The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Aligned Stars and the Presence of Dynamite

Sunday, January 30, 2011

Aligned Stars and the Presence of Dynamite

There has been a whole lot written about "balance" between work and family, and almost all of it is aimed at women. I could never work when my kids were small, particularly the boys. And I'm not talking work as in leaving the house with shaved legs and make up on. I mean work as in planting marigolds.

I actually tried to make a garden once when both boys were toddlers. Philip began "tasting" the sand and Christopher got stuck in the thorny berry patch and began howling. So I just played with them. Everyone stayed intact and the only "balance" I had in my life occurred when I got the two boys, the groceries and the dog food into the shopping cart without tipping.

But they're older now, so the other day when I got a phone call from an actual interview person, I felt really cool. And I rarely feel cool, but that morning I did. I had cleaned my desk off and my new YA was coming together and I had FINALLY bought living room curtains, so all my stars were aligned. There I was, with that new ms, an interview, and Christopher safely off at college.

Of course, my life is generally not this smooth. The other side of that day was that the living room curtains are still in the bag, the YA only has the first chapter and a half done, and it was a snow day which meant Philip and Emma were both home.

Philip and Emma have been tight playmates ever since we toted Emma to the playground with us in a Snuggli.

Life with them is something like this. This is Philip's personality:

So alone, that's not so bad. Here's what happens when Emma comes along:

And there's a bigger reason I chose those images. So there I am, on the phone, feeling cool for the first three seconds of the interview. Very writerly. Very organized. And I get this text while I'm talking about organized,writerly things: Rmbr that rocket P got for his bd a lng time ago?

I do remember the rocket Philip got for his birthday. He was turning12 and a well-meaning (childless) friend had given him a rocket to launch. Somehow, ~~because I had put it there~~ it ended up in a box of old maternity clothes.

Put it back, I texted, and get out of the basement while I'm on the phone!!!!!

Mom, is he lying or is this acktual dynomite? BRB

So I trotted down to the basement, still discussing character and plot and all those kinds of things. I got the rocket and wrote an old fashioned note to them: We can launch this later, when I'm off the phone. I got the interview done. I sounded, the interviewer said, very animated.

If only she knew that it wasn't plot structure giving so much pitch to my voice.

12 comments:

Bish Denham said...: OMG! The Adventures of Mom and Other Hair-raising Tales of Terror.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Anonymous said...: I've had the same thing happen to me: I'm either too excited or too lackluster on the phone because I'm preoccupied with something in front of me.

Yikes @ the rocket.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: Bish, I've learned that when they are quiet and you want to think they are reading or absorbed in some mind-enhancing activity, you better go check.

Emma and Philip are pretty much experts at conjuring adventure.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: I find it really difficult to talk on the phone unless the house is empty, Medeia. And that almost never happens.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Jemi Fraser said...: Yikes! Rockets are not a good thing to find when mom is on the phone! But that's always the way, isn't it???? :); Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: It does seem that way, Jemi. They could be great all morning, then when the "critical" friend, the one who doesn't have kids, but has lots of opinions on what you're doing wrong calls, a huge squabble explodes out of nowhere.

You can pretty much count on it.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Marcia said...: I'm still wondering what they were doing in the maternity clothes. :D; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: According to the legend, Marcia, they were looking for snow clothes so we could go sleigh riding that afternoon.

And yes, that was the first thought that crossed my mind when I got the text.; Sunday, 30 January, 2011
Adrienne said...: Ha! When it comes to phone calls, kids and pets forget all about boundaries...
See, I think this is why women are so good at multi-tasking. Our survival (and our children's) depends on it.; Friday, 04 February, 2011
Mary Witzl said...: Hahahaha!

I had a telephone interview for a teaching job a couple of months ago and my cat decided to crap in the corner the minute it started. For two hours previous to this, he had been curled up in a ball, sound asleep. Wish I'd done as well on my interview as you did on yours...; Wednesday, 09 February, 2011
Anne Spollen said...: That's right, Adrienne. If women couldn't multitask, the species would have died out thousands of years ago.

Kids and pets provide such a grounding though for those times when we take ourselves too seriously.

Well, Mary, I happen to speak some Cattish, and if that phone call disturbed that kitty's nap, you got a clear message on what he thought of that situation - and you. And I think saying I sounded "animated" was an uber polite way of saying, "Geeesh, I didn't know Anne suffered from bipolar mania." Cause that's how I think I sounded.; Thursday, 10 February, 2011
Nora MacFarlane said...: Oh my goodness! I needed that laugh! Never a dull moment...; Tuesday, 15 February, 2011

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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