I'm a Klutz, Mr. Spock, Not a Bricklayer

And the Weirdest Accident Goes to...

I sprained my ankle two nights ago. Now I remove the ace bandage at the end of the day, hoping for miracles, finding a misshapen hoof.

Pain...terrible pain!

I often moan this paraphrase of bad Star Trek dialogue. Why? I'm a klutz. I have been for as long as I can remember—certainly since I walked smack into a "No Parking" sign when I was ten years old.

I've sprained my ankle several times before and more spectacularly. A year ago, I pulled out ligaments in my knee while dancing with my young son to—of all things—"Disco Inferno."

The kindest interpretation is that I'm an active, fun-loving, gonzo risk-taker. The truth is more nuanced and mysterious. Because of my latest sprain, and because I also banged up the other leg while slipping on ice last week—I feel driven to pose the following questions:

1. Are some people more accident-prone than others?
2. Once you've had a silly accident, does whining about it help?
3. Does it provide a secret release from the duties of normal life?
4. What's the weirdest accident you can think of?

Pain...terrible pain is from one of my favorite Star Trek episodes, "Devil in the Dark,"* which involves creatures called the Horta. These lava monsters make tunnels in the rock on a mining planet, working in tandem with the humans running the operation. All is well, until they start attacking people. Kirk and Spock and the red shirts who end up fried come down to the planet to figure out what's going on.

Mr. Spock mind-melds with a horta. He lays his hands on this pulsing hunk of magma and goes into a trance, wincing, grimacing.

"Pain...terrible pain!" he shouts, channeling the horta's feelings.

Oh, Horta, I know.

Two nights ago, I stood up in my office, after falling asleep while watching The Colbert Report—yes, that's already sad—took a step towards the computer, tripped, and came down on the side of my foot.

Pain...terrible pain! 

My husband rushed in. I limped over to him, crying, "I'm OK!"

What an idiot. I should have put ice on the ankle instantly. Instead I walked around, trying to prove it was nothing.

"Pain...terrible pain! That's all I got, Captain...waves and waves of searing pain—it's in agony!"


The thing is, I've had a lot of accidents. Nothing major (knock wood), but I'm known for being clumsy and "only vaguely connected to this planet" (direct quote from husband). Once I tried to convince a friend when we were hiking down a long Cape Cod beach that I kept tripping in the sand because my feet were too small. She almost believed me.

This same friend, who recently was hospitalized for a truly strange turn of events that she's only now recovering from, told me, "You know, Martha, I never have weird accidents like you always do."

"Always" is strong, but one college boyfriend did like to make a point of walking on the outside when we were on a busy street, shepherding me along as if I were in constant danger of stumbling into traffic.

He didn't last. The miracle is that I have. Knock wood.

I've had countless running and biking accidents in which I end up picking gravel out of my palms. Those aren't weird.

The only weird thing about the time I sliced open my finger while cutting up carrots at a dinner party was how unflappable I was. No horta-like raving; I just put down the knife, picked up my purse, and told the assembled, "It's no big deal. I have to go to the Emergency Room, but I'm fine."

Later I heard the guests hadn't stayed. They'd said I had to be in shock; how else could I be so preternaturally calm? (Practice makes perfect, I could have told them.) Our horrified friends insisted my husband and son join me in the ER. I was glad to see my guys there, but we laughed about it, too, because visits like this had become so routine.

Besides, I only needed two stitches. That's a non-accident for me.

The weirdest one in my recent history involved the little toe of my left foot. (Warning: The following story causes people to flinch involuntarily and to make the sign of the cross.) I was sitting on that same couch in my office, heard the phone ring, leapt up, and managed to catch my little toe on the wooden couch leg as I lurched forward and...

Pain...terrible pain!

The webbing between my toes tore. I'm pretty sure my husband could see way too much when he looked at it.

"Yep." He blanched. "You're going to the ER."

That time, he took me. Our son was asleep upstairs when the accident happened, but the boy still claims he heard me yelling an "oops" word at the decibel level of a wounded buffalo.

Maybe he did. But the story has become something of a family tall tale. A good friend came over to stay with him while we were at the hospital, and in her telling, the little guy padded down to find her cleaning up a few drops of blood on the carpet. As he tells it, she was swabbing up pools of blood.

Here's the weirdest connection: Because of the toe mishap, I now wear lavender Crocs around the house to protect my feet. Yet I stumbled on one of those Crocs two nights ago when I sprained my ankle.

What that proves, I don't know, except that people like me must be accident-prone—"scientists say"—and that, yes, there is a luscious thrill to be had in whining, in shucking one's usual grin-and-bear-it attitude.

As for Question #3: I've been released today from a family outing with small children, all of whom were supposed to be getting ski lessons on an icy mountain in temperatures way below zero.

And maybe every action we take in this world is linked to another, for all time, and I am on a wheel that will somehow provide enlightenment, coming with the authority of a lightning strike.

Knock wood.

Night Storm 2

© Yanik Chauvin | Dreamstime.com

* "Devil in the Dark" also includes the famous line from Dr. McCoy: "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer!"

Neutering His Book: Mental Illness in the Family

I've just finished reading Michael Greenberg's Hurry Down Sunshine, a revelatory account of his teenage daughter's first bout with mania.

So much in this 2008 memoir is wise, beautiful, and scary. But what strikes me most is Greenberg's description of what happened when he finally went back to work, after his daughter Sally came home from the hospital.

He hadn't been in his rented workspace or looked at the manuscript of his latest novel for weeks. He started editing it in almost a fugue himself. After Sally's experiences on a psych ward, he thought his first-person narrator was too "melodramatic, overromantic...too desperate for love":

"With pencil in hand, I find myself eradicating his voice—eradicating the offending 'I'—and replacing it with a third-person narrator, omniscient and bloodless.... Any whisper of chaos that I come across in the narrative is surgically removed.... It's as if my aim is to neuter the book, to relieve it of feeling itself."

Oh my God. Of course! Of course this father felt the need to run from his own feelings, to ease the emotional storm he saw in his daughter. He both identified with the storm and felt guilty about it.

How much havoc can a mentally ill family member wreak on the creativity of others? How much can another's manic energy drain the life from one's writing voice?

It can do a lifetime of quiet damage. I know.

I've struggled with this for years—not to mention the family injunction against talking about it—so much so that, even now, I feel guilty referring to my own experience. It doesn't matter how vague I'm being here about which family member of mine is crazy; the guilt comes down, the editor who so sternly wants to deny what's wrong.

Greenberg's account of one terrible summer in broiling New York City and being confronted suddenly with a wild-eyed stranger—his daughter—who proclaims everyone a genius brings it all back home. The extremity of her emotion sucks up everyone else's air.

In my own work, I can control the editor sometimes, but she's always sitting on my shoulder, doing her own version of neutering.

All my fictional characters start off angry; it's the emotion that animates most of the action, and it's too one note. But in my nonfiction, anger rarely surfaces. My sadness does, yes, and my longing, but the closest I get is sarcasm, a veiled rage that tends to keep readers safely away from the real flames.

I'm not sure whether to thank Michael Greenberg—no, I do thank him. Every once in awhile I dive into memoirs about mental illness, and I emerge into a world in which I feel both relieved—I'm not the only one who's had to deal with this—and the kind of fear that's the biggest self-censor of all.

Towards the end of Hurry Down Sunshine, Greenberg talks about how worried they were about his daughter going back to school. As that first day in September approached, Sally was the most worried of all. He and his wife advised her not to tell any other students what happened, because "[p]eople won't understand."

"But am I right about this?" Greenberg asks himself. "Is it really better for Sally to conceal what happened? It may not be possible. And what of the burden such a secret will place on her?"

Knee-jerk secrecy becomes a burden for all involved. He's right to ask those questions, and the resulting book is a testament to what it means to release the grip of something so corrosive.

I've long felt that I couldn't write about people I know in hurtful ways. Yet I'm coming to realize that the privacy of others isn't the only ethical consideration.

I've always thought that my desire to be honest with my son about his adoption, for instance, was rooted in the conventional wisdom about what's good for adoptees. But maybe my determination has been sparked by something more fundamental—my need to rebel against an older family story that has sometimes kept me muzzled.

It takes so much effort to hide the damage. I won't say I'm in full-scale rebellion now, but I'm trying to reclaim my voice. I'm telling that she-devil editor, who says I have no right, to back off. It's my story, too.

The "Perfect Guests": Who Would You Be If You Walked Away from Your Life?

A local news story has reanimated a guilty fantasy of mine: throw away the rules, max out the credit card at a fancy hotel, damn the consequences.

According to the Boston Globe's "'Perfect Inn Guests" Swindled Proprietors, Police Say," Jane and Benjamin Wolff have been caught and arraigned "on charges of defrauding an innkeeper" after staying in a series of tourist hotels. They allegedly ran up big bills—such as $3,600 at the Hawthorne Inn in Concord for 19 days—then split without paying:

"They lingered over breakfast, raving about the homemade granola and chatting amiably with other guests at the richly appointed 19th-century bed-and-breakfast. They kept their room spotless, whiled away afternoons over books and brownies, and entertained their hosts with amusing stories."

"They seemed like your grandparents," another innkeeper is quoted in the Globe. This week the local Fox News station hyped the victimization of these trusting B-and-B owners and ran footage of the Wolffs in court.

The Globe notes that the "reasons such a couple would go to those lengths...have so far eluded authorities." The story points out that Jane Wolff filed for bankruptcy in 2005.

I can think of lots of motivations for this scam, from skilled con artistry to desperation. If you made the movie, you could portray the Wolffs as schemers (Marlon Brando and Joan Collins) or as dreamers on a spree before getting free room and board in jail (Dustin Hoffman and Shirley MacLaine). One person calls them "an elderly Bonnie and Clyde."

"At this point, they are homeless people knowingly breaking the law," a Concord police detective told a TV news reporter. "They do have family. It's just an odd case."

I see 79-year-old Benjamin's hunched back and stiff movements in the courtroom, and I wonder about why they might feel estranged from their family. The Wolffs are my parents' age, and if my mom and dad weren't so ill, I can imagine them saying, what the heck, let's live high off the hog for a few days.

The TV news reports present their departure from the usual roles played by "sweet" seniors as disturbing and titillating. The lack of a clear-cut explanation seems to make everyone nervous. So far, the reports don't contain quotes from the Wolffs—just shots of Jane hurrying away from a thrusting microphone—although a piece from another local paper notes that Jane's son decided not to to pay the money they owe; apparently they've been pulling such stunts for years.

A salon owner in Newburyport who got stuck with two bad checks laughs and says, "They are a team."

So the perfect guests are probably schemers. But it does give me a little thrill that the couple managed to fool innkeepers who often charge more than $200 a night. Benjamin claimed to be a doctor who "worked at home," as well as a Goldman Sachs executive who was just waiting for a $20 million bank transfer.

And the story—which ran on the Globe's front page—got me wondering where I'd go if my life became a financial and emotional train wreck.

The dreamer in me has to admit that I've thought about starting life fresh with a new identity. Well, not really thought about it in a premeditated way, such as figuring out the logistics and calling some friend of a friend to help me with getting fake ID. I'm basing this on mystery novels now and also qualifying wildly, because in no way do I truly want to take a powder and leave everybody I know to become a river-boat gambling queen or a waitress in Key West.

Yet years ago, when I read Anne Tyler's Ladder of Years, before I even had a child, it did give me another kind of vicarious thrill.

In that novel, during a low-rent beach vacation, a mother just decides to walk away from the house and become somebody else—somebody free of the demands of squabbling, irritating others. As Cathleen Schine writes in her 1995 review of the book in the New York Times:

"If the reader is never quite sure why Delia deserts her life, neither is Delia herself. All she can say to explain herself when her family finally tracks her down is, 'I'm here because I just like the thought of beginning again from scratch.'"

Shocking as it may seem, I've felt overwhelmed by laundry and arguments over ice cream cones and one too many episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. My husband is a total mensch and gorgeous guy, but we butt heads on occasion. I've also quietly steamed over long-time conflicts with other family members whom I'll just call "difficult."

I'd like to say that the fantasy has me traveling the world, flirting with dangerous people or descending into a racy alternate existence. Call this the Don Draper approach in Mad Men. But I'm more captivated by the thought of solitude. I'm a hermit in a cottage on a rugged seacoast, scribbling in my notebooks, accepting the simple gifts of food and drink brought by villagers because of my renowned wisdom.

Or for a few seconds, I'd like to be the perfect guest—the person who's a cipher, who you can never get too intimate with‚ pampered by luxe sheets and complimentary brownies.

Of course, Don Draper's multiple identities don't make him happier. And Delia of Ladder of Years discovers that she can't escape herself. She establishes a new identity in a new town, but soon enough new people are relying on her.

We parents may fantasize about escape, but most of us are wired to care for others. But, oh, to have a night or two in the Musketaquid Room room of the Hawthorne Inn, with the free videos and breakfasts. Here's a description of the room from the inn's website:

"Sunrise filters through a sieve of ancient maple boughs and breaches the bay window sill; a new morning embraces you. The flood of warmth charges the room with a glow of burnt umber, sienna and rust as walls and carpets and the burnished wood of antiques awaken."

What was that about carpe diem?


This piece has been cross-posted on Open Salon.

Map of My World—or Why I've Fallen off the Edge

I've just completed an assignment that has starkly revealed how little I know about "bedrock" reality.

Before going into detail, I'll put it to you: What would you write if you were asked to describe the geography of the United States? What kind of map would you draw?

I've been challenged by this in the past few weeks, and so, coincidentally, has my seven-year-old son.

In my Vietnamese class, my fellow students and I first translated a narrative titled "Địa lý Việt Nam" ("The Geography of Vietnam"). This essay included sections on "Núi và cao nguyên" (mountains and highlands), "Sông" (rivers), and "Biển và bờ biển" (oceans and coastline). Each section contained several densely packed paragraphs of Vietnamese, detailing facts like the highest point in Vietnam (Mount Fansipan) and the length in kilometers of various rivers, including sông Cửu Long (the Mekong).

In class and at home, I pored over a map of Vietnam in Vietnamese, split between two modes: learning the facts of the landscape and a different way of expressing those facts. I found it fascinating and mind-twisting.

I've always been good at reading maps, but here even places in Vietnam that I had visited needed to be rediscovered. The reframing of place names, provinces, and borders in another language seemed an apt metaphor for viewing the land through a different cultural lens.

Yet I didn't expect such mental twists in viewing my own country. Our next assignment was to write an essay about U.S. geography. I thought this would be a snap at first, until I slammed up against my ignorance of information like the length of the Mississippi River.

Wikipedia (there's a joke in this link) and a variety of websites became my friend. But the real twist came in expressing direction and geographical formation in Vietnamese. My ignorance of the facts I thought I knew—what are the tributaries of the Mississippi, for example? Where does the Columbia originate?—made me feel I'd suddenly just landed on American shores, scratching my head.

One small example: directions such as northwest or southeast in English are reversed in Vietnamese—that is, tây bắc (or "westnorth"). This is easy enough to get used to, but it does also involve a perceptual shift in how one moves in physical space. The Southwest, for instance, is referred to as "miền Tây Nam" ("area West South").

Meanwhile, unknown to me until I attended a potluck breakfast in my son's second-grade class, he had drawn his own map of Vietnam, complete with illustrations of a compass and a ship. There's a thumbnail of it at the top of the post, but you might not be able to make out Nick's personal labels for places. Under "Hannoi," he inserted "us + me"; under "Da nang" he put "didn't go to"; and with "ho chi men city," he wrote "I was born here" and "next time."

Nick's map is accompanied by a story. "Chapter 1 Hotel!!" begins this way: "In Hanoi when I first looked at my hotel it was great with Ho Chi Minh's sayings as famous as MLK to Vietnam." In the second chapter ("Me!"), he writes, "Mom said that we would go to the market place. Vendors were selling everything from fish to...well sea food."

My husband and I were delighted to see his map and to read the story, of course. But it also brought home to me how personal one's sense of location in the physical world is. In Nick's case, after one visit to Vietnam a year ago, he can recreate that geography and label the places that matter to him far more vividly than he can the landscape of where he lives in Massachusetts.

I don't mean that he cares more for his birth country, although I think he'd say that he does. He is also quite rooted in our corner of Cambridge, the streets of our neighborhood that we often walk to school, the collection of shops a few blocks from our house. It's possible to live many places in your mind and heart, and I see his map of Vietnam as so much more than a geographically correct drawing.

As for my geographical correctness, I muffed the verbal description of oceans around the U.S. that I gave in class. When asked why the oceans are important, I basically said the equivalent of "they have everything from fish to...well, uh, seafood."

On the written essay, I scraped through with a B-minus, which is starting to look like a good grade to me. My inability to get top marks, even if I study for hours, is another mind-twist: my old assumption that if I just work hard enough, I'll succeed just doesn't cut it in this class. My new map of the world has dragons and demons on the borders, and includes the possibility of falling right off the edge into the unknown.

The funny thing is, I've felt an odd burden lift from me, a weight I hadn't even realized I carried. All the shifts in perspective have made me see that my internal topography is changing all the time. I think even a year ago, I might have found this a scary thought, one that required maximum mental fortifications. But just as a map of a country like Vietnam isn't static, it doesn't make sense to take the bedrock of me for granted, either.

I've discovered that my knowledge of geography is thoroughly embedded in personal experience: my old wood-block map puzzle of the United States from childhood; the many times on family car trips that we crisscrossed the flat agricultural lands of the Central Valley to the Sierra Nevada mountains; the bike trails I've traversed repeatedly in Acadia National Park in Maine. I used to run along the trail from Inspiration Point in Tilden Park, so my memory of the spine of hills that separates Berkeley and the East Bay from the Delta isn't just visual; it's in my feet.

The borders of my map might jump from a floating turkey vulture above Tilden to the buzz of a hummingbird off the trail, from the traffic jams of Saigon to late fall in New England. If I drew a map of all these places—as Nick drew his of Vietnam—I'd label everywhere I've been and where I want to go, including the mysterious edges I can't know.

Am I Crazy to Study Vietnamese?

Đi học về—home from school—and the pros and cons of multi-tasking



This past weekend, my family attended a concert at a local Catholic church with a Vietnamese congregation. It was a fund-raiser featuring the legendary Khánh Ly, who, up until the Fall of Saigon, was akin to the Joan Baez of Vietnam. Her collaboration with the protest-songwriter Trịnh Công Sơn is still beloved by that generation of Vietnamese.

So there I was in a church basement with my family and 200-plus Vietnamese Americans. There was Khánh Ly, looking amazingly good for a woman in her mid-sixties, belting out those beautiful songs. She joked with the audience, accepting roses from her fans. She stood before multicolored tinsel streamers, a mirror ball flashing rainbow light.

I'd been nervous about attending this concert. After months of studying the language, I had performance anxiety about speaking Vietnamese. This turned out to be silly; we were in a suburb outside Boston. Yet I'd hoped to follow what was spoken on stage, if not sung.

Instead the words swirled over my head, out of reach. I felt like a frustrated cat, batting at flecks of light—or a little girl, trying hard to be an adult.

The revolving mirror ball, the language I don't quite understand, are emblematic of so much of my multi-tasking life. My attention divides and divides again. I'm not ADD in any clinical sense, but one book that's become a touchstone for me in the last few years has been Edward Hallowell's CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!

Hallowell, a psychiatrist who lives in the Boston area, popularized ADD and ADHD as diagnoses, and has written a number of well-known books about coping with these disorders. But in CrazyBusy, he goes a step farther, arguing that our multi-tasking, post-millennial, "CrackBerry" era fosters a form of cultural ADD. In that sense, we're all suffering.

I agree. And yet a funny thing has happened this fall, as I juggle more balls than ever, and I live with the consequences of an absurd decision to study Vietnamese for a second year in a row. I've started wondering if divided attention is a bad thing.

Most of us middle-aged geezers complain about memory problems. It's as if you hit forty and BAM! You can't remember your friends' names or how to spell words like gizzard geezer.

Most parents of young children, regardless of age, also complain about memory lapses. You're sleep-deprived, you're required to track dervishes in diapers, your vocabulary gets reduced to Elmo levels of comprehension. If you're working, you're subject to all manner of interruptions at home and the office.

As I sat down to write this, for example, my son Nick barged in and said, "Can I show you my armor?" He proceeded to put on a purple-felt apron from his dress-up box, securing it in back with a set of numchucks (string-connected sticks usually whirled around in a deadly fashion).

He placed a napkin over his head, crowning that with a robin-hood-style hat—the complete medieval samurai warrior. It was impressive.

Where was I?

I've been hit with a double-whammy, it seems: I'm way over forty with a seven-year-old child. (My own parents are also quite ill, but that's another story.) I'm back to writing full-time.

Then there's my Continuing Vietnamese class. I started studying Vietnamese because my son was born in Vietnam. (I've told some of this saga before in print: Click here for the long version. Also see my post "For Shame.") But my original reasoning, with its whiff of selflessness—I'll help Nick get in touch with his birth culture—no longer makes sense. I'm proceeding because of my own arcane interests and a stubborn need to prove myself.

Still, I almost dropped out at the beginning of this semester. It's a very small class of four students, two of whom are fluent speakers, and a dedicated teacher. There's absolutely no place for me to hide.

I have good days, especially when I've done the homework. But more often, they're bad. Very bad. Last week, I missed half of one class because my son was home sick; I arrived at another class with the tail-end of a migraine. I couldn't remember simple grammatical constructions. My stumblings were mixed with long, awkward silences in which I'm sure you could hear the gears grinding. I kept mumbling, "Em chưa hiểu." ("I don't understand yet.")

The week before, I found myself confusing the use of "open" and "closed" in English when distracted by my son. Now all my confusion of verbs of motion and prepositions in Vietnamese seems to be transferring to my native language.

Most of each class is conducted in Vietnamese; I understand about 50 percent. My worst moments are when I'm asked direct questions in which my comprehension is zero. The words seem to bounce off me like a handful of pennies thrown at a mailbox.

At the last class, the name for the Red River—sông Hồng—near Hanoi, a name I know well, kept tripping me up.

There's no doubt that some of my struggles are physiologically caused. Many researchers now believe that what we geezers really experience is failing attention. In "The Midlife Memory Meltdown," an article for O magazine adapted from her book on the topic, journalist Cathryn Jakobson Ramin says of our aging brains:

"When the frontal lobes are in top form, they're adept at figuring out what's important for the job at hand and what's irrelevant blather; a sort of neural “bouncer” automatically keeps out unnecessary information. In middle age, that bouncer takes a lot of coffee breaks. Instead of focusing on the report that's due, you find yourself wondering what's for dinner. Even background noise—the phone chatter of the coworker in the next cubicle—can impair your ability to concentrate on the task before you."

The thing is, I've always been like this. I'm great at synthesizing ideas, but I've never been good at memorizing facts. Historical dates elude me; foreign vocabulary evaporates as soon as I'm not immersed in it.

I'm also a life-long insomniac—an Olympic champion of sleeplessness—so much so that my husband thinks Barenaked Ladies wrote "Who Needs Sleep?" for me. Lack of sleep is a major cause of memory problems.

But the ideas! My many proliferating story ideas! Here's where I shine, and sleeplessness doesn't seem to slow me down. It's no accident that I'm running four blogs now—one in an editorial capacity for the Women's Review of Books with multiple authors on various deadlines—and writing print articles and prepping for teaching my magazine class in the spring.

A few years back—say, 2006, when CrazyBusy first came out—this would have seemed even crazier to me than it does now. Yet despite the fact that my brain isn't getting any younger, I feel more alive. I've gotten better at mental juggling. I won't claim I'm more organized, but my constantly dividing and skipping attention seems to be sparking me as a writer. I find myself excited by ideas all the time.

In part, that's because I have more control over my own writing and its distribution—a definite silver lining in these cathartic days in the publishing industry. Blogging encourages creativity on the fly.

But the study of Vietnamese also seems to be feeding my passion for words. Just the poetry of Trịnh Công Sơn's songs, the longing for peace and a lost Saigon, testify to so much rich complexity. "Xin cho tôi" ("Please give me" or "May I") ends with "May I ask for just one day."



There's another benefit, too: Experiencing bouts of incomprehension in class takes me back viscerally to what it's like to be a child. It's rare at my age to be humbled in quite this way. In Vietnamese class, I'm always being corrected and looking for approval; I feel by turns resentful, defiant, ashamed, and excited. I'm distracted by big booming life outside the window.

More than Vietnamese culture, then, I'm re-learning the culture of childhood. I'm that little girl listening to Khánh Ly, grasping for flecks of light. For a writer-parent, that may be the best training of all.

In CrazyBusy, Hallowell himself distinguishes between the "stress" that gets your juices flowing and the anxiety-producing mess of having too many commitments:

"If you’re busy doing what matters to you, then being busy is bliss. You’ve found a rhythm for your life that works for you. This world is bursting with possibilities; its energy can be contagious. If you catch the bug, you want to jump out of bed each day and get busy, not because you are run ragged by details or because you are keeping the wolf from your door, but because you are in love with this fast life."

I'm often grumpy about familial distractions; I long for the kinds of writer's retreats I used to take at colonies or in cabins by myself. The real world can get me down, no question, but I know my own work has taken off since I became a mother, despite the additional juggling.

Even the wisest of us doesn't know everything. And perhaps there's a real benefit to failing and stumbling and smacking up against our limitations. For writers, being in control is not necessarily a good thing.

This makes the whole concept of attention "deficit" wrong in metaphysical terms. Maybe we're all dumb mailboxes, pennies bouncing off us in this dervish of a universe. Instead of simply coping, maybe we need to accept the pennies, the flecks of rainbow light, our disorganized version of manna from heaven.

What about you? Do you struggle with divided attention? Do you ever find it a blessing?

Where was I?

Oh California...I'm Not Coming Home

In the 1970s, when I left the Bay Area to go to college, Joni Mitchell's "California" was my anthem. I was a wraith of a girl, a straight-A student. I was never a surfer, but Beach Boys songs reminded me of home, too. Back then, being from California seemed essential.

Here's Joni singing with all that youthful longing:

But my heart cried out for you California
Oh California I'm coming home...

I still love California. But I can no longer come home to it in a romantic swoon, and it's not just because the Golden State has been tarnished by economic and natural disaster. It's because I've lost the sense that any place can "take me as I am." My loss is personal and profound, and in it I recognize the calls for a return to an older dream of America.

I support the Obama administration, but this emotional recognition worries me. On Saturday, September 12, thousands will participate in the "Taxpayer March on DC." I hope White House staffers are paying due respect to the feelings under all the crazy talk. I fear they are not.

It's hair-trigger, the way so many leap from their own grief to political rage. I know my lack of security has everything to do with the fragile health of my parents. I'm outraged at the government, but letting my anger spill over to governors and presidents does me no good. Maybe it feels good for a few seconds, but then it doesn't, not at all.

If you look at websites for groups like the Tea Party Patriots, there's little content about policy. I tried to pull a quote with substance, yet all I found were references to "our Founding Fathers," "free markets," and "limited government." It's all about mobilizing, speaking up, resisting.

It's relentlessly personal. It's feeling-driven, just like a pop song, and what an irony that the language of lefty organizing—all that attitude about "Sunset pigs," in Joni's words—now does service for conservatives. Our supposedly lost country is a long way from 1971 and Laurel Canyon on her album Blue. Yet in that California dream, everyone wanted their own freedom, too. They wanted to sink into a reverie of pleasure.

No bourgeois values. No war. That was just a dream some of us had.

California has always had a libertarian strain. My dad the political-science professor understood this well, starting with the election of Ronald Reagan as governor in 1966. But I didn't get the zeitgeist shift earlier this summer, when my family happened across a "tea party" rally in Times Square. One block was suddenly packed with white skin, and there were exhortations about "not taking it anymore" from revved-up guys on megaphones.

I did feel the shift by the end of August, however, in San Diego. An old friend we visited in La Jolla says that on election night, when she ran out her door to cheer for Barack Obama the minute the polls closed, she heard only one other answering yodel blocks away.

There was far more cheering in the Bay Area and Los Angeles last November, but the aggrieved conservatism is also California. As a teenager, clutching both Blue and David Bowie's Diamond Dogs as identity totems, it was easy to sneer at Southern California. Yet its dreams of beaches and surfers and casual hook-ups most evoked what I called myself then.

We're all culpable in our desire for a metaphorical home. The longing for a golden past is easily manipulated by conservative interests, who use code words like "individual liberties" and "fighting change." But existential angst is what I'm talking about here—a complex brew that can send the strongest of us running to a cause. Progressive politicians reveal their own biases when they don't see how much the current dissent is animated by hurt.

Oh California. You symbolize more than you know.

My home is elsewhere and has been for years. But I visit the Bay Area often because my parents are both ill. My father, in particular, is slipping into the frozen darkness of Parkinson's Disease. On a good afternoon, he and I might spend ten minutes under the lemon tree in his backyard, an occasional hummingbird buzzing in the leaves. I smell my past there: the scent of the dry hills. I smell my dear father, in his baggy sweatshirt, as he talks about letting go, about having lived a good life, about his worries for my mother.

Yes, I'm scared that one season is ending as another begins. But to conflate my loss and fear with the state of the country would be to lose my soul—and these days, my soul is the thing I come home to.

Joni has lost her amazing young voice, too. But some would say she's attained something richer and more hard-won. Even by 1976 and her album Hejira, she was on the endless road again. Ron Rosenbaum's paean to her transcendent song "Amelia," about the "ghost of aviation," explores longing in a far more complicated key:

I was driving across the burning desert
When I spotted six jet planes
Leaving six white vapor trails across the bleak terrain
It was the hexagram of the heavens
It was the strings of my guitar
Amelia, it was just a false alarm

As Rosenbaum notes of the many meanings of false alarm, "when used colloquially, [it] is more often taken to be analogous to—if not synonymous with—'false hope.'"

Joni was never a romantic swooner. In a review in NOW Magazine, Susan Cole complains of a difficult interview with her in 1994. Cole quotes Michelle Mercer, author of the biography Will You Take Me As I Am: Joni Mitchell's Blue Period, as saying, “Joni Mitchell is not like us. She’s driven to recreate herself as an artist in ways that very few people do. She’s been through so many stages of regeneration.”

Last week in La Jolla, I took a walk to the beach by myself before heading to the airport. At the end of a cul-de-sac, among all these deceptively modest bungalows in a million-dollar neighborhood, I stepped out on a ledge between houses. There was the blue Pacific and the white sand and a watery haze in the air. I expected to feel a last "ah," a sweet snort of Southern Californian fun and sun to take back with me to the east coast.

Instead I was suffused by sadness. My eyes blurred. I watched several surfers up the beach, black crescents in their wet suits. The swells were large but orderly, and when one surfer stood, he or she descended into beautiful white froth, then paddled back out to do it again.

I kept watching them, counting seconds, daring myself to wait until they took another wave—and two did, cutting down the same swell and into the same sparkling froth—not graceful, but fully alive and present.

I thought of myself, getting up and roaring down another wave, of the need to keep getting up and splashing down into the cold froth. I thought of my father, who often needs a push to get started out of his chair just to take a few mincing, wobbly steps forward, who needs my help now to lift his legs onto the bed before descending into sleep.

Oh it gets so lonely
When you're walking
And the streets are full of strangers
All the news of home you read
More about the war
And the bloody changes
Oh will you take me as l am?
Will you take me as l am?
Will you?

Oh California. I will remember you. I watch the surfers and also feel ecstatic. The day I don't find myself yodeling down a wave is the day I die—or so I tell myself, under a misty blue sky, my body still brown and whole and able to lift me up.

Family Vacation? Help! Cries Mom, Send Moose and Squirrel!

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At a particularly low moment yesterday, I whimpered to my seven-year-old son, "Would you stop talking? Please?"

"Mom, why do bees have sticky hair?"

Silence.

"Because they use honey combs!"

It was Day 3 of a week-long stay on Cape Cod. Every day I'd been pulling my son Nick on the tagalong attached to my rental bike. Yesterday had included the dubious adventure of going to Martha's Vineyard by ferry—with the bike—for a grunting tour on dusty roads in close to 90-degree heat. Just a hint for the Obamas when they get here this weekend.

For those unfamiliar with children's bike equipage, a tagalong is a third wheel and handlebars that can be connected to an adult bike. That means pulling approximately 80 additional pounds, counting the small child who will inevitably squirm and, in Nick's case, pedal backwards.

By this low moment, we'd returned to Wood's Hole and made it off the ferry. Sweat was pouring down my face, but Nick perched happily on the tagalong, still talking at my back.

"Mom, in the Vietnam War, did people want to escape?"

"Not now!" I huffed. "Can't you see how much I'm working?"

God. I'd resorted to waspishness: Can't you see how much I'm [fill in the blank]? Evil Mom. Shouldn't I be thrilled that my child loves to ask questions? Serious questions about Vietnam, his birth country? Tough questions like "Why does China own Tibet?"

I am thrilled. Yet the brilliant monologues on the back of my bike are also mixed with fully dramatized scenes from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show—"What's your name, Natasha? Fatale, Fatale! Boris darlink, even Moose and Squirrel know that. Boris, you leetle squirt!"

I don't do well on family vacations. It takes at least a week of grueling exercise to slow down my mind. Or a week of complete solitude in a cabin miles from civilization. I seem to learn this every summer, as we spend a week at the Cape or on an island in Maine, my son a different age each time, and me longing for a few seconds to stare into space or to hike ten miles by myself. Instead I get my son full-throttle, with no child-care breaks and endless negotiations about what to do next, and me feeling horribly guilty.

Typical po-mo feminist mom. Typical entitled selfish ridiculous writer mom.

A few disclaimers: My husband enjoys the family time of these vacations. He also gives me breaks. However, some of our trips are tied to his work—as this one was to an academic conference—and so he's often gone during the day, while my son and I are left with each other. This is both good and bad.

During one of our treks on the Shining Sea Bikeway between Wood's Hole and North Falmouth, for instance, I was struck by the trail's beauty, even during a heat wave. Yet for me, cresting a small hill with a view over coastal marshland to the shore, it just wasn't the same with this exchange:

Me: "How gorgeous!"

Little chatterer: "Did you know Boris eats rutabagas?"

Me: "Look at the ocean."

LC: "What's a rutabaga?"

At one point, when I was negotiating a tricky turn into a beach parking lot with a UPS truck barreling micrometers from my son's exposed leg, the little chatterer said, "Mom, can I tell you the names for all those guys in my story, Kun the Turtle, his friends' names, remember you said we could figure out what would happen—"

"NOT NOW!" I cried. "Can't you see how much I'm concentrating?"

"Is it OK if I keep talking? You don't have to answer."

He kept talking. Within moments, I was answering.

When I complain about the little chatterer, my husband laughs. He's the one who usually gets stuck with the tagalong on our family bike rides.

"I just don't answer him," he says. "Pretty soon he shuts up."

He's a good guy, my husband, and a practical one. But I think I'm wired differently. Words make me respond—it's the writer in me, the pedant. Words are luscious things, not just chit-chat or time-fillers, and despite every drip of sweaty frustration with the chatterer these past few days, I know that words have weight for Nick, too. They are himself: Look at me, look at me, what do you think? Am I funny? Am I fabulous? Will you always love me? Can we get married? Will I be famous someday?

It's amazing, really, being privy to so much that's usually private in adults. Once, as I was wrestling with the bike locks, Nick tugged my arm.

"Mom?"

"What?"

"Why do people like me?"

I wanted to melt, and not from the heat. "Because you have great ideas," I said. "Because you're funny."

Nick kept looking up at me, as if unconvinced.

Because you're you, I thought.

OK, I love this child. Maybe expecting a family vacation to be a vacation is a fool's errand. Maybe vacation is the wrong word. It's more like moments of being—strings of shiny shells interspersed with stinking seaweed and whiny requests for ice cream.

On one of our first mornings here, Nick crept into bed with us, snuggling against me, and fell right back to sleep. I held my husband's hand, and he squeezed mine, as if transmitting his warmth to me and to Nick, who was silent for once, blessedly silent.

But I realized later, during another tagalong monologue—You know the thing I like best? Mom? Living!—that by listening to children, we affirm who they are. Listening is as important as touch; it gives them the freedom to shout and argue and annoy and bedazzle.

I try to explain what a rutabaga is or why China has colonized Tibet. I tell my little chatterer that I love life, too, although I'm not sure it would be my number-one choice if I had to live without the people I love.

LC says, "Yeah." Then he cracks a joke, putting on his Boris Badenov accent.

I know that I can't protect my son from all harm. But I can inoculate him against despair. And if I do—please, God, yes! I love living!—perhaps I can also inoculate myself.

This post originally appeared on Athena's Head, Martha's Open Salon blog.