The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Philip

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Happy Birthday, Philip!

Remember turning 16? Philip did on March 19, but we only had a small family party for him on that day. We celebrated last weekend; it's amazing how different he looks now than he did even last year.

No more little boy.

I remember people coming up to me around Christmas time (my bd is in February) and saying, "Amazing that you are going to be 16 on your next bd. It's unreal." I never got what was so special about turning 16 until I had my own kids. It really does seem like a transition. Plus, in NJ you can drive.

Anyway, here are some pictures from what we've been up to, beginning with a family basketball game:

and a quick bd moment with Philip:

I think I changed how I thought the year I turned 16 simply by virtue of telling people, "I'm 16." It sounded so much more official (I actually remember using that word when talking to my girlfriend back then) than 15. 15 just sounds so much younger. Or at least we thought it did.

Did you change when you were 16? What do you remember about it the most?

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Mother's Day Revisited

Mother's Day Eve is not a very well known holiday, but I was thinking it should be made more official last Saturday on Mother's Day Eve. Son #1 had gone bowling with friends, Son #2 was watching youtube videos in his room, and Only Daughter was creating a Mother's Day novella.

Even our Malaysian houseguest had agreed to stop watching Deal or No Deal and Wheel of Fortune as they had begun to drive me nuts.(Is there a channel dedicated to these shows? They seemed to never go off the air) We rented The Commitments and he kept leaning forward and turning the volume up to figure out the English inside their thick brogues.

So he was challenged, the kids were all occupied, Maisie had had a bath and was subdued and damp in the laundry room, and the cats were all in different napping spots. It was one of those rare, calm moments in the house. I sat on the couch. I thought about doing something productive, maybe even sneaking off to write a little bit. Yes, I thought, that will be my Mother's Day present to myself: an hour or so of writing time. Before going upstairs, I decided to bring some kitchen waste out to the compost pile.

As I was coming back inside, I saw about six young girls standing on the lawn. It was around 8:30 at night. This could not be good. I went in to talk to Son #2.

He explained that their parents had gone to see a show in Atlantic City and they were all sleeping over one of the girl's houses. They were just out for a walk, he explained, but would it be okay if he walked Maisie?

Now my boys offer to walk the dog about as often as blizzards hit Kenya, so I started laughing. "No, she's good. Why don't you stay inside?"

Glaring at me since he obviously had already made plans, he slammed the door really hard after I left. About five minutes later, Emma came to get me.

It seemed Philip was locked in his room. Literally. The door would not open. I got a flat head screwdriver, and managed to slide it under the door to Philip. He got the entire doorknob off, but the deadbolt was still firmly embedded into the doorframe. But at least we had airspace and could see each other.

"MOM, DID YOU DO THIS?" he wailed, "LOCK ME IN HERE?"

"No, it must have happened when you slammed the door." Mind you, we were talking only through the circle where the doorknob had once been.

"I think I'm having a panic attack," he complained.

I looked out the hallway window. The girls were moving around under the trees like ghosts. But Philip was high up on the second floor.

Now, I could have called my husband or Googled locks to fix this problem, but I realized I had Philip, for once, exactly where I wanted him. And it was kind of a holiday.

"Breathe, honey," I told him, "Breathe in and out and you won't panic."

"But I'm hungry. And thirsty. I have to get out of this room!"

Emma got him a juice box and held the flexi-straw up to the open space. She slipped him animal crackers and granola bars. He found a much needed Pepsi bottle after drinking his third Capri Sun (life is sometimes easier for boys).

"Mom, can't you fix this?" he asked again.

"I think," I said seriously, "that you are in there until Dad gets home tomorrow morning. You have some granola bars in there, and you can just use the Pepsi bottle."

"Nooooooo," he cried, "you can't do this."

"Sorry," I said, "but this is probably the best place for you tonight."

While Emma was telling him how he was just like Rapunzel right now, I went out to the lawn and asked the girls if I could help them. They said they were just taking a walk. I stood there smiling until they left.

Then I came inside and put my eye up to the semi circle space I had to view Philip. There he was, playing the guitar, his curtains wide open. Only he could not leave and no one could come in.

It was perfect.

If only it could stay that way.

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.

***