rockin.

By Monday night the skies had cleared and that means the temperature plummeted to below zero.

In one night:

We ran out of propane, which heats our water and is used for cooking.

We ran out of home heating fuel, which, well, helps to heat our house.

We were out of firewood, having only ordered six cord the previous fall and due to the longer-than-usual winter last year had burned it up already. Frankly, with March here, we really were only looking at a month until spring. Usually. (This year, we ordered seven acres, just to be safe)

So, here's the patchwork of Yankee ingenuity we stitched together in order to get warm.

1. I found pieces of unused boards in my basement, left over from the previous owner, who had been a carpenter of sorts. I took these assorted boards and cut them using a skill saw. Me. Using a skill saw. I'll paint a picture for you: Barney Fife holding onto a growling saw with its round, toothy blade inches from my hand, my eyes closed, head turned away, imagining those Discovery Channel stories about men eviscerated by fly-away skill saw blades.

2. I purchased four armloads of Cumby Wood. Cumberland Farms, for those not living in Maine, is a convenience store. The kind where Joe the Toothless Chain Smoker buys $12 worth of scratch tickets and proceeds to narrate each goddamn scratch. All while the rest of us stand in line and wait.

"Yessa. I think I might have a winna, theya. I come down last week, ya know, and bought me a ticket and I'll be damned if I didn't win fahty dollas. Mutha got all riled up and I bought her a pint of Allens Coffee Brandy."

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

"Nope. Shee-it! That one was a looza. Can you toss that in ya circulah file, honey?"

3. I bought two 5-gallon K1 jugs, cuz in Maine if you don't use the correctly rated fuel container, Al Gore himself will kick your ever-loving ass. The state has contracted this service from him, so I've heard.

4. I cut out the bottom of a 2-liter Pepsi bottle using Corrine's favorite scissors. The once-sharp kind.

5. I trudged around the edge of our house, waist deep in snow, carrying these two K1-rated fuel jugs until I got to the oil pipe. Which is buried from the last storm.

6. I place the neck of the decapitated Pepsi bottle into the top of the oil pipe, and proceed, cautiously, to pour the kerosene into my oil tank, which is actually in our basement. Picture this: Barney Fife, one knee bracing the Pepsi bottle so it won't tip over, tongue stuck into one corner of my mouth, head turned for fear of kerosene splashing out and into my eyes and all the while worrying that someone's cell phone will ignite me. Hey, don't laugh. There's a reason you're not supposed to use those things at gas stations.

7. After pouring in the 10 gallons of kerosene into our 275-gallon oil tank (it sounded like someone pissing into a culvert. it sort of left me feeling really cold and empty) I then start fires in our living room and kitchen stoves, using the old scrap furniture wood from the basement and the Cumby Wood.

8. Corrine gathers the nine tiny ceramic space heaters used for thawing out pipes beneath the kitchen sink (also left over from the previous owner) and places them around our living room the same way you would set up speakers in a surround sound home movie studio. We have enough extension cords in use that I'm fairly certain we'll trip the breakers in all the houses on High Street.

9. All of our children amble down to the living room and immediately begin to bitch about it being cold, apparently oblivious to anyone or any circumstances more than an inch beyond their own skin. When told we ran out of heating fuel, one child had the temerity to say, under her breath (but let's face it, audible enough for us to hear it), "Daddy's house is always really warm," in reference to her father, who lives in another town in the House of Perfection and Perpetual Warmth and Love and Proper Parental Care

10. I offer, subtly, to escort said child to her beloved father's, by way of my foot up her ass, but Corrine shushes me before I get to "Listen, you..."

11. I go downstairs to prime the motor to the furnace. This is a set of sub-steps as follows:

a) Take a 3/4 inch wrench and place it on a nut at an impossible 90-degree angle to the motor. I have schoolgirl hands. Small, petite, feminine in their smallness. I'm not ashamed to admit that. I make up for it in other -ahem - areas. I do, however, ponder how the hell Kirk the Oil Furnace man, with his MAN HANDS (no joints, just sausage fat fingers) can possibly do this task.

b) I take an empty 12-ounce Mt. Dew bottle and place the neck up under the nut. Folks, if you make crude sexual jokes about this I will hunt you down.

c) With my girl hand firmly wrapped inside the motor, clutching the 3/4 inch steel wrench (it's cold in the basement. Imagine wrapping all fingers around a bar of ice) I gently loosen the nut, holding the Mt. Dew bottle in place with my knee, and I push the furnace reset button. The same furnace reset button that has, above it in bold capital letters, DO NOT RESET THIS MORE THAN ONCE.

Picture this: Barney Fife, kneeling on the cold half-cement/half dirt floor of our basement, little Sally hand tucked into the guts of a motor, holding a cold wrench, turning said wrench to loosen a tiny nut, bracing a Mt. Dew bottle with one knee, depressing the small reset button, eyes closed, head turned, and picturing that scene in Die Hard when the skyscraper loses an entire floor after officer John McClain drops a whole pound of plastic explosives down an elevator shaft.

What happens when you trip this reset button is that the motor chugs to life. You loosen the nut to allow actual fuel to squirt out into the bottle, sputtering sputtering sputtering until you get a good unbroken stream, then you tighten the nut. If you did it right, the air is out of the line and the fuel is then injected into the furnace, which roars to life WITHIN INCHES OF YOUR LITTLE PATHETIC SALLY DAINTY HAND

Of course, it never takes the first time. It usually means doing it three or four times. Three or four reset button trips, despite the ominous warning. We had it looked at later that year and I'll be a son of a bitch if Kirk the Oil Furnace Fat Sausage Finger Man didn't turn to me and say "Have you reset this more than once?" in that accusing, I'm a professional and you have girly hands, kind of way. I just said "Huh? Reset button what?"

So, the furnace is back purring and billowing beautiful warm air up up up into our house and leaking out through the various porous spots around every window, the eaves, and the roof, which is why we don't have an energy audit because let's face it, we KNOW we're heating the maple trees. We don't need no stinking energy audit to tell us that.

And then we break the news to our children that there is no propane. Which means there is no hot water. Which means no showers. Which means, heaven help us, the girls might not be able to break the record for most consecutive days with a shower that they started when they were 12, the same day they discovered boys.

We have a remedy for this too, of course. We gather every pot in the house, fill them with water, and place them on both stoves. When the water rises to a nice, toasty luke warm, we instruct them on how to bathe in the shower with the pot of water at their feet and a plastic cup.

Ever see the poster of the monkey in the hot springs? His coat of hair is covered in snow, only his head is above the steamy water and he's got the cheerless, You've-Got-To-Be-Effing-Kidding-Me look?

That's our children. Wrapped to the necks in blankets and sleeping bags, hair askew from slumber, and wearing looks of disgust that only a mother/step-mother could love.

They relent, because they have to. They understand that no amount of foot stomping, pouting, cursing and conjuring the name of their other, more reliable parent, will get them any closer to getting clean.

That happened in one day last winter. The perfect storm, if you will, of bad luck. But hey, as we told our mirthless, shivering, blue-lipped children: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Nearly Seventeen

Fallon, my first
This daydreamer's first great dream
Now, nearly seventeen

She used to fall asleep on my chest
And her breathing was syncopated against my own
As if needing to establish an independent rhythm from the start

She now walks in the froth of the cold Atlantic
Her back to me, looking out into the ocean
This girl of mine

This child who is my first
Who takes after me, with her back turned, looking outward
Imagining anything and everything possible

This daydreamer's first great dream
Is now, nearly seventeen
But I still feel her on my chest

Mistakes Happen

Okay, there's been something bothering me lately, something that cropped up into my consciousness the way weeds do in an untended garden. And if I don't clip this particular mental weed, right now, It's going to choke me to death creatively.

I published a novel a little over a year ago, for middle readers. It was my first published work of fiction and I was proud of the accomplishment. I was scared, too.

Here I was, with a 404-page work, some 150,000 words. Two years of hard labor had produced an actual novel, with a beginning, middle, and an end. With characters talking and doing things. I had finally, at the age of 38, done something I truthfully thought I would do 20 years earlier.

I was elated. I was in love with my book. I reread the finished draft eight times, swimming in its pure perfection.

I was also in a hurry. I wanted to see the sucker in its final form: with a glossy cover, page numbers, my bio on the back.

So I made an executive decision to forgo paying for a professional editor. My only real BIG mistake of Surfacing. I mean, there were little ones here and there. Mistakes I mean. But really, the only BIG mistake, the rear view, hindsight-is-20/20 kind of mistake was not shelling out the $400 to have the thing scrutinized by a real editor.

Not by a friend. Not by some schmuck I used to work with at one of the three newspapers I used to work for back in the day. A real, honest-to-God, editor. Someone who could dig deep into the story but still catch the niggling grammatical slips.

I stand before you today and agree, had I done that last step before firing it off to be published, Surfacing would have been an improved story. That's how that works. It's common sense.

I admit it.

But in my defense, I was a boy with a new model airplane on his birthday. I wanted the thing to fly RIGHT NOW. And forgot to glue the parts together before sending her off on her maiden flight.

Some 15 months after the book was published, I am not unhappy with it. I don't lose sleep over the whole editor gaff. I've read it since it has been published, I catch a glitch here and there, but I'm supremely proud of the accomplishment.

Here's what is nagging at me. It was an email I received from a former coworker - of the newspaper variety - about six months after it was published. In it he begins by saying he purchased the book online and had read it.

Now, being that the book is for middle readers, when an adult tells me they've read it I'm a bit happily surprised. It's basic reading, folks. It's not John Le Carre. That's not being modest, but honest. It's a book for kids.

Anyway, he goes on to say, and I am quoting roughly here because I deleted the fucking email right away, "It's filled with mistakes."

Filled?

I got stuck by that word. A splinter beneath the skin.

And then, he went on, "You really should have someone check your work."

I had one of those moments when you're being confronted by someone unexpectedly and the light around the corners of your vision blurs and your face gets really hot.

That was how the email ended. Not a word about whether he liked the story or the characters or something.

I went into a week-long tailspin after that email. I reread the book in search of all those errors, determined to find one on every page. I hammered my own ego with the various self-inflicting comments only writers can relate. Unworthy. Fraud. No talent. Poser

Different things happen to most writers when their delicate egos have been bruised. For me, I conjure old writing adversaries - the kid in my sophomore English class whose writings were glorified by our teacher while my own efforts were ignored. Or the guy I worked with at a newspaper who won awards for reporting when my own reporting fell short.

I'm better today. But lately that email has come back for some reason. Maybe it's because I'm 80,000 words into a new novel. I don't know. What I do know is that I am certain of this: that email was a shitty thing to do to someone. To say you don't like something is one thing. But to generalize and claim melodramatically that it was filled with errors was cruel. But, given who the person is - we were not friends at the paper, but mere colleagues - it makes more sense today.

Today, I weeded out a nasty strangler. One that has been creeping up again that I should have rooted out a long time ago.

By admitting that there will always be better writers, smarter writers, better-read writers. That's the way of things.

By learning from my mistake of not going through one last, professional edit.

But also by admitting to myself that Surfacing is not filled with errors, but a few.

And that that email writer is filled with shit.

Scary Spice

This was shot when Gabrielle was only a year old, Halloween 2007

Had to include it here because it's too damn cute.

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