When The Suburbs Sang

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My father played pool with two contractors named Joe, and Carlio. One was my father’s friend, or so he thought, and the other one, less so. So they built us a split level ranch in the suburbs of Syracuse New York in 1973 one summer, creating a clean break with our old elementary school, as we moved in before the new year began.

We moved less than two miles, from the city, to the suburbs, part of a vast white migration away from city centers into unsustainable suburbs. Nobody had run the numbers, or if they had, nobody cared, about the fact that as the infrastructure aged, in many suburbs, the taxes didn’t support fixing anything; the spread out houses, with the big lawns, with all that breathing room, were connected to grids that were stretched to the breaking point. Maintaining all the electrical and sewage stuff, fixing and plowing all those roads, for that population density, was kinda…

Stupid.

Oh, but the space a middle class person could afford. The distance from the neighbors. The two car garages, and the unfinished basements that could and often would be finished, the back yards into which decks could expand, into which swimming pools could be sunk.

No sidewalks for the kids to walk on, but who cared? Who needs parks with the swing set and sandbox in the back yard.

It seemed the most natural thing in the world.

My parents were academics, at that time one Ph.D, and one in the making. My mother from the deep south, with an accent that waned in the Northeast, and waxed on visits home, but was always there. My brother and I attended a city school, maybe 50% minority, which is and was something that is hard to sustain. The white people get scared and move out.

The school was I think, mediocre, in the way such things are typically measured. I scored very high on the Iowa exam, learned to read and do arithmetic by 4th grade, learned a bit of what we called social studies. I spent a lot of time in the library, looking at picture books of space travel by Willy Ley, whose paintings now looked kinda stupid as Apollo unfolded in the real world.

I was involved in a fight, in some way—we called it getting beat up, because me and my friends didn’t fight very well. Many of our classmates were much bigger than we were. My mother came in for a meeting with the VP in charge of discipline, (all schools have them. This way the principle can seem nicer.) and when she asked what was going to be done about the attack, the VP wanted to know what I had done to provoke it. What words I may have used.

She heard my mother’s southern accent loud and clear.

My parents decided to move that night.

About that word– my parents never used it, and my best friend taught me to never use it either, not even when we were alone, for reasons having less to do with social justice than survival. Or maybe my best friend had just figured out how horrible the word was. He was gay, I think, though I left town before that surfaces. Likewise my mother’s family, and her racist mother, never used that word, either. 

The word branded you as white trash. We weren’t necessarily enlightened. We were classist.

I can’t honestly remember being happy or sad about the move. It just was. But I loved watching the house be built that summer; pacing the foundation in the sea of mud. Walking into the basement from the backyard, as the property sloped downward and on that side, the basement had windows.

It would have been nice, if we had ever finished it. Or built a real deck onto the back of the house, where Joe and Carlio had hung a tiny balcony. But my parents salaries weren’t huge. Their retirement funds grew fantastically, but they weren’t allowed to ever touch them, which of course, is why my parents generation retired well, even the people in the middle class. So we never even poured a driveway over the gravel strip to the two car garage we started out with; which of course made plowing and shoveling the thing in the hideous Syracuse winters problematic.

My father hired a pickup with a plough, and it gouged up dirt and gravel.

My father hated any and all manual labor, so the large yard did nothing for my parents. My mother talked for seventeen years about putting in a garden, but only ever filled a little brick window box on the porch with petunias. They weren’t outdoor people. We never went camping. We never hiked. They never took us to parks. We never even got a swing set in that back yard, as we were ten and eleven and presumably needed to only wander the streets of the subdivision, or explore the vast tracks of undeveloped land surrounding us.

Which we did, and loved doing.

All this aside, I loved the suburbs, not knowing what I was missing, and for everything we missed, perhaps something was gained. Or did it it make into a person who enjoyed long lonely walks along mostly tamed wilderness? Who shrinks back from knowing the neighbors? We enjoyed the autonomy which would now be branded as neglect.

We never locked our doors. There was no mass transit. We rode bikes, but it was very hilly, glacially dumped Hobbiton mounds that were difficult to build on, and so, remained wild and lovely, poking up through the landscape sporting only the occasional pale blue water tower. Places for teens to drink and gaze out over a world of golf courses and ranch houses and drainage ditches, a vibrant but fading middle class, dying on the vine, like a cut flower, still colorful and bright as the manufacturing died and the big businesses all went bankrupt. The downtown that died, turning into a museum of a time gone by, shuttered by six o’clock every evening.

Except the University, Go Orange, which did just fine, becoming the cities biggest employer. My father had tenure. So we weren’t going anywhere, and we would never, ever want for anything, or even have the fear of wanting for anything.

Our only enemies lurked within. The restless madness of adolescence, the reason for armies and monasteries, the sequestering of violent young males. But there were no wars to send our testosterone poisoned, so instead, we went slowly mad in the weird toxic gasses given off by the cold war, the constant threat of annihilation, which troubled the thoughtful and which, like COVID today, was ignored by so many that the myth of the 80s now is one of patriotic exuberance, and not the punk counterculture gnawing at the tender trap of the fading post war dream.

Suburbia aged badly, like our Danish modern furniture, the nicks and scratches made it look like what it was; hastily constructed, a momentary fad, kinda cheap, and in the long run, not a good investment.

A shiny momentary dream of modernity to match the rockets racing to the moon, sputtering on the martini powered fumes of black and white JFK speeches, powered by Eisenhower’s prophesied monster, the military industrial complex. 

I am old enough to love my childhood uncritically, minimizing the paralyzing fear of the dark, my ostracization and the suicidal misery of middle-school, the homophobic bullying, the hatred of high-school, the absurd early morning bus rides to wait forty five minutes for homeroom.

Instead I remember the gleaming hardwood floors of the new house, the light coming through the windows, sledding on the golf course with my friends, who all lived with a ten minute walk, snow forts and spelunking in drainage tunnels, junkyards, quarries, hallucinogenic adolescent ecstasies,  vivid, violent, sexual awakening.

My first girlfriend, half nude in the steamed up car, her long, pale perfect body, the electricity of our touch. Orgasms like tactical nuclear explosions. 

The skunky sweetness of burning weed, the icy cold cheap American beer, the future an endless road to anywhere and nowhere. I tested well, in school, very, very high, so high my half assed grade hardly mattered. We had enough money. I could and would go anywhere and do anything.

I close my eyes and I’m listening to the weekend drone of lawn mowers, smelling freshly cut grass through my open bedroom window, prowling stacks of discarded periodicals for Playboy magazines, tucking centerfolds in my back pockets, organizing my comic books, penciling dungeons onto graph paper, mastering my first campaign.

We went to war with orcs in middle earth. We initiated ourselves and each other with powerful drugs in cemeteries and on golfing greens. We kissed in steamed up cars. Made out with strangers in finished basements.

We waited for the futures to unfold, ready to spring away from the joyful, perfect, soul numbing safety and isolation of our subdivisions. To leave suburbia behind, and in my case, never go back.

Which we never did. But some part of me lingers, never leaving, roaming that undeveloped land that is now packed with newer, even more souless McMansions. The past a different country, that boy a stranger I don’t really remember being.

Back when the suburbs seemed like a good idea.

Back when the suburbs sang.

 

 

Sue Grafton’s Interior Decoration

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I have been amazed, over the years, at my love for Sue Grafton’s work, because so much of it consists of minutely observed details that have no bearing on plot whatsoever. Theme, tone, of course, is reflected in every part of the world, or rather the parts of it a POV or narrator chooses to call out, Grafton spends perhaps 10-20% of each of her books describing the interiors of spaces.

I’m one of those readers that let the specifics of a space wash over them, but tune into the details. I will not remember which wall the bookcase is shoved against, whether it’s opposite the king sized bed or the broken window, at all. There are readers that do, though.

But I do love me some details.

The interiors reflect the characters of the people that inhabit them; bring them into tighter focus.

The average private investigator in fiction will tell you the job is mostly boring details; Grafton makes you live every single one. The plot coupons, the stuff she uses to put her cases together, are completely invisible to me on every read. There’s so much detail to lose the important ones in. She has never once telegraphed an ending.

I have, at times, wondered how the hell she figured out what was going on; I have at times, been confused during the climax, because I have been mesmerized by all the ashtrays and tatty slip covers.

There’s a thing, where a writer describes some perfectly ordinary thing that you can’t recall anyone ever describing in prose before, and it makes you weirdly happy. I remember this during my first Salinger readings. I get that from Grafton a lot, in an among the turns of phrase we’ve all read ten thousand times.

Still, it’s an odd recommendation.

“Wanna read endless descriptions of rooms, houses, faces, lonely spaces, a made up stretch of coastline this detective runs every single goddamn morning?”

Turns out? You do.

Sue Grafton Alphabet Mystery Re-read

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My family read the Grafton Alphabet series end to end.

I’d revisited the first few books a few times over the last thirty years, but most of them I’ve read a single time, generally the year of publication. We started giving them to each as hard-covers on Christmas, or for birthday presents. Audiobook versions percolated through the family, as boxes of rental audio cassettes, packs of CDs, purchased or borrowed from libraries. Sometime after my father died two years ago I started re-listening to the Sue Grafton mysteries on Audible, starting with A, and going on from there, with the goal of rereading the entire series. I was reading H when my mother died on the first day of 2021.

I’m pushing sixty, so it’s not like the loss of my parents is anything but an ordinary, foreseeable tragedy. But the deaths have hit me hard. I have enjoyed escaping into these books as I walk an hour or two or three a day.

Sue Grafton died in 2017 at age 77, getting ten years less life than my parents had, but having almost completed her alphabet. Z is for Zero, her family tells us, will never be written. Sue’s alphabet ends at Y. and that is oddly appropriate, I think. A Work of Art Is Never Finished, Merely Abandoned, as the saying goes.Still, Sue got a ton done, before vanishing into that other country where my parents now reside.

The series consists of the internal monolog of Kinsey Milhone, a twice divorced, former cop private detective living and working mostly in fictional California city she calls Santa Theresa, a place I thought was real for thirty years. Toward the end, Grafton throws in a few new viewpoint characters, non-recurring,  having perhaps gotten tired of the rendering the single voice for decades.

If you’re interested in Grafton and her life and work, the Wikipedia link here is a good place to start. This post isn’t really about her, or the mysteries, but about my family’s experience of them.

The books are about mortality, for me now, about what a life work should look like, about the length of time I got to spend with my parents, from my birth in 1963 until their deaths the last two years. The alphabet is a yard stick, stretching from the beginning of my college years to my late fifties.

The series begins as contemporary detective fiction set in the early 80s when it was written. She publishes a book a year in the series until M in 1996, as she turned 56 years old, and thereafter it takes he two years per book. She wasn’t able to quit her screenwriting until G is for Gumshoe, which gives you an idea of how hard it is to make a living writing novels, even in popular genres.

The series turns into a period piece relatively quickly, as time passes more slowly for Kinsey than it does for her readers. Y is for Yesterday book ends the series in more ways than one. It contains staged events (in other viewpoints) from 1979, with the action of the book’s present, 1989.

Grafton had no interest in writing about the internet or smartphone culture. Born in 1940, she was a decade younger than my parents; in this she was like my mother, a more extreme technohater. My mother earned a Phd, and wasn’t sure why one had to rewind a video tape. Her cellphone’s ring made her jump a foot in the air–she never learned to answer one. The batteries went dead and they ended up in a pile of newspaper.

So, the Kinsey Alphabet-minus-Z, written from 1982 to 2016, 44 years, span only 7 years of Kinsey’s life, taking us from her mid twenties to her early thirties.

Most non-YA protagonists are in this age range. Old enough to be doing something interesting, to be out of adolescence, but young enough to avoid having to get up three times a night to pee, or experience hot flashes. Each alphabet mystery spans a few days or weeks, with a month or two between books, working gigs Kinsey doesn’t consider worthy of sharing any details.

So Kinsey is falling into a singularity, time slowing, living six times slower than you and I.

And so, Kinsey remains, always, in her prime. On most days running three miles a day, except when she’s too beat up to get out of bed.

My father said, about the late sixties and early seventies, that that was his time, their time, my mother and him, and this struck me as sad, to feel like a creature out of time, on the sidelines, watching an increasingly bizarre game play itself out in their endless wash of twenty four hour news.

So Grafton drifted into her own past, as the years went by, and never had to learn new private detective stuff. Kinsey went to libraries and looked at microfilm and made calls from phone booths and listened to her answering machine and did all these things we now think of fondly.

Unlike my father, a one time computer programmer gradually infuriated by ever new release of Windows. He once owned three computers at once, but by the time he’d died had only a few tablets without keyboards that he hated typing on. Our communication faded away during this time, without email, to the occasional phone call, very brief, as if that generation could never fully understand that long distance phone calls didn’t cost anything anymore.

So I fall into my past, my time with my family, because these are among the only books, certainly the only series, that all of us read. Not sure they both got to Y.

We read them, and spoke of them in no great detail, ever. “That was a pretty good one. H or G. I can’t remember.” But we lived in Kinsey’s head together. The first few paperbacks lived in the stacks of books that never made it into the bookshelves in our house on Westerly Terrace, in the post war boom suburb of my dying home town.

The books are rendered in sometimes excruciating detail, the camera almost always on. They are immersive. They become repetitive. A person doesn’t change all that much, usually, in only seven years. We see Kinsey as a complete human being, frozen in her era.

Living her best life, on her own terms, in her time, the 80s.

What forty and fifty something Kinsey might have become we can only imagine. But we got to live so long ourselves, my parents and I. We avoided being shot in dumpsters or buried by bulldozers, just like Kinsey.

I miss Grafton, even though her work is done and you can really ask much more from life, to find good work to do and to be able to do it. Seventy Seven seems less and less like old age to me, though.

I’ve written and published a stack of shorts and novellas and a few novels; Grafton was ten books into the Alphabet at my age, and just a few years into making her living as a novelist. I feel sometimes I have daydreamed my life away, as I re-read Grafton rather than leap into the literature of this moment.

I have my news addiction for that, as did my parents.

I miss Kinsey. Never knowing what her next story might have been. I dream about Z is for Zero. I have imagined a book where a romance arc sticks; she marries someone again, third times the charm–but dies saving him, heroically. The lover, male most likely, as we never get any sense that Kinsey is anything but heterosexual, gets sucked in to the game looking for her killer, and becomes a vigilante, and finally, a PI in the 90s, as the internet changed everything.

I imagine writing these books, this series, using numbers instead of letters. In fact, I wrote a novella about a writer trapped in a weird dystopia writing these books at gun point. (

I’m trying to remember the titles I gave them… One for the Money, Two Steps Ahead, Three’s a Crowd, Four by Four, Take Five, Deep Six, whatever. You get the idea. Seven Up.

My companion series never has to end. Because I hate endings. Even fulfilling ones.

I miss Grafton, and my parents, and my past, and the worlds that could have been.

So. Now it’s time to write. I will fade away completely, then, not be me, and not miss a thing.

Wish me luck.

Why Do Readers Hate My Protagonist?

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One of the hardest things to hear as a beginning writer entering a critical process (with work shoppers, teachers, or editors) is that anyone hates your characters.

It’s even worse when they hate your main character. (MC or POV.) It’s even worser still when likability isn’t their arc; they aren’t supposed to become likable; you though they were already.

I’ve written about this before. But it is a fruitful question.

One of the things writing can reveal is the subjective quality of your own introspection, that is to say, when compared to others.

Specifically, I’m talking about your particular flavor of negativity bias. 

One of the problems is that many brains interpret negativity bias as TRUTH. When someone hates your character for articulating in their internal monolog or spoken dialog strong negativity, a common response, for the writer, is to think, “shit, that’s just true. What the fuck is wrong with (this reader) (me)(my writing)( the entire fucking universe, oh God, I’m going to binge watch old episodes of Columbo.)

Relentless negativity bias is exhausting to those that aren’t used to it.

Genre is a sort of flag that tells us how much negativity we are expected to wade through while still empathizing with a character. Of course, great writers can get away with defying these conventions, but I’m not talking about Great Writers. I’m talking about you.

And me.

See what I did there? Did you flinch? Did you agree with me at some level, that we are both not great, and then did you get pissed off and depressed? Because writing about writing is supposed to build you up, not tear you down? Because that is the genre convention?

Most genre characters are slightly idealized and simplified. Especially the ones we are meant to like or inhabit.

It doesn’t have to be much. But a single truly offbeat detail can prevent something from being publishable. A single thought. A single action–on the page.

And we fucking hate your POV. And probably? If you hadn’t written the thing?

So would you. But you don’t see that. Not without help.

I had a friend, a dog person, a very sweet person, who hated Cats. When we saw one outdoors, she would make a little hand-gun, and shoot at it, making the little hand gun POW noise. This person was super supportive of me. But I have cats. I’m allergic to dogs.

At one point I had to tell her, “fucking knock that shit off.” She was driving me nuts.

I can’t say that to a character in a book. At some point I stop wanting to hang out with them. So I stop reading.

Hand gunning cats wasn’t her most salient personality trait. It’s just a detail. But it derailed me.

I think horror characters can be more perfectly realistic… and of course Literature is the place where characters are permitted to be totally realistic. This is one reason so many people hate Literature. (Capital L.) This is probably why Amazon kindle data reveal that most people don’t actually finish literary best sellers.

Of course, they read every word of series genre novels written by not-great writers like you and me. Assuming we get the fucking hang of it. Nobody buys book 5 if they didn’t get through book 4.

Moving on…

Modern audiences, young people, are also often more and more intolerant of stupid opinions and unkind or irrational feelings in anyone. Even a villain. They don’t want to experience that kind of self-talk. They find it damaging and infuriating.

But… Villains can be more realistic too, which is one of the reasons why some people empathize with them. Think of the people who never break with Walter White of Breaking Bad. They bond to him early, when his morality is ambiguous, and stick with him to the bitter end. Some readers are like that.

But many of us want heroes so badly we don’t care about realism. Or, rather, we enjoy a judicious editing that screens us from some realistic negative self talk. Self loathing. Cynicism. Pessimism. Nihilism.

We will put up with slightly boring heroes too. Second bananas and villains will steal the stage.

Don’t worry.  You’re doing it right. (I mean, given that you’re not great. Hah. Ouch. SHUT UP!)

Inserting ‘positive’ stuff about your POV may feel fake, un-truthful, but remember the research–you are editing that stuff out. It’s actually in there. People are mixtures of good and bad. The parts you put down on the page are decisions you make.

Those decisions guide readers about the kind of story you are telling.

They can make or break a story.

They lie at the heart of enjoyability. Of what is and what isn’t entertaining.

Whether you are writing literature with a capital L or not.

Life Goes On. My New Novella Out of the Box is in the July/August 2021 Asimov’s.

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So, the year of pandemic and the death of my parents is over, and I have the one novella to show for it; and a hundred pages or so of memoire, which I have no idea what to do with.

There are a few hunks of memoire here; most of it was donated to a billionaire friend of mine that is sad that he can’t afford his own personal space program.

I’m joking. It’s at facebook. He can afford a space program. Hah hah. Why in the name of God do I post there?

So, this is the best thing I’ve done in my life, pretty sure, and you should go read it. You can read a sample, linked to from the home page of Asimov’s. 

You can buy a single issue, or get a free trial subscription from Amazon, or a digital subscription from another vendor.

ASPIRING WRITERS: I have a tip for breaking into this business. It worked for me. Take a look at the bibliography if you want to see this, but basically, the way I started my career in the 90s, and picked it up again in 2012, was to do this very strange thing…

Read SF magazines. I read the magazines I wanted to be published in. I wrote and finish short fiction. (I did not endlessly pick at a novel manuscript like a scab.)

Don’t run away!! Seriously, this is huge. I wrote for years without doing this… and got precisely nowhere.

It wasn’t that I didn’t read, or hadn’t read; it was just that I read a few dozen authors, and I wasn’t any of them. I couldn’t figure out, from that reading, what my stories were going to be. What my voice should be like.

The magazines expose you to, rub your nose in, a lot of contemporary genre voices. The stories fan out across a spectrum of stuff you are familiar with, and stuff you never personally got into… but you can see have appeal.

Some of that stuff you never read? Turns out, you can write it. And you want to.

The magazine? It gives you permission to; to write this thing you didn’t know existed, you weren’t sure if you liked, but which you find inside you, and low and behold, you have a voice and. you’re publishing a lot.

Magazine editors pour their lives into this. No joke. Their insights mean something. They don’t have time to mark up manuscripts or give you specific feedback, except, the magazine’s they curate… they are the feedback.

Read them. Get a few issues of each and read them cover to cover, including the online markets now starting to dominate the awards. Keep reading, but after that initial brain programming you can read stories across the field as makes sense to you.

Oh, the other thing? Write the authors and tell them what you thought of the stories. Unless you hated them. Then don’t.

Do this for a bunch of issues, go back and buy stuff by the authors you like, email them or DM them and or tweet their content, and you will end up people that will be on. your side as a writer; don’t demand free critique or beat reading or copy edits or award nominations or secret handshakes. This isn’t transactional. But some of these notes will turn into relationships that will help sustain you.

That’s it.

Please check out my novella. Read the beginning for free online.

It got me through a rough year.

Forever and Ever

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My mother in the middle at Daytona beach during World War Two, with her brother John, and cousin Sue Anna.

The home health aide’s number lights up my phone and she says “you need to come now.”

For a moment I imagine that Mom has come around and is asking for me, even though I saw her a few hours ago, and she was unresponsive, and this seems unlikely.

Sometimes I am told they rally, and there’s one of those last conversations.

“There’s the Happy lamb hot Pot,” my Mom would say, as I drove her home as we hit Mass ave, back when she was eating dinner with us every night, before the plague.

“Do you think the lambs are really happy?”

“Not really, no.”

“Maybe we’ll eat there some day.”

She would sing out the landmarks as we drove past them, proud that she knew where she was and where she was going, even though she was 89, mostly drunk, and suffering from severe memory loss.

The drive to Mom’s assisted living is over in an eye blink and I’m clumping up the stairs and then I don’t want to go in, but if it’s that rallying thing then I should keep moving. I listen at the door. I hear muted TV news. No screams, like the day before yesterday, thank God. But no human voices.

The door is unlocked and the overhead light is far too bright and the aide stands in a cloth mask and bandana, looking up from her phone, and in the other room Mom’s mouth hangs open in the same way my father’s mouth hung open when he died eighteen months ago. There’s some drool on her chest and she doesn’t really look like my mother, but some age-made-up version of her. She aged twenty years in 30 hard days.

I go to her. Her skin is still warm, damp with the exertion of her fight with death, her body perfectly still, and I lay my hand on her forehead, the way I comforted her while she was dying, and it feels the same, really, as if she was alive, but she’s inert. So still. So I try to hug her, an awkward leaning over the hospital bed thing,  and I say the stuff you say. Her eyes are closed. I kiss her between the eyebrows.

I stand up.

“She’s at peace, now, Jay. She’s at peace.”

“Yeah. I know. This had to happen. It’s good. It’s a good thing.””

I turn back to the body, lean in again and whisper  all the things as the aide retreats to the other room. I love you, Mom. You were a great mom. I will miss you. I am glad you aren’t in pain anymore. All the things you say. There aren’t that many.

I go and turn off the overhead lights and turn on the table lamps. MSNBC mutters continually in the background.

“I have called the hospice nurse.” The aide says. She doesn’t tell me to be strong, like she did a couple of times, to stop me from crying and upsetting my mother. When I had to tell Mom she was dying. Over and over again, because she couldn’t remember. I explained to her the cancer out of nowhere, the shadow on the lung, the blood clots, the surgery that failed to save her arm, her blackening necrotic fingertips.

Over and over again, in and around the morphine and ativan.

“They have to pronounce the death,” the aide says.

“I’ll call the funeral place. I picked one out.” Wait. What order do we do this in?

“Yes. Call them now. They will make you wait, so don’t worry, the nurse will get here before.”

I’ve already picked out a cremation place and I click on the link on my macbook but I have not filled out the pre-payment form. I meant to, but the fucking e-commerce was broken in the mobile app. Idiots. So this will cost us more. Well, me more. Who cares. But fuck.

I pace around the unit. I return to hug her again, wordlessly, eyes filling with hot tears. I walk over to the desk and pick up a photo of her holding up a glass of wine in a restaurant in Asheville, Christmas lights shining out of focus behind her. She always smiled best for my father. He took the shot.

“They should use that one,” the aide says. She means for the memorial table downstairs. I remember from my father that you get one week on the table.

Seeing her so alive and so happy in the photo hurts in a way it is impossible to describe. She will never be that way again. Never drink another glass of wine. She will be ash sometime soon. She is very still now.

I text my family. They knew when I left what was happening.

“Do you want me to go with you?” My wife asked as I put myself together to make this trip.

“No,” I said. No reason really. My wife wasn’t very close to my mother. My wife isn’t overly sentimental about death. She’s a rock, in the good and bad sense of that word.

My mother never got that close to my kids, or my brother’s. My parents chose to live 1000 miles away from us. My mom was nice to her grandkids, and they loved her in that way you love your grandparents, but she never talked to them for hundreds upon hundreds of hours. The way I talked with my mother.

“You were a great mom,” I told her, two days ago, when she could still speak.

“Why do you say that?” She asked. Details. I’m dying Darling, give me details.

“Because I could always talk to you. And you always listened. And I never thought I was boring you.” I bored my Dad.

“You were never boring, darling.. Never boring.” She pauses, groping for what to say next. “You were my favorite person to talk to.”

It’s been two years since I could say the same back to her without lying. Her broken memory made conversation a challenge for both of us. But it was one we met, every day, as I walked her around the building. Her mandatory exercise.

“Where are we going,” she would ask. “Just around the building,” I would say.

Like Pooh and piglet walking around that tree, alarmed at the ever increasing numbers of footprints.

“When I was one,” I would start.

“I had just begun,” she would answer.

The sun has set, I came too late, put the visit off, and it’s twilight and nobody in his right mind would be walking this old woman at this hour, in this cold, over the rutted asphalt and raised parking lot speed bumps, around the dark puddles.

But sometimes the sunset was so pretty, and she noticed it over and over again, and remarked on it. It was new to her every time.

That was fun, really. It made her happy over and over again.

“There is our blue dumpster.”

“Truly a beautiful sight to behold.” This was the blue dumpster that had replaced the red one with the Hillary for Prison sticker which we had covered with a Biden bumper sticker a few days before the election.

“When I was two,” I say.

“I was nearly new.”

I’m doing the easy part, the numbers.

“and when I was three–“

“I was hardly me…. where are we again?”

“Just walking around the building.”

“I live here?”

“Yes, when we turn the corner you’ll recognize where we are. You always do.”

“I know. I’m just old, that’s all.”

“You’re not that old, really. You should stop complaining.”

“But that’s what I’m best at. Complaining.”

“No, you’re not. You don’t complain much at all. Now, where were we?”

“What?”

“Four. When you were four.”

“Oh! I was not much more!”

I know the rest. “When I was five, I was just alive, but now I am six–“

“–And I’m clever as clever,” she says.

“So I think I’ll be six now–

“–For ever and ever.”

We say the last words together.

As she lay, struggling with the pain, I read to her from the Milne poetry books, When We Were Very Young, and the other one, Now we are six. But I couldn’t get through many of the poems because when you are dying you don’t have a lot of energy for such things, which is really too bad.

I skipped past this poem, that first day I was reading, and went back to it, the second day, the last day, I read, avoiding this, the best one really, because of the name… which was, which is, The End.

I don’t want it to be the end, even if it’s time.

But it is.

And now I’m in the other room writing this, and Natalie the Catily has left her post at my mother’s feet, her mission done, and she won’t let me type. She demands to be petted and the funeral man knocks and he’s in the hall pushing his shrouded gurney and the hospice nurse is sitting at the love seat doing the paperwork, after removing the morphine pump and catheter and the health aide, Francis, stands behind me, and we all wait, because there is more work to do, still, tonight.

Promises to keep, right? And miles to go before I sleep.

Goodbye, Mom. Good night.

Forever and ever.

Chasing Rainbows

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The clouds on a quarantine walk.

I attended writing workshop I hadn’t been to in awhile a few years back now, and the nice but slightly awkward person there, uh, one of them, mentioned that she’d heard I’d fallen off the horse. This was news to me. My publications had slackened while I worked on longer stuff, and I guess the consensus of the workshop was I was out of juice.

I hate to think many were happy about this, thinking that a not young writer had gone into retirement and maybe some new blood could use his vacated publication slots.

I shouldn’t care. I’m trying not to care about such things.

John Cheever wrote in a letter that pursuing a career in order to find a group of successful colleagues to be friends with is madness. The cart before the horse. It may happen. It may not. If that’s your focus… maybe get the hell out of the arts and go into marketing. You know, like Willy Loman.

When you drift away from writing, or writing in a certain genre, those working in that genre drift away too. It isn’t a conscious decision. But writing is hard and you simply have no room in your life, often, for anyone or anything that makes that effort even a tiny bit harder. Your slacking off can feel infectious to others.

So, keep your non-writing friends. You may need them desperately from time to time. For years at a time.

Older writers say this infuriating thing to younger writers, that if you don’t have to write, do something else. Instead of reassuring you about a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you’re told you should enjoy chasing rainbows.

Because that may well be all that you are doing.

So. Now I smugly assert, at age 58, that I find myself writing, thinking about the WIP, piling up words. Trying to force myself to hit a word count, a set number per day, in the hope of Making A Living writing has receded. The one person I know who went on to that has the willpower of olympic athlete.

And I have come to grips with the fact that I am not one of those. Almost.

But as I process the passing of my parents and our lives together, their lives as I have uncover them in letters and photos and fragments of memory, I find myself lighting out over that inner landscape again.

I’m lighter there. Younger. The light is different. The world is newer and the work beckons and it is never good enough, and I’ve grown to accept that, too. Almost. The work embarrasses me, even the stuff that gets published, or maybe especially that work. We reveal ourselves in our work and if we are decent human beings feel both pride and shame in this.

The sky is full of brooding clouds that will one day merge into darkness, the darkness into which we all disappear. But for now there is light, and color, and power, and Story. A few good writer friends and generous (and award-winning!) editors that give a Flying Fuck. They should be enough.

And the work.

And the shimmering heat mirage of success. I mean the big-time, always somewhere up ahead, never getting any closer. Mocking you and reassuring you. Reminding you that you better enjoy the ride.

It’s the one thing you are guaranteed to get.

Losing your parents

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Losing my father all-at-once, and my mother by degrees to dementia has been hellish.

My parents are in their mid-eighties so, you know, it’s just one of those things, but it seems like, no matter what the age, this is never just one of those things. Long expected deaths, or short sudden ones, like my father’s. It’s impossible to say which is worse, I guess, unless you’ve been around both.

Dear God, don’t let me have both. Though it looks like that is the direction we’re heading.

All this has produced a gap in fiction output. I know that Sheila Williams at Asimov’s will do her best to keep me in print should I get her stories worth publishing, but production schedules mean that I’ll have nothing in print in 2020 most likely, which is too bad, as 2020 is a seriously science-fictional year. At least, to people my age.

Story-telling, which compresses the creative act into a half day producing and performing a five minute bit, has become my substitute for the sustained mental effort of writing fiction. It resonates with the memoire work that I generated spontaneously as I processed all that paperwork.

And all that emotional stuff, too. Not that it’s fully processed. Or ever can be.

I wrote and illustrated a hundred pages about parents life in the 40s through the 60s. My mother’s illness meant all the paperwork, the nitty-gritty of coping with my father’s death, fell to me. And I felt an urgency to extract the stories that might soon be lost forever. Wanting to know my father, more, and better through her, and to escape the endless grinding estate work.

I am really really bad at paperwork. Well. I’m better at it now.

The memoire gathered a small but devoted readership in my FB feed. I may do something with it. Or maybe it’s therapy. I’ll give it some distance to figure that out.

There’s a lot of this dead parent content going around. It’s a generational thing; late boomers, early gen-x’ers parents are dropping like flies.

My parent’s, who had us a few years late by the standards at the time, were a generation known as the lost generation or, less popularly, The Lucky Few, a name they resented as they were born during the great depression.

” As it turned out, we really were very lucky,” as my Mom says.

A small cohort, they moved into job markets that welcomed them with open arms, and open wallets. Being white and educated, they benefited from post WW2 stuff, a GI bill, a booming housing market as the suburbs continued to sprawl, sucking middle class whites out of urban cores. Into that already fading suburban American dream, tracking the rise and fall of mall culture, the tail end of TV as king, phones as immobile objects, computers as props in SF movies or big business machines mailing you inscrutable bills.

My parents were professors. I staggered through my college years… tuition free.

I have been, and continue to be, wildly lucky.

But death has a way of leveling the emotional playing field. I’m a wreck. I feel so much so strongly now. Maybe it’s the bipolar. I struggle now for balance, composure, perspective. I flash back on the death bed, again and again, and long for a chance to really clear the air. Instead of clutching a still warm body ugly-crying out the things I’d never gotten to.

My mother slips away before my eyes and I struggle to remember her as she was, proud and intelligent and independent. A professional, a professor, an intellectual, always one of my best friends, a fact I only admit to myself as she becomes my charge. My responsibility.

My friend is mostly gone, and when I talk to her, really talk, dig deep, half the time there’s confusion in her eyes. She’s lost the thread. She fades in an out, like a ratio station receding from your speeding car on the interstate. Fuzzed with static, then clear, then unintelligible.

The strong, loving, flawed ever-s0-slightly distant, and beautiful people they were are gone for good.

I’m left spewing cliches. Life is precious. Time is limited. Say things while you can, and if I didn’t really listen then you won’t either. I can’t help but repeat them though, now, for you, wise and gentle reader. This reader that somehow I feel closer to than ever.

I feel closer to everyone now.

You’re going to die. I’m going to die. Other than that, there’s literally nothing to be afraid of. And eventually, if you do the work, maybe, you’re not even afraid of that. But I’m happier, in this sadness, knowing the first thing. I’m going to live as if my life matters.

I’ll get back to the writing. Or something even more important, and it will be full of writing stuff no doubt.

But for now…

If your family isn’t a toxic presence you have wisely cut yourself away from, give Mom and Dad a call. Say what you need to say. Now.

It can all change in an instant.

And you’ll wish you had.

My new novella “You Must Remember This” is in the November / December issue of Analog Magazine

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If you are reading these please go to the Analog site and check out my excerpt and the illustration there. It’s good. It captures the emotional flavor of the work. Analog can track the hits and seeing interest in my work is a Good Thing. If you would like to see more, I mean.

This novella is one of three I wrote last year, one of the two set in the Zeitgeist universe; the first was a mess that could become a novel, or be printed and used for insulation in an attic, and the other straddles the line between SF and superhero fiction and is thus, a hard sell.

That is to say, it didn’t sell.

I’m finally working again on two novellas started before my Dad’s death. I feel like a different person in many ways. I’m curious what it does to my work.

The Boy Who Read Every Book in the Library

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My father died on the eighth of august, a week before his 87th birthday. He had a good life and we had a good relationship. But.

My mother is fading, her memory going, and I’ve been living with her, packing to move her… somewhere else. Back north, to be close to her surviving family, which would be us, her two sons.

Winnowing down the belongings to an iconic few, going through old photos, old clippings, old drawings, financial records, my parent’s academic work. Throwing away the useless tech cruft that builds up around us, the old cell phones and land lines and USB cables and battery chargers and transformer bricks that go to nothing that you’re afraid to throw away, in case you suddenly need whatever the hell it is they used to provide power for.

The retirement community will absorb what we leave behind. Oh, they have experience doing that. It’s a donation. Or more like a lizard shedding its tail to escape a predator.

I am a very lucky fifty six year old, to have not lost anyone but grandparents who was important to me. So lucky. And I’m so torn open now, so empty and lost. I’m not sure why. I’m told it fades. But never goes away completely.

Good bye, Dad. The boy who read every book in the library. The man who took his young sons bowling, for a time. The science fiction fan who bestowed upon me the genre. A futurist, technologist, a curious soul, an early computer programmer. Bridge player, crossword puzzle do-er and life long nightly drinker who never missed a day of work and was seldom visibly drunk.

A passionate atheist. With a wicked sense of humor.

One of the Lucky Few, the name for his generation, the Korean War set who ended up teaching the baby boom. Tenured professor. A man who dearly  loved wearing a suit. Who rose above his working class roots. To be respectable, a man of substance. Husband and father.

My father. Who I never had enough of.

But what I had will have to do.