Leaving on a jet plane

All my bags are packed, I’m ready to go. Wait, isn’t that a song? Well, at least I’m not singing. Bill and I are leaving today for San Francisco. I’m speaking at a writers conference there next weekend. If anyone living in that area reads this blog, check out the appearances on my website and drop by to see me. There is a mass autographing on Wednesday night, July 30th. Hundreds of writers signing their books and all the money goes to literacy.
We’re going early because I’ve never been to San Francisco. I consider myself fairly well-traveled. But then every time I think that, some giant gap in my knowledge wields its head and I have to remember that I’m still that oil patch kid who saw the ocean for the first time at age 27!
I often find myself a bit envious of people who grew up in the larger world. I meet writers who’ve got MFAs from Ivy League schools or spent years in Europe walking in the footsteps of Gertrude Stein or Hemingway. They talk about wanting to capture the ambiance of the Hampton’s in the 1960s or maybe write another memoir of their east coast private school for the privileged. I like those stories, too. But that sort of shared history that a lot of people in publishing claim has always left me as odd writer out.
When I try to capture the ambiance of oil patch in the 1960s or wax eloquently of my small public high school where the well-to-do were the ones in the nice new mobile homes my work gets pegged and "wacky southern". I don’t really think of myself as wacky or southern. But I guess to the ladies from Radcliffe and Wellesley it must seem very amusing indeed.
My background, perhaps, makes me an improbable writer. I remember once getting a fan letter from a reader who’d grown up in my hometown as well. She said, "I’m so happy that someone from Oilton did well."
Of course, the truth is, a lot of people from Oilton have done very well. So well in fact that if you see them on the street, you can’t recognize them as different from anyone else.
So maybe that’s my goal. I’ve packed up my best clothes and my warmest smile. I’m headed off to San Francisco to be among a huge throng of writers. And I hope not one person looks at me and says, "hey, is that one of those gals from Oil’n?"
I’ll keep you posted.

And staring in the role of Great-Aunt Nora...

Bill and I took my daughter to see Mama Mia! I’d seen it on stage several years ago, so there were no surprises. It was fun. Who wouldn’t enjoy a lot great songs, wonderful dance numbers and fabulous scenery.
But you would think, since the director, producers, virtually everybody, knew that it was a musical, they would have cast actors in the roles who could actually sing. For most it was a laudable effort. Poor Pierce Bronson was worse than guys at my high school.
As we were leaving, Bill said to me, "I just kept imagining how Cher would have belted out those tunes or even Madonna.’"
I couldn’t help but agree. Meryl Streep did a pretty good job. But yeah, Cher has really lived the story.
Of course, both Streep and Cher are a little old for the part. Much was made of the daughter being just twenty. So when the mother was living this wild life with three serial boyfriends, she was 37? Hmmm.
My sister, Sherry, told me (therefore it might be just gossip rather than fact) that Hollywood had a hard time getting someone to accept the part of the mother. That the script called for a woman aged 40. But in Hollywood, no woman aged forty wants to admit to being forty. So they had to settle on Streep who is 59 and therefore more kindly disposed to being thought to be 40.
I just shook my head at that. Hollywood! They are such shallow phoneys. Getting older is great. My years have given me such perspective. And I’m a lot happier now than when I was younger. I don’t look like I did at twenty. But I think I have more character in my face now than I did then. A photographer once suggested that my publicity photo should be air-brushed to get rid of the crows-feet around my eyes. I wouldn’t let her. I think the lines actually make me look smarter and more interesting.
With these thoughts in my mind, I piddled around my house tonight feeling very smug and superior. I’m traveling to San Francisco next week for a writer’s conference and have a lot to do to get ready. All my best clothes had to be pulled out of the closet, tried on and then taken up or let out. I’ve got to get a haircut and freshen my highlights. Tomorrow, I’m getting a facial and having my invisible blonde eyebrows dyed. Much to be done.
As I washed my face with jojoba cream, I caught sight of myself in the mirror.
Who do you think you’re fooling? I asked.
If I’m so unconcerned with my looks and my years, then why aren’t I allowing myself to gracefully age into a revitalized version of my Great-Aunt Nora.
Does this qualify me as having ‘gone Hollywood?’

Breakfast with Griffin ease

Six-year-old Griffin spent the morning with me. His mom had a doctor’s appointment and just a couple of minutes after she left he said that he was hungry.
"What would you like to eat?" I asked him.
"Pizza!" he answered, very enthusiastically.
I carefully explained to him that it was nine o’clock in the morning and that we do not eat pizza at nine o’clock in the morning. He heard me out completely, nodding in recognition and then with a slump of his little shoulders and a sigh of defeat he said, "Okay. Hot dog."
I did not feed him pizza or hot dog, because I just couldn’t get my breakfast mindset around it. But I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.
Why is a hot dog so different than a link sausage and a couple of pieces of toast?
Are there things in pizza that you wouldn’t put in your omelet?
I remember as a kid that occasionally we would have "breakfast night" at my house. Instead of a typical supper, my mom would fix pancakes or biscuits and gravy. Looking back, I imagine that the breakfast nights undoubtedly coincided with the end of the month or right before payday. But as a kid I had no sense of that. And the truth is, I really like pancakes better at night than in the morning.
I guess our food choices for specific meals is more a habit than anything else. General Mills pretty much invented breakfast cereal. Prior to that, I think breakfast looked a lot like any other meal. All meals were heavy on bread and since bread took a while to bake, quick breads, like biscuits and corn pone were more typical early in the morning. That was also the time to gather eggs, so maybe it made sense to eat them early or at least to eat the ones that were cracked. Working people ate meat if they had it. And with no refrigeration, ham and bacon cured with salt or sugar was convenient for just slicing off to go in a pan.
So it seems to me that what we eat for breakfast has probably almost nothing to do with health or diet or nutrition. And has everything to do with convenience, perception and tradition.
I’m sure if Griff were sixteen instead of six, he would have argued it just that way.

A Morsi movie review

I went to see Kit Kittridge, American Girl this week. Actually I went twice. I took my daughter and liked it so much I talked Bill into going with me to see it a couple of nights later. It’s a kids movie, I guess, but there is so much kid still in me that I’m not bothered by silliness. And I felt the storyline had tremendous depth and a lot to think about in our current economic times. But I don’t want to ruin it for anybody who hasn’t seen it. And I don’t really want to talk about that part of it.
What stuck with me in the movie was not how daring and resourceful and bright Kit was. She was, and that was great. She and Ruthie and Stirling represented the young people raised in terrible economic times that would grow up to fight and win a world war. Tom Brokaw called them the Greatest Generation and I would never argue that. I know and remember so many who grew up in that time and I admire them tremendously.
But as I watched the movie, I just couldn’t get over the realization of how young Kit’s parents were.
I guess I hadn’t really thought of that before. Somehow I’d always pictured the adults in that era to be, well...adults, wise and certain and in control. But you know they weren’t. They were no more wise than we’ve been. They were as uncertain as humans always are. And during the depression, so much of the world was out of control.
Kit’s dad went from an up-and-coming business owner to standing in line at the soup kitchen. And Kit’s mom goes from serving the ladies of her club in the garden to being on her hands and knees in it trying to scratch out food for the table.
The grace displayed on screen, probably couldn’t hold a candle to some of the stories our grandparents or great-grandparents could tell.
I remembered a story my dad told me about he and my grandfather. They had been hired to harvest a farm and they were to be paid in sorghum. Dad said it was just the two of them, one man and one boy on a huge farm. They worked for weeks in terrible conditions and awful heat. When they got paid their sorghum, they took it home in triumph only to discover that it was rancid.
My Dad was furious. He told me, "I wanted my father to go back and kill that farmer." But grandpa didn’t. Instead he said, "Son, now we’ll know never to work for him again."
Dad would shake his head when he told that story. Sixty years after it happened, he still was amazed at the decency of a man who could take that kind of injustice and somehow live over it.
It made me wonder about myself. Sure, I’ve had some tough times, some heartbreaks. But those seem small in comparison to what these people faced. I don’t know that I have the fortitude, the grace, the decency that my grandparents had.
And if perhaps I actually do...well I’d just as soon never find out.

Weathering best & worst

It rained this week. I know you’re thinking that’s pretty lame news. As in, when you’ve got nothing to say, talk about the weather. But it really was exciting. The sky clouded up. It got darker and darker. And that wonderful smell of ozone was in the air.
I said to Bill, "Do you think it’s going to rain?"
He answered something like, "I hope so."
Probably a half hour later it began. At first just a few scattered sprinkles. Then it started coming down as if it were in buckets. We sat on the front porch together and watched it. My side of the swing was getting most of what was carried on the wind, so I made Bill switch places with me. My mother would have said, "You’re not made of sugar, young lady!" But the truth is, I am.
Now if you’re not living in south Texas in the summer of 2008, or in the southwest generally or northern California or the Sahara, then you’d probably think that we’re pretty crazy to sit on our porch to watch the rain. But this June was the driest on record. We’ve only had six inches of precipitation since last September. And we were days away from water restrictions.
But then it rained and rained and rained and rained again. Today I was at lunch with three of my Slacker girlfriends and we lingered over coffee as we watched the downpour through the windows.
My girlfriends and I, known to ourselves as The Slackers, have been together about fifteen years. There are seven of us now. We sort of ran into each other over writing. Some of us are multi-published, some slightly published, some not yet published and maybe a couple who’ve thrown in the towel on getting published. Writing brought us together, but it’s not what keeps us together.
We’ve shared a lot. We’ve bought each other gag gifts that nearly made us gag. We’ve analyzed each others children and listened to each others complaints about husbands. We’ve been through deaths and divorces. We’ve danced at weddings. We’ve worried about health. And we’ve even tried to remove an orange aura seen by a fortune teller in New Orleans. Don’t know if that worked, we didn’t go back to the fortune teller to find out.
We’ve drank too much. We’ve laughed too loud. And we’ve cried like our hearts were breaking.
And today was no different. Some great news, some good news, some not so great news.
Like the weather, things can be lush and wonderful for so long, that we forget how bad things can be. Then the troubles come and we feel like we’ll never get past them.
I try to believe that the rain will always come. That no matter how long it’s been since all that cool goodness has poured down on us, it will always come again. Some days that’s enough to get me through.
Or as Natalie said one Thanksgiving when she was still just a little girl, "I’m grateful that nobody is in prison."

Happy 4th of July!

I wanted to share something special for the 4th of July. This is a blog that I wrote in May for someone elses site. It's about Memorial Day, but I think it has significance for this holiday as well. So fly your flag, thank a vet, make some noise. Have a great holiday.

Memorial Day weekend is just ten days away! I’m Pam Morsi, your guest blogger today. And I’m here to remind you that hot dogs and potato salad are in your immediate future.
It’s been a busy month for me. I’ve got a new book out and I’ve been doing some traveling around to try to promote it. I like traveling, but I really like staying at home too. So, I try not to overbook myself and spend more time than I really want on the road. With that said, yesterday nobody was more surprised than me when I decided that for this Memorial Day weekend I would head north to Oklahoma and see my old Uncle Bob.
Uncle Bob is a gentle soul, with smile so wide it makes his eyes disappear, and a laugh that comes rumbling up from a depth of good humor. He’s the last of his generation in my family. He’s outlived his brother and sister and most of his friends. Although he still takes care of his own yard, he’s just not as strong as he used to be. He doesn’t see as well and doesn’t drive unless it’s an emergency.
On Saturday, the 24th, his high school will have a big alumni picnic. He wants to go and visit old friends. So I’m going to take him.
His class, the Seniors of 1942 faced a world so different from ours, it’s hard to get our minds around it. Many of his classmates quit school before graduation to go into the military. And others who’d signed up for the National Guard right out of Boy Scouts were simply plucked out of class. He knew that he would be going off to fight a war, because the whole world was involved in one.
Bob was lucky to come back, he says. Lucky because some of the battles he was in, D-Day, the Hurtgen Forrest, the Battle of the Bulge, are imfamous for all the guys like him that didn’t come back. I knew that Uncle Bob was in WWII, but I didn’t know a lot about it.
My father was a highly decorated Army Air Corps Medic who served in four theaters of the war. Maybe he overshadowed his younger brother. Or maybe Uncle Bob is just too modest about the contribution that he made.
My first true understanding of these men I’ve known all my life came about while I was doing research for the character named Bud, in my new book LAST DANCE AT JITTERBUG LOUNGE. Let me make it clear, Bud isn’t my Uncle Bob. The old man I created in that story is a composite of a lot of guys of that age and time. The fond memories of days gone by and the scars of events that can’t quite be outlived are both a part of all of them.
This Memorial Day, when laughing and eating and enjoying friends and family, as we rightly should, let’s all do some remembering of those who serve their country in all our conflicts. We do that by being the cheering crowd in the hometown parade and by decorating the graves of the fallen.
I’ll be hanging out with one of the heroes that’s still with us.
Maybe you can find time to do the same. I realize that everyone doesn’t have an Uncle Bob. But just a mile or so from my house is Brook Army Medical Center. Hundreds of men and women are recovering there, rehabilitating themselves for more active duty or a whole new battle completely. Volunteer opportunities abound. I’m sure your own community has its way to say thanks to Vets. We are all so blessed that these people are willing to put themselves in harm’s way. That’s something that can’t be measured into potato salad.