Last Time Counts For All

I’ve sent flowers to my Grammy for years now, ever since she moved into the nursing home and didn’t need more knickknacks to clutter a small apartment.  Her birthday, Christmas, Mother’s Day; always a bouquet, always love from me.
But last night was my last order. She’s dying.
Oh, let’s be honest; she’s been dying for years.  She’s ninety-six, and in amazing spirits for all of that.  When I saw her last month, she asked about my heart, urged me to exercise, was happy to hear I was going on a cruise with my family, asked about my Mom.  Maybe she repeated herself a bit, and you had to speak louder so she’d hear you, but I doubt you could have a better conversation with someone in their nineties.
But with age comes the ravages thereof, and she has been fighting a failing body for decades now.  And now she’s refused to fight.  Never in a mean way; that’s not her style.  But she doesn’t eat unless prompted heavily by the many loving family members who come to visit, and she keeps asking whether this is really necessary.  And so, after realizing the next set of treatments would destroy her quality of life, my family has put her on hospice.  She’ll eat when she sees fit, and take only the barest of medications.
I don’t know how long she’ll last.  No one does.  But none of us thought she’d make it this far, so she may surprise us.
And I thought oh, well, she’s in her mid-nineties, she’s literally had the best life I can imagine, that’s sad but it’s inevitable. When my Dad told me, I heard and then went out to lunch.  I’d been braced for this for years, no biggie.
Then I realized: this will be my last chance, ever, to send her flowers.  So in a panic last night I went to 1-800-flowers and ordered her a nice big bouquet of daisies, her favorite, and clicked the “Finalize Order!” button and then had to go for a very long drive with the windows down.
I hope the florist sends her the right flowers.  I know from long experience that whatever you order online often has very little resemblance to what you get, and they may decide to replace it with tulips, or daffodils, or whatever.  Will she know that I meant daisies?  She will not.  She can’t even talk on the phone any more, not really.
And I could, I suppose, get on the phone to emergency change the order, to tell the florist how terribly important this all is, but…. I don’t know that it’ll matter.  I don’t know how she is today.  Maybe she’s already in bed, sleeping her days away.  Maybe she’ll never know, not really, now that she’s off the big medications.  I know my temptation is to make a big deal, send flowers every day until she’s gone, but… that’s not her way.  She hates having a fuss made, hates being reminded of bad times.  She’d want to steal out of life quietly, like slipping out of a lovely party, which for her it has been.  A family that adores her.  Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, all summoned to her side effortlessly for endless parties, a house by the seashore, a husband who doted on her, a bond of Steinmetzes brought together by mutual worship.
Dear florist, I hope you know that my Grammy has a magic power: she makes people better by only seeing the best in them.  Anything unworthy or shabby about you is discarded in her eyes, only the good reflected back, and when criminals are in her presence they straighten their backs and live better.  She quietly sees you as so wonderful, clapping her hands in joy, that you vow to be wonderful, and walk out of her presence a better person.
You don’t know that.  You can’t know that.  And yet, inexplicably, your flowers will be my last, clumsy message of love to her.  Whatever you decide today will be my last gift to her, my last way of telling her that I care, this random bouquet of flowers on her windowsill.
I hope you give her daisies.
I hope she knows just how much she means to me.
I hope.

If You're Going To Channel Orwell, Don't Be Stupid

At 6:00 a.m. this morning, my iPhone buzzed for long enough to wake Gini up.  It was, as it turns out, an Amber Alert to let us know that a child had been kidnapped in our area.
We had not signed up for anything remotely like an Amber Alert, but apparently everyone around us got one anyway.  Which is a little distressing.  I’m all for saving kidnapped children, but I’m also all for not having my phone hijacked against my will.  I like the illusion that I control my phone – I know it’s not true (HELLO RSA), but I cling to it anyway.  A random police department call being able to bug me at a moment’s notice without my consent or opt-out notice is a little terrifying.  (And if you had your phone noises on, which we never do because people text me at all hours, apparently it made a terrifying alert noise.)
But fine.  I’m all for helping children.  How do I do this?
I don’t know, because there’s no record of the alert.  Didn’t show up on texts, no history, nothing.  If you were not lucky enough to be awake when the alert was sounded, or slow to answer your phone, the information vanished.  So if you were, say, checking your phone twenty minutes later because you were in the shower, well, I guess the kid’s gone, too late, let ’em go.
I hope that child is okay.  I really do.  But if you were going to commandeer my phone sans notice, I’d prefer you do it in a way I could know what to be on the lookout for all day, and maybe a second notice to let me know how it turned out.

All The Things That Were Not Me.

This last Saturday made me wonder who I’d become.
My friend Angie was in town, and rather than seeing a movie, we opted to go team up with my daughter Erin to go paint my arcade cabinet, because that sounded like more fun.  So we spent the afternoon outside, painting and then waiting for the paint to dry for the next coat, eating raspberries picked from our bush while we watched the bees hum and work.  Erin made a fire and showed off her hula hoop skills.  Gini did some gardening.
I am not who I was.
I don’t know if I’ll continue to work on crafts projects, or if the lustre will fade like webcomics and I’ll not return.  But I thought about all the things that recent blog-readers would identify as uniquely me, and I can pinpoint their start in the last five years:

• The pretty pretty princess nails? Started in March last year.
• The snazzy hats? December 5, 2010.
• The beekeeping? February 24, 2011.
• Hell, the polyamory? We weren’t even poly seven years ago, and we only came out officially as poly on February 13th, 2009.

And speaking of Clarion, I was a writer before that, but my attempts to be professional were pretty stunted, and had no serious basis in reality.  The Ferrett Who Publishes Short Stories didn’t effectively exist before August of 2008.
This mutation makes me deeply, deeply happy.  I’ll be turning 44 this week – mark the date, as July 3rd is the most important day of the year – and I’m still greatly in flux.  I don’t want to be one of those old men walking worn paths, doing the same thing he always was.  So much of the goodness in my life comes from an influx of new activities, new learning, new risks to take.  I look back over the last decade and the Ferrett of 2003 would barely comprehend the Ferrett of Today – and that’s such a good thing, in the same sense that Teenaged Ferrett shouldn’t have a real solid grip on the Mid-Twenties Ferrett.  It shows I’m growing.  It hopes I’m learning.
I’m living at the speed of life, and all the things I am and might be are still negotiable.  This is a happy way to begin my birthday week – surrounded by loved ones, covered in fresh black paint, working on something that didn’t exist a week ago.
The cabinet is built, as am I, with a little help from my beloveds.

I Got Nothing Today. Sorry. So Instead, You Can Look At My Wood.

I tried to write some snappy essays for you last night, came up dry.  I have a lot of good ideas, but my essay-writin’ segment of the brain is conking out to the point where I don’t feel like making good arguments in a sloppy way.
So here!  Have some more woodworking!
My wife surprised me for my birthday, proving she is the best wife in the world by buying me the thing I wanted most: reproduction Ms. Pac-Man cabinet art.  Ms. Pac-Man is the game of my childhood, and a bonding experience with my father: every time we get together, we find some way to go head-to-head, devouring dots.  So I’d been thinking about how to make my cabinet look like a Ms. Pac-Man machine, and lo!  She had done the research to find me the art!
There’s just one problem, though:

The art doesn’t fit.
*sad trombone*
Some have asked, “Why don’t you just cut the art to fit?” And my answer is, “Why don’t you chop up the Mona Lisa to fit in a smaller frame?” This is classic art, man, and I’m not going to resize it. That would bug me. No, instead I’ll just have to make a new, reproduction Ms. Pac-Man arcade cabinet at some point down the line.
In the meantime, Erin and I did the final touches before the coat of paint:


It looks like an actual piece of furniture now, which still amazes us. We wander outside to look at it in a happy daze, unable to believe that we did this. Which is bizarre, this idea that we formed something from tools and raw materials, but here’s the proof. It’s done. We can put things in it. So strange!
The painting is what I’m excited about. I’m told that once you paint it, it becomes an arcade cabinet, and that I can see: right now, it’s all patched wood and beams, but when it gets a coat of glossy black, it becomes a single object, and that will be exciting as fuck. I’ll probably do that on Sunday, as I have some delightful Angie-company visiting this weekend.
The great thing is that after this, I know what project I’m doing next. Gini and I have always wanted a Secret Passage in the basement. So we shall make one, hiding a door with swinging bookcases. This is going to involve me being good enough to make normal bookcases – which, let’s be honest, we can never get enough of – and then eventually making a heavily customized one. That’s a project that’ll take probably a year of time to get good at, since it’ll involve making at least seven bookcases before we’re done.
But hey. I’ve got time and wood on my hands.

Building An Arcade Cabinet: About Halfway Through

So this Sunday, as Erin’s Father’s Day present to me, my daughter and I started making an arcade cabinet.  Which is intimidating; we had set up all the tools, but now we actually had to use them.
Our first issue was tracing the diagram on the board, which involved about an hour of careful measuring, and then cutting it out using our freshly-purchased jigsaw:



We made several errors, but the biggest one was that frankly, never trust the blade that comes with the jigsaw. It was a tiny thing that left a very lopsided cut as we cut through the board on the lowest, slowest setting – which we thought was my poor skill. Once we got a better blade at Lowes, one that was recommended by another book, we discovered that hey, Erin’s a natural at this! Wait! Now I’m a natural! It worked!

When that was all done, we completed the day with triumph:

But I was bored and restless, since Gini wasn’t back and I didn’t feel like going out for a run – so instead, I sat down for another two hours in the workshop and made the base and monitor shelf.

The next night, Gini helped me screw in the bases and shelves:


Here was where I made the other major error: in trying to rush the shelf placement so as not to hurt Gini’s back (she was holding the monitor shelf at an awkward, disc-snapping angle), I rushed it and now the shelf’s a little tilted. We’ll fix that in-cabinet, but it just proves that really, you should take your time.
And last night, I had an absolute panic attack. I went shopping for food, and while getting some Omega-3 healthy eggs, I looked at the chocolate chip cookie dough. And I realized: I couldn’t have that. Ever. No more would I just have a bad evening where I could tank up on cookie dough, or Entenmann’s chocolate cake, or just Ben and Jerry’s… whole worlds of food closed off to me. And then I thought of my job’s schedule-tightening where I’m no longer free to switch my hours around, and this just all seemed so overwhelming, all the things I couldn’t do any more, and…
…wham. Panic attack.
I didn’t know what to do, aside from crying and holding Gini, so… I went out into the garage to work some more on the cabinet. And you know what? It worked. I can’t think of anything else when I’m in the workshop; I have to concentrate on something external and concrete, and if I fail to pay attention, it all collapses. So I lost myself in a good ninety minutes of drilling, cutting, and sawing, and in the end I had about half of the cabinet complete:

That’s about twelve hours worth of work right there, for a distinctly amateur woodworker. And there’s tons of tiny flaws, but I won’t tell you about them, because you probably won’t notice them when all is said and done. Like any good craftsman, I’m learning and fixing as I go, and when it’s done it’ll look impressive to you, even as I see the hundreds of errors I could have done better.
But as a hobby, it’s a good one. It’s not like writing, where I have to go inside my head, and if I’m in a jangled or depressive mood, everything gets worse. This is physical labor, the kind that forces you to not really have emotions or side thoughts or anything, a sort of focused meditation that helps. I may develop a need for this, and I can easily see that happening; a kind of therapy.
And it’s a kind of love. When you start a woodshop, there’s tons of bills as you go and get more wood, this new drill bit, these new clamps. Gini is quietly overlooking the bills piling up at Lowes, because she knows how awesome this is.
And in the end… I’ll have a cabinet. Maybe a little off-kilter in some ways, but way better than no cabinet at all. And that’s good.

A Mid-Level Class In Story Structure: The First Five Paragraphs

One of the things I try to do when discussing writing is to create “intermediate” story advice.  Because there’s a lot of beginner’s advice out there – “Show, don’t tell!” “Have a snappy opening line!” – but not a lot that tells you how to get from A to B.
Today, I wrote what I think is one of my best essays on writing, because I wrote 350 words to a short story… and then show you, paragraph by paragraph, what I’m trying to do.  The first are tricky things, because you need to balance so much – an snappy opening, introducing the theme, introducing the character, introducing the conflict, introducing the setting so it doesn’t feel white-roomed, introducing the speculative element (if it’s sci-fi), and so on.
Last night, I wrote a servicable start to a story.  It’s not great – 6 out of 10 is what I’d rate it, barely passable – but I break that down to show you all the moving parts, everything I’m trying to accomplish that’s necessary.  This is why stories are so hard; you have so many things you need to get across right away, and in many cases the distinction between a bad story beginning and a good one is knowing which elements to prioritize in the opening sentence, and which ones you can delay for a short period of time (but had better get to in the next two ‘grafs or you’re doomed).
I did that, and pretty well.  Unfortunately, I’m doing it for the Clarion Write-A-Thon, so if you want to see it, I can’t give it to you for free.  But I am very proud of it, and I’m pretty sure that essay is worth the $5 alone to any aspiring writer, let alone the reams of stuff I’ll be analyzing over the next six weeks.  So if you have the money and are interested in such things, donate at least $5 (more never hurts, as it’s for a good cause) and then email me with your LJ user name so I can add you to the community.
Ah, Clarion.  It taught me a lot.  Hopefully I can pay that forward.
(This’ll be the last I mention the Write-A-Thon for a day or two – I just was quite content with this particular entry.)