Climb Every Mountain (Or: My Novel and Other Shit)

I have a stack of pages on my desk that, collectively, represent a nearly finished novel. It's 377 pages, but it's rough. That's the way these things work.

Right now, it's not a novel but 377 pages.

A pile.

Of.

Shit.

No, no. Just kidding.

It's a pile alright. Don't get me wrong. A stack of pages that, loosely, represent the workings of a fictional narrative. There is a thread. There are stable characters. There is a plausible setting and even a rising action leading to ....

What?

That's where I'm at. The WHAT? part.

Picture a novel as a hiker does a mountain. Starting at the base, it rises almost constantly, with short-lived respites where things plateau a bit before moving upward again.

At some point, within sight of the top, you feel exhilaration. A sense of impending accomplishment. That's where I'm at in my novel. Page 377 represents that mossy area 100 yards from the peak of the mountain. The place where it flattens just slightly and no longer is your vision blocked by the trail before you, with its brambles and rocks and tree roots. When you look up now, you see sky.

Page 377 is where I have stopped, and as much as I would like to claim that I'm resting for the final push, I would be lying. It's more like I've twisted my ankle and now sit there rubbing the injury and swearing.

Something really nasty, too, like "Fucking douche bag motherfucker!!!!!!!"

Which is what I reserve for slow drivers, anyone who scores on the Patriots or the Red Sox, and for when I am stuck on my novel.

Hey, I never said I was classy.

Anyway, slow drivers and professional sporting events are easily handled.

A stalled novel, however, is a different beast altogether.

But not impossible.

My problem is that, along the journey, I have come to realize some new things about the characters, which will swing their actions in a different way. Characters are people with motives, things that drive them. And as I have progressed, their motives have become clearer. And by that I mean they no longer need me to direct them, but rather for me to bear witness to their actions.

In other words, I have to go back and change what they do earlier in the novel, which in turn affects what other characters do, which in turn...

Well, you probably get the picture.

It's not really as daunting as it sounds. And, quite frankly, it's refreshing.

Remember the mountain analogy?

So here I am with my sprained ankle, sitting on my ass these last three weeks and losing weight, dehydrated, hallucinating about naked talk show hosts and I remember a few yards ago there was a shelter with a first aid kit. If I swallow my pride and limp back there, I can get an ACE Bandage, wrap the ankle, and press upward again.

It makes writing exciting, actually. It means that my story has taken on a life of its own and all I need to do is sit back and let it unfold (as opposed to dictating the action, which is like pissing in the dark. Sometimes you hit the mark, but mostly you're just making a mess).

My desk is a testament to the hike. Around my literary pile are scattered the tools of a writer's climb. For example, I have a can of warm Mt. Dew; a bowl with a dried up apple core and a withered piece of chewed kielbasa; a cold cup of coffee three days old and growing hair; a fresh Dunkin Donuts coffee bought this morning; several pens; several 4x5 index cards; a three-pronged adapter; John Irving's Hotel New Hampshire; and Roget's Thesaurus.

These seem, to the untrained eye, merely the accumulation of debris of a lazy man.

Which is accurate.

I'm just telling you so that I can set the scene.

Which is: I have my pile of a novel I'm now editing.

And other shit around it.

A Passing Lament

love is sprung

upon the young
and just as quick is lost

then I wish not
to unwind the clock
and away the years be tossed

for there was a time
in this lover's mind
a lament for all we missed

for a younger age
upon a different stage
in a play in which we kissed

but had we met
when the sun had set
on younger eyes as we

I would regret
your beauty yet
be lost on youthful me

for your loveliness
I must confess
gave me pause this way:

if I met you first
and quenched a thirst
would we still be we today?

experiences past
means love now will last
the length of a million days

youth was served
so that our love be deserved
in more enriching and fulfilling ways

Mt. Blue

I confiscated some pictures from my mother this morning and rushed home to scan them before she notices.

They are images of camping at Mt. Blue State Park, a Turner family tradition since before I was even born. My mother is on a kick lately to gather all the family photos she can in order that they may be put together in an album.

I thought, just for shits and giggles, I would share a few here. They were taken when Fallon and Harrison were much younger. And so was I.

God. Look ma, not beer belly!!

I hope you enjoy.

(Oh, and yes, the fact that these are SUMMER pictures is not lost on me, sitting here in January.)



Me and Harrison, summer of 2001. He's seven years old. I'm not 7.


Fallon and Harrison, 1998. Harrison is 4, Fallon is 6. And, as always, she's got a firm grip on her younger brother.



Harrison, 1998. One of my favorites of him.



Harrison, 1, Fallon, 3, and my father, around the campfire, 1995. Apparently Harrison is pointing to the spot he wants Fallon to jump to. She's contemplating it.

I walked to the mailbox this afternoon, later than usual after a busy day, and the cold air was a confrontation. It's done that a lot lately. The crisp affront has become expected; an insulting slap across the face that I have learned to instinctively burrow my chin against.

Or maybe because it's been a bad stretch all the way around that I have come to hate the winter cold so much; like it is the embodiment of all that is wrong and bad in my world. Like the frigid air is a metaphor for my own personal hell.

It's not far to the mailbox from our front door, thank God. And from it I pulled only a few items. An electric bill. A large envelope from the local theatre group for whom I am directing a show this spring.

And a card.

A card?

On January 21?

Immediately I ticked off, in my mind, the familiar annual milestones.

It's not my birthday until March 4. It's not Corrine's birthday until next September.

Our anniversary is in September. Our wedding was four months ago. And since it was addressed to both of us, I could rule out any of the kids' birthdays.

I recognized the name in the return address up in the lonely left-hand corner of the envelope and thought perhaps it was a thank you note for shipping out Surfacing.

But then again, I thought to myself, she's already sent a thank you.

I opened it once I was inside. In it was a card that featured a haiku from a Japanese poet named Masahide.

On the face of it, it read:

Barn's burned down,
now I can see the moon.

The haiku rests beneath a branch of a bamboo tree, its leaves silhouetted against a pale moon, which itself appears to be breaking through clouds.

I don't get cards much. In fact, I don't recall, other than Christmas and last year's birthday, when I got one. And I can certainly say I have never gotten a card from a near-perfect stranger.

Especially one with a check in it for $100.

Marie Harris, thank you.

I don't mean to call you out like this, to put you up and into a spotlight, but I must.

To my readers, Marie Harris is a fellow blogger who I discovered in that random way we find writers while out searching the blogosphere. I liked what I found on her blog - she is a creative spirit, a writer, a searcher like me - so I commented on her blog one day. And she reciprocated. And, like the rest of us, a blog friendship was formed.

I don't know Marie beyond the electronic landscape, which is to say I don't know Marie at all. I know her words. And, from them, I have formed a very shaky image of the person. But I don't know her any more than you who are reading this know me, really.

I mean, let's face it, if you were to draw a mental picture of me based on my latest posts, your image of me would be fairly dark. What with frozen, bursting pipes and all.

But we know Marie better today. Her card's haiku could not have more perfectly framed our life today if we wrote a thousand words in a thousand blogs for a thousand days.

It speaks of the unexpected freedom we can get from the ashes of a seeming disaster. Something bad happened, yes, but look at what you have gained. It's there. It's a bright, shining thing you're going to miss if you keep staring at the burnt barn.

And we got this message in the form of a haiku on a card from a near-perfect stranger in California.

Folks, that's a 3,000-mile random act of kindness.

I won't share with you what she said in the card, other than to say that it was in direct response to our latest pipe-bursting, frozen bathroom crisis. Her words are kind and generous and have, in their special way, thawed this winter of ours.

Her act of kindness has, in one fell stroke, shattered the ice cold of a merciless winter that has petrified our will and paralyzed our hope.

Our house has burned down, it seems, more than once lately.

But now we can see the moon.

Thanks to our perfect stranger.

Civics In The Livingroom

We gave our children the opportunity to stay home from school today for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. I think it should have been a national holiday. Every inauguration should, just as every national election should too. Both are the ultimate civics exercises, when we get a chance to do something very few in the world are afforded.

No matter your political bent. No matter what color your state is or the letter you put next to your politician's name. You have to be moved by the ascension of a common person to the position of Leader of the Free World.

So we sat and we watched and we said nothing, witnesses to history on many levels. The obvious: Barack is our first black president. The not-so-obvious: Barack is the first president whose father was born in Kenya and whose mother was white. The not-so-known: Barack openly admitted to experimenting with drugs in his youth, an admission that would have ended his political career not so long ago. Or how about the fact that he's our first president with an iPod and BlackBerry. Probably our first who knows what the term "I got Googled" means, too.

I admit here, proudly, that I voted for him. I also admit that, not too long ago, there was rumor Colin Powell would run and I was ready to vote for him. He was a staunch member of both Bush administrations, let's not forget.

I would have voted for Hilary, too, who is also making history even if not quite what she wanted.

But what I really like about today is that Fallon, Harrison, Alyssa and Ty all said yes when asked if they wanted to stay home from school to watch it.

These are not kids who miss school, folks. They are all honor students. They have sports and tests and homework due that will now be late a day because they stayed home. They did not sleep in. They would not have been allowed. Nor would we have extended the invitation if we thought they would abuse the privilege.

I was not surprised, honestly, that they sat, in silence, and watched. They're much more politically astute than my generation was. I never saw Carter or Reagan or Bush inaugurated. I saw Clinton, but by then I was an adult and knew the magnitude of the moment. And I watched H.W. Bush too.

What did surprise me was that our day care children clamored for a seat before the television too. Not one of them could tell you the names (other than Obama, whom they argue is brown not black, something they were told in school I guess) of the people on the television. But they understood that this was a magnificent, momentous event that deserved their attention.

They giggled when Aretha Franklin sang, because they had never heard of a large black woman named Aretha, apparently, but maybe it was the hat she was wearing. And they pulled a face at the name of Yo-Yo Ma, the celebrated cellist who played with three others. I didn't dare confuse them with the bit of trivia that the man who composed the piece was the same who composed the Star Wars, Superman, and Jaws movie themes.

Either way, it was a moment that they can now proudly look back upon and remember having taken part, if not on the ground in D.C., at least on television. The same way many saw the assassination of Kennedy, the first man on the moon, and the Columbia disaster, to name a few.

What happens from here - the ramped up expectations, the critics champing at the bit, the foul economy that has clouded everyone's future - remains to be seen.

But it will not take away from the fact that my children saw something historic on this day. There's just something about that that makes a missed day in a stuffy classroom worth it. I think they would agree.

Can You Read My Mind?

Fallon Paige received a new digital camera from me and Corrine for her birthday and has been spending the last couple of days taking pictures. She's quite good at capturing the sentiment of the moment. She has an eye for it I think.

One of my favorites is a candid of her youngest brother, Griffin, next to whom she was sitting last night. With camera in hand, she snapped a quick shot of Mr. Smile a Mile, which is my new nickname for him. It used to be Sir Shitsalot.

The photo is a perfect reflection of who Griffin is, I think. Now, mind you, he isn't smiling in it and the boy smiles more than any child I've ever met. He is a very happy baby. But lately he's hit an emotional growth spurt. That stage in a 6-month-old's growth in which their entire world becomes interesting. Before, all they really can and want to do is eat, sleep, and poop. Now, he wants to KNOW. He wants to UNDERSTAND.

He has become much more attentive now that he can hold his head up and completely still, so he spends a lot of his time staring at people, and I'm dying to know what the hell the boy is thinking.

He looks deep into you and it's freaky. Harrison, my second oldest, used to do that at Griffin's age as well. He would spend long amounts of time just observing. Calculating. Contemplating. I used to joke whenever Harrison stared at me at length that he was thinking "Crap, you're my father?"

Fallon's picture, like I said, captured Griffin's latest stage in growth perfectly. He looks right into the camera, straight through it even, as if into your eyes. And the look on his face says "You're a mystery, please explain yourself. I promise I will not judge you. I just want to know."

I love that look.

Sunshine or Shit

I went to college for a year. It was a mistake to even go, to be honest. My dream, in high school, was to backpack across England, Scotland and Ireland, and to be a novelist. Instead, I flew west to Texas where I enrolled at Abilene Christian University.

My thinking back then was that the safe way trumps the dream way. The practical outpaces the outlandish in almost every race.

Meaning, standing at the crossroads I saw to my right a career as a teacher, with a stable salary and benefits and a house and car, etc. To my left, I saw the romance of being free to travel and write, but without a salary or benefits or any sense of how I would survive.

We live with our choices, good and bad. We just learn more from the bad. And boy have I made some doozies.

But I told myself over the past few years I would not live with regret. I had been, you know? I had been stockpiling my mistakes and keeping them in a safe place so that, when something bad happened, I could chalk it up to karma coming back to haunt me for my past errors.

It works like this: you make a decision that ends up hurting people you love. You see the error and you repent. Your intention was never to hurt, but you did and there it is, a blemish on you and your character and you feel legitimately sorry.

So, time passes. Then shit begins to happen. To you not by you. And you can't help thinking "Well, that's what you get for ..." and then fill in the blank with whatever you did that you regret.

That was me. That was me in spades. Hammering myself into the ground for making mistakes. Living with regret and pulling them out of a deck of cards. So that your hand is never a winner. Let me be plain: YOU stack the deck, then deal yourself a shitty hand. Is it any wonder, then, that you never win?

That was then. This is now.

I am, as some of you have been following, on the worst losing streak of my life. I won't enumerate them all here. Let's say for the sake of brevity that for one whole year it's been bad luck upon bad luck.

And to some I know, and maybe even to you that read this, my life is shit. My life is a black hole.

But nothing could be further from the truth.

My life is filled with richness and fulfillment beyond imagining. It is a life no longer dictated to me by shame and guilt and regret.

I have changed my perspective by acknowledging that shit happens, but it's just shit. It is not exacted upon me by karma and is not a direct result of anything I have done. And it certainly does not define me.

There's shit and there's sunshine. Both fall upon us all in equal amounts, we don't have a choice there.

I have found, though, that where you do have a choice is in which one you choose to bask.