Look at the Magic

Okay, I’m awake. It’s 5 a.m. I decide do some editing on my Island book.  I go to my computer, and it’s like grand central station around here. The cats figure a closed door is an invitation to ask someone to open it. Zoom Zoom, traipses across my computer, purring, rubbing against me. For a skittery cat, he is affectionate when nobody else is around. Obi, Nina’s cat, tries to bury a piece of tissue paper on the floor. (He will try to bury my coffee too. He is the cleaner-upper around here.) Peaches, our poodle, wants out. Bear comes into the room, then he wants outside. Well, the sun’s up, and the animals have settled down. Time to pack Neil’s lunch.

Yesterday five-year-old Grandson was sticky so I convinced his to let me spray him off with our shower hose. Reluctantly he got into our tub, then decided that spray was pretty fun, and after he doused me with water, I closed the shower curtain, and was wiping up the floor.

“Ow,” I said.

From behind the curtain: “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I bumped my head. You didn’t do it.”

“That makes sense,” he said, “Cause I’m not out there.”

On Monday, a good friend commented that if we are skeptically optimistic, the world is magic. And I decided to look at the magic, for I’m tired of reality.

So yesterday I tried to find a quote I remembered from Ray Bradbury. I thought it was this: “The world is a magic place or it should be if we don’t fall asleep on each other.” Maybe it’s his, maybe not, I can’t find it.  I took pleasure, though, in a memory of Bradbury. It was a warm night in San Diego. My husband was going to an Optic Conference. I almost didn’t accompany him as I had some wounds on my face I didn’t want to expose to the public, but they were small, and Ray Bradbury was the keynote speaker—that motivated me, scabs or not.

I don’t remember what he said, except that he always raised his audience to heights of stupendous expectations. Afterward I went up to him and instead of asking for an autograph, I asked to shake his hand. He said, “How about a hug, and gathered me into his arms in a big bear hug.” Gosh I wish some of his magic had rubbed off.

This is how I remember him.

And, what do you think of this? From the wisdom of Bradbury:

If you know how to read, you have a complete education about life, then you know how to vote within a democracy. But if you don’t know how to read, you don’t know how to decide. That’s the great thing about our country—we’re a democracy of readers, and we should keep it that way. –Ray Bradbury

I spent three days a week for 10 years educating myself in the public library, and it’s better than college. People should educate themselves—you can get a complete education for no money. At the end of 10 years, I had read every book in the library and I’d written a thousand stories.

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” 
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

“Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy. Lord, there were a lot of lovely books once, before we let them go.” 
― Ray Bradbury

And here I am writing an eBook.

And finally, "You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you." --Ray Bradbury

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Hit that Publish Button Again

God, I’m so nervous.

I hit publish again for my mother’s letters.

I know I’ve been through this before, don’t know why I’m so anxious this time. Excited maybe. 

I went back to Bookbaby, for they will distribute the eBook on many sites including Page Pusher which means it can be easily read on the computer. No tablets, Kindles, Nooks, etc. required.

This morning I read through the manuscript again, changed a few things, cleaned the letters up a bit, found some typos—again. 

I know writers need an editor for a writer has a hard time seeing their own mistakes. Mistakes bad, but if the grammar or syntax isn’t correct, I’m not going to worry. I wanted the voices to be mother’s and mine.

Strange isn’t it to read words of someone long gone, words of someone you thought you knew intimately. Mom was secretive with me, embarrassed. She never spoke of the Lord in our conversation as she does in these letters, but then she was speaking to a Christian Adoption Agency. I know she opened up more to her next children than she had with me. She had no reason to be embarrassed or uncomfortable with them, and I wish she had not with me…

I never knew I was her pride and joy as she stated in the letters, nor do I remember that she ever said to me, “I love you.”  I accepted it somehow, and it didn’t stop me from telling my children I love them.  I know Mom never resented me, even thought she was sixteen when I was born.  We lived with my grandmother, and I remember she and I at night lying in her bed finding shapes in the tree outside our window.

Mom felt she “had” to get married. I know my father and Grandma got along famously, not so much my mother and him. 

Dad was an artist with a hobby of taxidermy. He built a “can house” behind the house that they said would take dynamite to bring it down.  It was a shop built of cans, large cans like drums, for he worked at a shoe factory and glue and such was delivered in those cans. He filled them with cement, thus the need for dynamite.

Dad befriended a mentally challenged boy next door who liked to draw water from the well, and on hot Illinois days would egg my dad on for a water fight with my mother so he could draw the water. One day, the kid entertained himself without the water fight, and we can home to an empty well. 

It sounded as though my parents had fun, but their marriage ended in divorce. It spun my mother and me into the next portion of her journey, however, and that led to her heart’s desire, more children. She told me that she always wanted a baby in the house, yet for 19 years all she got was me.

The tragedy was that she died 12 years after adopting her second family, and 10 years after having a natural-born son. Then there was the secret she never knew about. I hope by my telling that secret it will forge a legacy for both mother and my sister Jan.

I think of little Jan and how she wandered around the house calling “Jo” when I was gone. My getting married and moving away was like the older sister going away to college and leaving the little ones behind—we had forged a bond, however, that will remain forever.

Once again I am presenting this book, new title, new cover, now titled Mother’s Letters…and mine.

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