Tag Archive for: Third Degree

The Fountain of Youth

/in /by
I was out to dinner with a group of friends the other night.  As a way of describing us, let’s just say that we are all past forty and looking forward to the wonder that is fifty; in two cases, anyway, the women are experiencing the wonder of fifty.  In any event, we were discussing the idea of plastic surgery and wondering if any of us would pull the trigger and go in for any procedures.  Having been the only one who had had a massive, unplanned surgery that didn’t result in the extraction of a baby too big to birth, I cautioned them that having elective surgery was something that they all should consider thoughtfully.  I let them know that surgery is not for the faint of heart. 
One friend’s response to the question of plastic surgery was the old Coco Chanel trope, “You can either focus on your ass or your face.”  My friend had chosen her ass but I have to say, her face looks pretty damned good, too, mostly because she’s Italian and Italians, in my opinion, age much better than the Irish.  (You’d think with all that rain, we’d have perfected that dewy complexion thing.  We haven’t.  In addition to the rain thing, we’ve got the booze thing, and that’s hard to shake off, even after generations of good dermatology.)  Another friend said she might consider an eyelift.  I, for one, would consider having the fat sucked out of my chin and then remembered the massive, unplanned surgery and put that idea to rest.  Another friend is so thin and so fit that she doesn’t have a line on her face and still looks like a sixteen-year-old.  We hashed this out over a few glasses of Chianti and then it finally dawned on me:  plastic surgery is a slippery slope.  It’s kind of like painting your kitchen and then looking at your dining room and thinking, “Wow, that looked ok before, but now?  Not so much.”  Where do you stop?  Do you stop with the chin and hope the rest of the face continues to look good or do you go whole hog and get the whole kit and caboodle done?  I suspect that if you get one “problem area” taken care of, you find that you need to get another one done, and then another, and then, all of them done until you’re deciding to get your ears—now too low on your head—moved up to accommodate your new, stretched thin face.
I had put this whole conversation out of my mind until this past weekend.  Every Rosh Hashanah, despite the fact that we are the goyest of the goy, we head to Massachusetts to visit my mother’s brother and his family.  The kids are off from school, which makes it the perfect time for a road trip.  My aunt and uncle couldn’t be more hospitable, but something I always forget until we’re there is that a) we eat a lot (making trying to stay on Weight Watchers fruitless) and b) there is not a light bulb in the house that is less than one hundred and fifty watts (which makes seeing yourself for the first time in the early morning light the most frightening experience you could ever have).  As I was putting my makeup on Friday morning, I regarded my reflection with alarm.  Had I sprouted a full beard and mustache overnight?  Did I have more wrinkles now than when I had gone to bed?  When did my eyes start drooping like that?  Were my teeth always the color of corn? What exactly had happened to me while I slept?
I came down to breakfast, a little defeated, wondering how I went out in the world without being chased by villagers with pitchforks.  It wasn’t until I was in the car with my mother—the only person you should ask questions of if you want totally honest answers—that I had the nerve to ask her, “Is it the lighting in the upstairs bathroom or do I look as bad and as old as that mirror would have me believe?”  I held my breath while waiting for the answer but her hysterical laughter was all I needed to hear.  Turns out that under the harsh light of an operating-room set of marquee lights, none of us look that good.  Including my twelve-year-old son who was mumbling about Botox on the way home.
So, I have determined that it’s not plastic surgery, or visits to a pricey dermatologist or esthetician, or shooting your face up with unknown products that harden under your skin and smooth out the wrinkles that are the key to aging gracefully.  Rather, it’s really simple:  good lighting.  A quick trip to Target for some forty-watt bulbs and I’ll be all set. Hubby will think that I slept in a time machine and have emerged looking like I did in 1991 (without the bad perm and the shoulder pads).   I’ll look dewy, fresh, young, and rested.  Now, I just have to figure out how to change the light bulbs in my aunt and uncle’s house every Rosh Hashanah without them catching on.
What are your secrets to the fountain of youth, Stiletto friends?
Maggie Barbieri

Living the Dream

/in /by

Time was, long ago, before I was published, that I thought that once I had a book out, everything would be perfect. (It’s the same thought process that tells me that if I just weighed twenty pounds less, well, the laundry would do itself, I would always have on the perfect outfit, and my kids would do their homework the second they walked through the door.) I would have attained my dream and the birds would sing and all would be well. It wasn’t until I was on my third book, or maybe closer to my fourth, that I realized that living the dream meant something completely different that what I had envisioned.

I was at lunch the other day with a large group, sitting alongside a woman who is writing her memoir. She asked me, “so what is it like now that you’ve achieved your dream of being a writer?” I looked at her, and very thoughtfully said, “Here’s the thing. When you have a dream and you achieve it, you have to live the dream in the context of your reality.” And then I wondered why nobody from the Oprah show had ever called me to be a guest because that sentence alone a) sounded like something I had heard on one of her “Live Your Best Life” shows and b) didn’t sound like me at all.

But the more I thought about it, and what a horse’s rear end I sounded like, I realized that there was a kernel of truth there. It’s putting all of the pieces together around the achievement that’s hard. It’s living day to day when you think things should be a certain way and they’re not that’s challenging. That’s why a “dream”—a word whose synonym is also “vision”—is exactly that: it is never what you think it’s going to be. Fortunately, while living this dream, I’m not naked and I’m not being chased by people with no heads, two situations that dominate my regular nocturnal dreams.

I have dreamed of being a writer for as long as I can remember. I wrote stories and novels and poems from the time I was small. Curiously, they all had dead bodies at the center, but that’s a post for a different time. And now that I am a writer—and those of you who read this blog regularly know that it has taken me far too long to admit that I actually am a writer and not just a “freelance college textbook editor”—I run into people all the time who ask me what it’s like to be a writer and how I feel about attaining what has long been a dream for me. They are often surprised to find out that I still work full time or that I don’t have a regular writing schedule. Writers, it would seem, don’t have regular jobs and spend every day, from eight to two or some other reasonable time frame, writing.

Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works in the real world.

I was at a family party a few weeks ago and a relative of my husband asked me why I continued to work full time if I was a “successful writer.” I bit my tongue and resisted the urge to say, “because my kids like to eat” because she was genuinely interested and not passing judgment on my doing both. So, I explained the vagaries of the publishing world and e-books and royalties and advances and such until her eyes glazed over and she was sorry she ever asked. (That’ll learn ya.) Thing is, we live in an expensive part of the country and we’ve got a kid going to college in a mind-numbingly close eleven months and those textbooks don’t come cheap. Just ask me—that’s my day job. But the truth is that the joy I get from writing can’t be measured in dollars (thank God) and despite not having a “writerly existence,” I am still living the dream of putting pen to paper every day (or fingertips to keyboard, as the case may be) in between dealing with smelly soccer socks and a garbage bin that smells suspiciously like death and water that seeps into the basement at the first sign of drizzle.

None of this is a complaint. I wouldn’t have it any other way. But the older I get, the less wise I seem to become, and the more surprised I am on a daily basis. I wonder if I’ll ever be that full-time writer who labors in my attic, only to emerge at a decent hour to continue thinking about plot, structure, and characters while drinking a whimsical white Rioja, but then I remember that if I did that, no one would have clean soccer socks.

And we don’t want that.

Tell me, Stiletto readers, what dream have you attained in your life and how has it been different from what you imagined?

Maggie Barbieri

The Follow-Up Question

/in /by
My picture pops up every few seconds above…does this look like the face of someone you should tell everything to?  No?  Well, if so, you’re in the minority, because everywhere I go, I hear at least one life story in a day.
No kidding.
My husband always remarked on my ability to make small talk with people around me, perfect strangers even, and wonder what it was that made me a magnet for people who have stories to tell.  It was our friend, a retired New York City Police detective named John, who came up with the only theory to explain this phenomenon.
Apparently, I ask the “follow-up question.”
What is the “follow-up question,” you ask?  Well, seemingly, it’s that one extra question that will get the person telling you the most intimate, darkest secrets of their life despite the fact that they’ve never laid eyes on you.  It’s the question that I guess lets the teller know that you want to hear every single detail of their story—of their life, even—and that you won’t rest until you do.  It’s the question that keeps you molded to the same spot in the local pharmacy or in the parking lot at Target or on the phone with “Marco,” in India, who is helping you reconnect to the internet after a recent storm.  It’s the question that separates me, just your average writer/housewife/mother/textbook editor from anyone else I know.
A less generous friend calls me a “psycho magnet,” but I don’t think that’s what I am.  I am just a person who is interested enough in some lonely—or maybe just talkative—person’s life to ask the one question that will set the monologue wheels in motion.  John, the detective, said that if the textbook thing (my day job) ever went south, I should apply to the police department and focus on interrogations.  Jim says that if assigned to the terrorism task force, I would be busting terrorists left and right.  People tell me stuff even if they’re not supposed to.
Unfortunately, I usually hear a lot about intestinal trouble or a diatribe about the horrendous service at _________________ where the person telling me tried to buy ___________________ only to have no one wait on them.  That usually dovetails into a more personal story about their spouse, or their children, or a wayward niece of nephew.  Don’t ask me how we get there, but somehow, we always do.
But there are other, more interesting stories that come out of the follow-up question.  Case in point:  the day my first book, MURDER 101, was published, the only place that had copies was a local gift store which was owned by a dear friend who had placed his order early and had what seemed like the first copies printed.  He had set the books up on a large round table in the middle of the store, announcing their arrival with much fanfare.  He called me the minute the display was up and I headed over to the store to see what it looked like to have fifty copies of your first publication displayed in the middle of my favorite store in town. 
It was fabulous.
As I was gushing over the incredible display, a woman sidled up beside me.
“These your books?”
They were, I assured her.
“What are they about?”
This was back in the day before I had perfected my “elevator pitch;” you know, the one-sentence description of the book and the series that would perfectly describe what it was and let the potential reader know if it was right for them.  I set about describing the book from start to finish. 
The woman held her hand up to stop me when I got to around page fifty.  “So the murder is fiction?”
Rather than tell her that I thought it was compelling and leapt off the page, despite being “fiction,” I let her know that it was and asked her what she liked to read.  She shook off that question.
“I know about a real murder,” she whispered, clearly dismissive of my character, Alison Bergeron, and the body in the trunk of poor Alison’s car.  (In the interest of full disclosure, this was not a confession on her part.)
By this time, my husband and the owner of the store had wandered off to peruse the latest men’s offerings from Crabtree and Evelyn and I, despite my internal warning system, said, “Really?  Who got murdered?”  Most people, when confronted with a woman with wild hair, and even wilder eyes, would have probably joined Jim at the Crabtree and Evelyn display to see if their razor balm really did cut down on razor burn, but to me, this was too good to pass up.  The woman proceeded to regale me with stories of her “research,” and how she kept it all in a safe deposit box lest someone else get a hold of her ideas and the story.  It was just that good, in her mind.
I let her ramble on and then the kiss of death: I asked the follow-up question to the follow-up question in the form of “have you started writing?” which led her to a list of reasons as to why she hadn’t. (She, apparently, was very busy.  At the time, I had two children, a husband, a dog, and a full-time job.  Oh, and daily chemotherapy to attend to.  I wasn’t busy at all.)
I never did find out who got murdered and I also don’t know if she ever wrote her story, never mind get it published.  I used to see her around town and she would always give me a look that would either say “Do I know you?” or “Now that you know about the murder and the safety deposit box, I have to kill you, too!” but I couldn’t tell which it was.
 So there you have it, one example of where the follow-up question can lead.  And trust me:  it’s never good.
Hey, Stiletto friends…are you one of those people to whom others tell everything?  Do you ask the follow-up question to your own detriment?  And thanks to my friend and fellow Stiletto blogger, Susan McBride, for prompting the topic of this post.  After reading about her sharing with her A/C repairman, it dawned on me that I, too, had this special gift called “tell me your life story.”  Thanks, Susan!
Maggie Barbieri

In Defense of Paranoia and Over-Protectiveness

/in /by
My kids say I’m paranoid.
They also say that I’m overprotective.
Yes, and definitely yes.
Being a parent is to know fear as you have never known it before.  Maybe I’m a little overly dramatic (ok, I am), but to wait for your teenaged daughter to come back from a run that inexplicably goes past dusk brings anxiety.  Or to have your twelve-year-old walk through the door ten minutes later than he is supposed to from his trek home from school is panic inducing.  I’ve tried to explain to the kids what goes on in my mind, but they still think I’m crazy, and I guess that’s ok.  To me, it’s a dangerous world out there, something I try to communicate to them without scaring the dickens out of them and making them paranoid like me but they still think I’m crazy and I understand that. I thought my parents were crazy, too, when I was both a tween and a teen. 
Now, however, I “get” it.
Last week, here in New York, an eight-year-old boy went missing on the first day he was allowed to walk home alone from camp.  After begging his parents to let him walk home from camp, they had relented, telling him that they would meet him half way.  He left camp, got lost, and encountered the one person—because I am convinced that 99 out of 100 pedestrians would have led him to his parents—who saw his situation as an opportunity to do harm.  The man, Levi Aron, a citizen in the tight-knit Hasidic community where this little boy lived and worshipped with his family, took him in his car—probably telling him that he would take him to his parents—brought him home and kept him in his attic apartment for a day. The manhunt that ensued after little Leiby Kletzy’s disappearance caused Aron to panic.  So, he killed the boy by suffocating him.
My husband read the story in the paper and looked at our oldest, saying, “And this is why we’re crazy.”
We’re crazy because one chance encounter can have dire consequences.  Sure, these situations are rare, but they are not completely out of the realm of possibility and that’s what makes them all the more horrifying.  Here in the New York metropolitan area, no one can get the image captured on a security camera of that little boy, walking along a busy Brooklyn street, his backpack on his back, walking toward a stranger who had more than one screw loose.  Every time I see it, I want to scream at the boy in the video to “keep walking!”  But he keeps going, not a care in the world, toward the stranger who will do him the ultimate harm.
All parents have been in situations where they have had to make a decision like the one Lieby Kletzky’s parents made.  “Can I walk home today?”  “Can I stop at the ice cream store on the way home from school?”  “Can I take the bus to the mall?”  “Can I go to the midnight show of ‘Harry Potter’?”  His parents, who are raising their family in an insular, and up to this point, practically crime-free city neighborhood, probably felt somewhat comfortable letting him go.  After all, the streets in this neighborhood team with other families, other parents, and people who would help the little guy find his way when he got lost.  I’m sure that they never banked on the fact that a lunatic walked among them on their quiet city streets, someone who would look for the opportunity to hurt a child.
The letters to the editor in our local paper were, for the most part, sympathetic, but of course there were the few that placed blame squarely on the boy’s parents for letting an eight-year-old walk home from camp, a distance of about ten blocks.  He was too young, they claimed.  He didn’t have enough experience with the world, they wrote.  It’s too dangerous out there, they opined.  Perhaps all true.  But once the decision was made the parents fretted a bit, I’m sure, but decided that in their neighborhood, one where everyone is very similar, very family-oriented, very religious and caring of one another, nothing bad would happen.  It’s a parent’s worst nightmare, the one where you make the decision that you have fought against only to acquiesce and have it turn against you in the worst way possible.
I read an editorial in yesterday’s paper by a mother in Los Angeles who allows her young child walk to and from school and who gives him freedoms that even my teenager doesn’t have.  Giving into fear, she posits, means the terrorists have won or something like that.  By not allowing our children some basic freedoms, she says, we are imprisoning them in our hysteria, creating fearful and dependent children not ready to take on the world. She’s right about one thing:  I’m not ready for my children to take on the world.  If that makes me an hysteric, so be it.  Intellectually, I know I cannot protect them from every harm or every monster that roams the landscape. I know that ultimately, I have no control over every situation.  But I have to control the things that I can in the hope that I can keep them safe.
I can’t stop thinking about the little boy in the striped shirt, walking down a safe city street, his backpack on his back.  In my mind, he turns around and goes the other way, away from the maniac who took his life and ruined his family’s.  I don’t think I ever will forget him, just like I have never forgotten six-year-old Etan Patz, a little boy who disappeared in 1979 on a New York City street on the day he walked to his bus stop, never to be found.  His disappearance changed how parents viewed freedom and independence for years to come.   So every time either one of my children asks me why I’m so overprotective, why I’m so paranoid, I’ll say a little prayer for sweet Leiby Kletzky and his family and tell my kids that some day, they’ll understand.
Maggie Barbieri

Turning “Off”

/in /by

I’m the kind of person who when faced with nothing to do, a long stretch of interrupted peace, finds something to do.  I’m not good at relaxing.  Mr. Maggie often refers to it as my “on/off switch.”  He says that if I’m not “on,” I’m “off,” which usually means that I’m asleep.  I have a hard time turning off my mind and my body, which is why doing yoga has proven spectacularly unsuccessful for me.
The last few weeks, however, have forced me to do just that—turn off while awake.  I have just finished a day job project that required me to get twenty books revised and to the printer—all in India, no less—by the middle of June for a mid-July collective pub date.  To say that the project nearly did me in is not an understatement.  (For proof, you can ask either the northern half of Evelyn David or Susan.  They have heard enough whining to last a lifetime.)  I had to deal with the first round of edits on my next book (PHYSICAL EDUCATION, out in November) and then the copyedits.  I have a number of other projects for work in various stages of readiness, and with varying degrees of author compliance.  By say the twentieth of June, my brain was fried.
So, I decided to play against type and take a few days off.  At first, it was an unsuccessful experiment, with me going deep into the bowels of the Barbieri basement (you remember, the one with the vermin) and beginning to clean.  Three giant black plastic bags later and I was only mildly sated in my quest to bring order to the house.  Suffice it to say, we still have a long way to go, but we’re getting there. Then there was the issue of packing child #2 for camp.  That took all of two hours.  I still had a lot of energy and not a lot of things to do.
I decided to read a book.  And then another.  I took long, meandering walks down by the river, through town, and even through the woods.  I spent a lot of time at the Laundromat while waiting for the delivery of our new washer.  I bought a notebook and started outlining chapters for a new book I’m working on.  I wrote down a few ideas for yet another book.  I wrote the beginning of the new Alison Bergeron book.  And I started to see the benefit of this relaxing thing, this turning off of the mind.  By turning off the mind, I discovered, you are actually turning it back on, and are able to think.  And for a writer, that feeling is priceless.
I guess I’m finding that there is a lot competing for space in my over-packed brain so I’m going to have to think of ways to carve out time to get some thinking done, as sad as that sounds.  When do your best ideas come?  When you’re busy?  Or when you’re “off”? 
Maggie Barbieri

Redefining Infidelity (and oh yeah, stupidity, too)

/in /by

I live in the greater New York metropolitan area but I don’t think I’m getting any more coverage of the Anthony Weiner fiasco than those you elsewhere.   I have been treated to a variety of salacious and ridiculous front-page headlines in my local paper, thought, poking fun at Weiner’s antics as well as his name.  I won’t go into detail, but suffice it to say, sometimes I wonder if my twelve-year-old son is the headline writer for the Daily News.

The other thing I’ve been wondering about since the scandal broke is: What are we currently calling infidelity?  And why, overwhelmingly, are men at the heart of these salacious sex scandals?  Weiner has vociferously protested that his marriage to the gorgeous Huma Abedin—now pregnant with their child—will not end, and maybe that is so.  But did he really think that texting provocative pictures of himself was a minor thing?  The number of women with whom he has now been “involved,” albeit virtually, is almost reaching double digits but I think there are still some people out there who don’t think “sexting” is a breach of the marriage vows because there was no physical contact.
I heartily disagree.
A couple of rules of thumb:
-If you don’t want your spouse catching you do it, it’s wrong. 
-If you wouldn’t do it in front of your spouse, it’s wrong. 
-If you’re doing it in secret, it’s wrong. 
-If you deny that you did it, it’s wrong. 
Obviously, putting all those things together would indicate that you are either shamed by what you did or afraid of being caught.  By very definition:  wrong.
Basically, if you can’t figure out how to use Twitter, you really aren’t qualified to do many jobs, not the least of which is New York City mayor, Weiner’s aspiration.  Most kids I know are fluent in Twitter.  Most of them also know that posting pictures of yourself online, either on Twitter or your Facebook account, can lead to undesirable things happening.  Why?  Because we’ve told them.  We’ve told them to be careful and to not post anything that they wouldn’t, potentially, want the whole world to see.  So why does a politician do something so bone-headed?
I’ve been wrestling with this for the past week.  Why is it that seemingly not a month goes by that we don’t see a male politician taking to the stage to give his version of events, and his excuses for his actions?  Why is it that we rarely—or actually never—see a devoted husband standing beside his incredibly stupid and oversexed wife as she recounts what she did and how she got caught?  Sheryl Gay Stolberg tackled questions like these in her recent New York Times article, “When It Comes to Scandal, Girls Won’t Be Boys.”  A quote from Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, said it best:   “The shorthand of it is that women run for office to do something, and men run for office to be somebody.”  The article went on to say that once elected, women feel more pressure to work harder, to prove themselves in a man’s world because even though we’ve made tremendous strides, let’s face it:  politics is still a boy’s club.  We’re just allowed to play sometimes.
Of course, there are women who cheat, female politicians who have been accused of adultery and other sordid actions, but they are in the minority.  And when that does happen, instead of not being surprised, we’re disappointed.  As the article points out so eloquently, we expect more from our female politicians.
Ok, so I know that this post has about three thesis statements and multiple main ideas, but that just goes to show you how hard it is for me to wrap my brain around this stupidity.  (Or just that I was having an “off” writing day.)  Men with beautiful, accomplished wives texting/sexting women they’ve never met…it boggles the mind.  Does it really just come down to the fact that these men crave sex of any kind so badly that they’ll risk everything for even a virtual encounter?  Are they still the uncool kid at the uncool table in high school, wishing a girl—any girl—would talk to them?  Or does it speak to a narcissism so great that they believe that they are invincible?  I’d love to know what you think, Stiletto friends.
Maggie Barbieri

Perspective

/in /by

First, I want to take moment to remember the people of Joplin, Missouri. I can’t imagine anything more horrifying than being trapped in a store while a tornado bears down, knowing that the store will probably collapse and bury you alive. The devastation is vast, the damage unthinkable. So, sending good thoughts and prayers to the people who are trying to put their lives together, one day at a time.

I am reflecting on this because I just passed the sixth anniversary of my original melanoma diagnosis. (There would be another, more serious diagnosis, the following year after I had achieved NED—no evidence of disease—just two months prior.) This past Friday, the day I had been diagnosed all those years before, was the same as every other here: get up, make lunches, walk dog, feed cat, do laundry, find lacrosse stick, carpool, grocery shop, walk dog again, feed cat again, make dinner. In between all of that, I juggled the management of twenty books for my day job, all of which need to go to the printer by this Friday at the latest. All were in various stages of being finished. Finally, after everything was cleaned up, I poured a glass of wine for me and my husband and sat down. I then proceeded to belly ache about my day and how busy I had been, how tired I was. He matched me, complaint for complaint. After we had finished, I looked over at the calendar to see when the next Little League game was and saw the date: May 20th.

I had a couple of reactions. The first was awe that I had not counted down to the day as I had in previous years. I was making progress on that account! The second was that I needed to shut my freaking pie hole.

I looked at Jim and said, “Six years ago today, I was an unpublished writer with a Stage IIIc diagnosis. Today, I have five books in print and I’m healthy.” I clinked my glass against his. “Here’s to complaining about the little things.”

When I was dealing with my cancer situation, people would say things to me like “It really puts everything in perspective, huh?” or “I bet you’ll never complain about the little things again, right?” Wrong. I didn’t need perspective then or now. I had and have it; I know how lucky we are. And being able to complain about the little things, the stupid stuff, means that you don’t have anything big to complain about. To me, focusing on the little problems that we all deal with on a day to day basis—standing in a line we consider too long, driving behind a car we think is going too slow, having an appliance break down—is a gift. It means we’re human and we can focus on the small stuff.

One of the best days in the last six years occurred when my kids—who normally get along swimmingly—had a knock-down, drag-out fight over something ridiculous. There was screaming, yelling, and eventually crying. There was Mom “taking sides,” according to one kid, and blame placing. Eventually, there were hugs and resolution. And all of it was music to my ears. When you go through something like an illness, or god forbid, a death, things change. The way people behave around you changes. Your kids stop fighting because they don’t want to upset you. They think you’ve got enough on your plate and are wise enough to settle their disagreements in private, away from you. So the way you know that things are normal again is when they have a knock-down, drag-out fight in your presence, and expect you to make everything right again.

All of that, to me, is perspective.

Today, take a moment and thank the universe for all of the petty annoyances that make up your day. I have already given thanks for the dishwasher that really doesn’t wash dishes, the dog who refuses to do anything in the rain, and the manuscript that won’t edit itself, no matter how long I stare at it.

Blessings to all of our Stiletto faithful and to anyone else dealing with the things that life can throw at you and that you have to learn to deal with without any preparation whatsoever.

Oh, and May is Skin Cancer Awareness month! Wear your sunscreen, even if it’s cloudy!

Maggie Barbieri

Paddling Against the Current

/in /by

This past Sunday was a beautiful day in the Northeast, so Jim and I strapped the kayaks onto the roof of the car and headed down to the River. This wasn’t the kayaks maiden voyage of the season; child #1 and the French exchange student had kayaked last weekend and christened them for the new season. We hopped in and paddled away from the shore, the water calm and the wind barely blowing. The day had the perfect conditions for kayaking.

About five hundred feet into our trip, I started complaining. My life vest was riding up. My paddle didn’t seem to be working correctly. Someone had changed the foot pedals in the boat and my feet were too far away from them. Jim calmly told me how to adjust everything and we started out again but this time, I noticed the underlying problem, the one that was making the beginning of the journey so hard.

We were paddling against the current.

Makes sense. The river we kayak on feeds into the great Hudson River, so the water is going to flow in that direction. I had forgotten that for the first part of the trip, you were paddling upstream, as it were, going against the flow, which made making any headway more difficult. When we reached the turnaround, a little stretch with a copse of wild overgrown trees smack in the middle of the water, I put my paddle down. There was no need for it. The current carried us through this stretch, our boats moving silently and gracefully along.

See where I’m going here?

Sometimes life feels like being in a forty-pound kayak paddling upstream. Other times, it feels like you are on autopilot, being carried along by the gentle current, the one that leads you in the right direction. I think this analogy applies even more so to writing. You jump into your work-in-progress and….thunk. No where to go. Paddling upstream. Your vest is too tight. Nothing is working.

I always tell my kids that it takes way more energy to be negative than it does to be positive. I’m trying to bring this approach to life in general, and writing, more specifically. Paddling upstream on your book is a waste of time. So, show of hands: who likes to waste time out there? (I’m looking…I don’t see anyone.) I thought about what I do when I hit a bad patch in the plot or a character does something that doesn’t make any sense to me or I get a case of your garden-variety writer’s block. Well, in kayaking terms, sometimes I whine that my vest is too tight. Sometimes I blame it on the paddle. And sometimes I just row back to shore and rest a while until I realize what’s been stumping me. It may be as easy as starting over, putting my character in a different situation. I may have him or her run into someone and start a conversation. I might have them make a phone call. I’ll do anything to get to that tranquil place where I let it all go and let the current—or in this case, my imagination—guide me back to shore.

I may have stretched this analogy thinner than a taut rubber band and for that, I apologize. Sometimes, though, things just hit me in the face and make me wonder if other people experience the same sorts of issues in life and in writing.

What do you do when you find yourself going against the current or paddling upstream in either your writing or life in general?

Maggie Barbieri

It’s French to Me

/in /by

There came a time, around my junior year of college, when I realized I had enough credits to qualify as a French minor to go along with my English major.  There also came a time, when I realized I really, really liked this guy in my French pronunciation class, that if I continued to take more French courses, I could graduate with a double major, French/English.

That doesn’t mean I can actually speak French.
The cute guy eventually became my tutor, and then my husband.  My mother often tells him how much money he owes her because, dag nabbit, if she sent a kid to college to get a French major, said kid ought to be able to at least order off a French menu with a modicum of confidence.
As my French teacher, the wonderful Madame Marzi, once said to me, “You have a wonderful accent.  If only I could teach you to actually speak French.”
Why do I bring this up?  Well, as luck would have it, tonight, we welcome a French exchange student to our home for ten days.  She is visiting us from a coastal town in France—the same one that my husband visited when he was part of the first group to partake in this exchange thirty years ago.  We are all very excited:  my daughter, because the young woman visiting us is the same age as she is and seems to have the same interests; my son, well, because he’s twelve and what twelve-year-old wouldn’t want a female French exchange student living in his house?; my husband because he is thrilled that the program is still in existence and thriving; and me…
Well, I’m not so sure.  See, the French exchange student will be spending most of her free time—the time when she’s not at school with my daughter or visiting New York City—with me.  The French major.  The woman who once told her children, in French, while on vacation in Quebec, that we would soon visit the factory to make cheese.  (What I meant to say is that we would soon visit the pool to go swimming.  Trust me, a lot of these vocabulary words sound the same.)
The goal of her visit is to speak as much English as possible, something that will be necessitated by spending time with me, the non-French speaker.  I am hoping that her English will be better than my French, but based on our meeting with last year’s participants, it’s a virtual crapshoot.  Some students have more English than others and are very enthusiastic about using the language, while others have a rudimentary knowledge of English and prefer to speak their native tongue. 
Regardless, it should be interesting.
And fodder for future books.
At the very least, it has gotten my family on board with cleaning.  She will be staying in my son’s room, which has become the de facto guest room for all visitors.  He remarked the other day that his room never looked so clean, and that he liked it that way.  (We’ll see how long that lasts.)  I spent the better part of Saturday at the laundromat washing blankets, comforters and sheets so all bedding in our house is nice and fresh.  I scrubbed the bathroom tile and grout so that the room feels new again.  If nothing else, her visit has prompted us to make this place spic and span.
Stayed tuned for updates on her visit and for the misadventures of “Maggie, the Only Diploma-ed French Major Who Can’t Speak French.”
Maggie Barbieri

The Royal Wedding

/in /by
Do you remember where you were when Charles and Diana got married?
I do.
I was on Cape Cod with my good friend, Kathy, staying at a house her parents had rented.  She and I, great friend all through high school, would be heading off to college in the coming weeks, she to Georgetown, me to Manhattan College, and the summer was bittersweet.  On one of our last days on the Cape, we set our alarms for four o’clock in the morning because the event that we had been looking forward to all summer—the royal wedding—was set to begin.
It had to be pretty special to get two teenaged girls up from their endless slumbers.
I remember that in order to see the wedding and remain in bed, we had to sleep on a creaky pullout bed in a drafty added-on room because that was the only room in the house that had both a television and a bed.  I remember that once four a.m. came, Kathy seemed less enthusiastic about the wedding than she had the night before when we were roaming Chatham, looking for a good time and only finding a plethora of fudge and tee shirt shops.  I, however, roused myself, not wanting to miss a minute of the Charles and Diana nuptials.
I remember, even though it was the early ‘80s and fashion was decidedly different than it is now, not liking Diana’s dress, thinking that it made the twenty-year-old look dowdy and frumpy.  I also remember laughing when she flubbed his many-parted name in the vows.  I remember the beautiful cathedral, the gorgeous music, and the fanfare.  I tried to envision what it would take, however, to find Charles remotely attractive, his prince-hood aside.
Diana wasn’t much older than I was at that time, yet being married was the last thing on my mind.  I couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to get married in front of the entire world to a man older than I and from a very different station in life.
Well, we all know how it ended and yes, I was one of those people who were truly heartbroken when I found out that Princess Diana had died tragically in a car accident.  For many women of my generation, she held a special place in our hearts.  She was buried on the same day that my sister’s bridal shower was to take place and I remember setting the tables at the restaurant where it was held, crying as a television in the background showed her funeral, her sons walking behind her casket.
I have a 17-year-old now and not once have I heard her mention the impending nuptials of Diana’s son, William, and the lovely Kate Middleton, a woman older, and probably a little wiser, than her late mother-in-law was before her own wedding.  What was it about the royal wedding of thirty years ago that captured so many hearts?  And what is it about this one that seems so predictable and not all that special? 
It’s hard to know.  I suspect that with the media being what it is today, we know a lot about what’s to come.  We are also going to witness the marriage of two people who have been living together for a while and who seem like a very stable, familiar kind of couple, a couple we could know.  There’s not a lot of mystery here like there was thirty years ago.  We’ve watched Will grow up and we’ve charted his relationship with Kate, having been with him almost every step of the way.  Yes, there may come a time when he could be king, but a lot of things would have to happen first.
I think maybe, too, the bloom is off the royal rose.  In the last thirty years, we’ve witnessed weddings, divorces, infidelities, scandals, and a lot of heartache.  The mystery and romance of a royal wedding just doesn’t exist anymore; we’re far too jaded.  We know them too well.  We know that in a lot of ways, many of them are just like us.
I’ll still be setting my alarm on April 29th to watch the royal wedding, however.  What about you?
Maggie Barbieri