Cynthia Harrison's Blog, page 33

Home: His & Hers

Something that happened forty years ago almost cost me my thirty year marriage last year. I only realized this yesterday. The body holds emotions that the soul and mind don’t divide into time. That’s why when we hear a song that is particularly poignant, we’re right back there at the senior prom.

This happens in many ways and for me it involved men and new houses. I have owned two new houses in my life. Half a lifetime apart. It would never have occurred to me that the husband I bought the first house with would influence how I responded to the husband I bought the second house with…I was married to house guy #1 for only seven years and house guy #2 has been with me for thirty. So, no comparison. Right? Wrong.

Subtle, though, which is why it can be a good exercise and clearing for you if you run into a perplexing problem of unknown origin like I did. I had my beautiful new home. A home I had never aspired to (I always wanted a cute little ranch house). My husband happily organized the appliances, the shiny new deck that caught the sunset perfectly, and picked out a television and the few pieces of furniture he believed we needed, including a king-sized bed.

Meanwhile I shopped in my basement, filling out the house as best I could with things that didn’t really fit. I mentioned I’d like to do a bit of decorating and husband said “Bank’s closed. We just spent a small fortune.”

I didn’t think much of it. I’m not a money person and I was fortunate for all I had. I moved on. Or so I thought. But I kept getting more and more depressed, feeling more and more isolated from my husband, and just in general unhappy. I didn’t connect it to the house. I eventually entered therapy where I found that I lived in an unequal marriage. The money management wasn’t equal. The time-commitment to each other and our home was not equal, and trust was all but gone.

Just like my first marriage. But this husband (which is why he has lasted thirty years) was willing to dig in and do the work. It started, funny enough, with me drawing up a budget to decorate the house, him laying out the budget for me, and us working together to make it all fit. It did and we went from there. I’m still working on some things like painting which men see as pointless in a new house because it’s new. But builders use cheap paint and nails pop and since I’m redecorating there are all those nail holes to fill. Also I want new color.

Since I’ve become an equal in money management, I know what we can afford and I’m not going crazy but I wonder, if, that first time I bought a new house, had he listened to me and bought the ranch instead of the quad-level (I had two children under two years old, but he wasn’t thinking about my needs, although I did stay slim running up and down those stairs), we would have had money (not that I’d have known) to buy curtains for the gorgeous living room patio doors and bay window. We’d have had money for real furniture instead of my worn down bachelorette fuzzy love seat and battered old plaid chair someone gave us.

What I didn’t know then was marriage has to be equal or everyone loses. Don’t give the money duty to your husband. Don’t let him make the “big” decisions to help him feel like a man, don’t do it because it with erode trust and without that you got nothing.

Tagged: decorating, family, home, intimacy, marriage, money, trust

Here’s to Bob

Bob just published his first novel! Yay!

And I had the pleasure of taking that journey with him, from the minute he sat in my Advanced Creative Writing class with at least one completed manuscript and a whole lot of determination.

To be a writer you need those three things: determination, some pages with words you wrote upon them, and a tribe. That’s my tribe, above: I’m sitting next to Bob, next to Tom, next to Vernie.

That writing class was Bob’s tribe for the moment. We writers move around. I don’t even teach college anymore; I write full time now. Neither Bob nor I were published when we met.

How Bob Baker became a friend of mine is pretty straightforward. I recognized his talent. I encouraged him. I was apparently nice enough so that he felt okay emailing me after our school semester was over. I was confident enough in his talent to invite him into my writing group, and he was confident enough to accept. Thus, a tribe was formed.

My writing group–it’s a small group, just four of us–came about through many offers for participants on my part and much comings and goings on the part of others until we settled into a fine quartet. We’ve been meeting there or four years now once a month with 10-20 pages each. We spend five hours tearing each other’s work apart giving each other constructive criticism and talking about writing in general. Publishing, too.

When the group began, we had two published writers and two unpublished. Bob has rounded it out so that now with the advent of Hiding Tom Hawk we are all published, all quite pleased with ourselves. And my best advice to any writer is to find your tribe. There’s no mystery to getting published. Practice and show your work to a few trusted souls and follow the well worn path that the internet is very happy to set out.

Here’s to you, Bob!

I’ve got a book about it. I wish I could give every one of you a copy but it sold out in print although there’s a newer edition of Your Words, Your Story anyway with the whole scoop on indie publishing, and whether you are published by a traditional press or as an indie, (and I’v been both) nothing will ever feel better than holding your first book in your hands.

To help say congrats to Bob, I will send free copies of both e-books, mine and his, to the first three people who comment today. And thanks for reading about my lovely band of merry writers.

Tagged: critique, debut novels, mystery, publishing, Wild Rose Press, writing, writing groups

Sacha’s Awards

I voted, did you? Had to tip my hat to the lovely and talented Ali at A Writer’s Wisdom. This woman created a true community and I met so many people in the short time I wrote reviews for her. She didn’t just do reviews. She interviewed with verve. She wrote hilarious Tales From the Manor about her hectic and heroic home life. She tirelessly promoted indie authors for absolutely no compensation and introduced me to worlds of books and some wonderful women I never would have known if not for her.

I voted in all the categories and have my faves but for best blog it had to be her. And I just want to encourage you to vote. Sacha spent a great deal of time on this award project and I hope it has the success it deserves. Whoever wins!

Vote! Vote! Vote! It makes these bloggers who win incredibly happy. They work for free and they work tirelessly, all of them. I could make special mention of some others but I’ll stop here and just post the link so you can go right now and vote for your faves before it’s too late. Only a few days left!

http://sachablack.co.uk

Tagged: A Woman's Wisdom, awards, book bloggers, contests, writing

Encore!

I am not very interested in promotion or platforms or any of that. I have this blog because I like blogging. That’s it. Also I remember I used to look at Jennifer Weiner’s blog and see all her book covers marching down the side of her page and thought how cool would that be? And now it’s real!

Anyway, I’m not sure about how this will work but I wanted to say that Blue Heaven is being reissued by Amazon Encore on September 15, 2015. That means it won’t be available anywhere (except perhaps pirate sites!) until then in e-book form. It’s still out in print as Encore only contracted e-book rights.

Even though I don’t like pushing my books, I am excited about this. Who knows what will happen? New life for an old book. 

Tagged: amazon encore, blue heaven, publishing

Double Feature: Alone & Lonely

A friend once told me that even when he was with someone, he ended up alone. “I never meant for it to happen, but it did.” And he added that he was fine with it. This resonated, let me tell you. Are we all that way? Essentially alone and okay with it?

Actually I don’t think so. I think it’s just some of us. Some are alone by choice, some by circumstance, and some live in families of two or more where there seems to be genuine togetherness most of the time.

I love my husband but we don’t spend much time as a team at our house. Al is a bit of a loner, which I knew when I married him thirty years ago, and this was something that, at the time, I found quite attractive. I’d just untangled from a horribly possessive and dominating man and felt like with Al I could maintain my hard-won freedom. But everything comes at a cost.

After my friend’s confession, I had to admit, I was in the same situation. All my life, I have longed for closeness, and, for one reason or another, have seldom found it. My husband and I work on being close, with date nights, one day of the weekend devoted to each other, and regular vacations. Besides that, I’m pretty much on my own. Unless I need him, which I try not to do, but if I do, he will do his best to be there for me.

I guess I thought that by the time we were sixty we’d be two spoons in a drawer. But it didn’t happen that way. I’ve slowed way down since moving to the country while his pace is more frenetic than ever. I worry he works too hard and plays too hard, but I don’t say much, because when you get down to it, it’s his life. He’s still the guy I admired for his independent ways. I’ve got to honor that.

But it can get lonely. Not a lot, I can be alone an awful lot of the time without being lonely. I’m a writer. We train ourselves to be alone early. I’m a reader. I need great swaths of time to lose myself in books. And yet, after writing my chapter yesterday, I found myself with time on my hands and feeling blue. Husband had not kept our weekend date because he took Monday and Tuesday off. Not for me, he was helping his dad move house, but still, the man only has so many hours. And he was so good when Owen was here.

So I took myself off to a double feature. I’ve been going to the movies alone for more than thirty years and it doesn’t faze me at all. What was sort of amazing is that they’ve put a bar in at the show. And you can take your glass of wine right into the movie.

The first movie, Trainwreck, was a hilarious comedy that inexplicably made me cry. I figured out later that it made me feel lonely for that romantic love that is just not always available. I somehow hold out hope for people who have happy endings; I hope they continue. But I was feeling a little blue for Ms. Boo Hoo. Trainwreck, the number one movie that weekend at my theater, or so the bartender informed me as I stopped by for my glass of wine, had comic bite and everyone was funny. The crying episode was totally my bad, with a little bit of Judd Apatow to blame. And tears before wine!

It was nice to have a glass of wine watching Love & Mercy. This was not a comedy, but a bio-pic about two important creative phases in Brian Wilson’s life. His musical flowering and then the slow descent of a sensitive soul who’s taken advantage of and so very unappreciated. It’s devastating to see this fall but so very affirming to see him crawl out of the hole he’d dug for himself, pushed down deeper and left for dead by crass commercialism, mean people, and manipulators.

It’s no secret: Brian prevailed! So that makes two happy endings in one day. They were both great films, but the second one was sweeter. Because it was true, and because it was earned.

Also John Cusack plays Brian. JOHN CUSACK. I never miss a movie by this master of soul. It’s like everyone else fades into the background when he’s in the shot. Or if he’s not in the shot there’s a little toe tap of “When will John Cusack be back?” I sipped my wine and never had to wait long. He’s got a meaty part and he plays it like Brian plays piano.

So if you’re feeling blue, go to the movies. It’s okay to go alone. I never even notice it anymore. I don’t need a person by my side. I’m interested in the people on the screen. And after the films, I met Al for pizza and then went home and listened to Pet Sounds.

Tagged: beng alone, brian wilson, john cusack, loneliness, movies, Trainwreck.

Beautiful Eye Candy

Yesterday on Facebook somebody said I was “more beautiful than when I was in high school” and called me “eye candy” and said he hoped Al knew how lucky he was. So I told Al all of this because he has never once called me beautiful or eye candy. Al said, “well, but I think you are!” You know Al, man of few words. Then today he called me and said “Hi beautiful eye candy” haha. Gotta love that guy. But the truth is, I’m more wrinkled and weigh lots more than in high school.



In high school I was not overweight. At all. But on the other hand, I did not wear any make up, did not wear nice clothes (just jeans and flannel shirts), and did not do anything to my hair. It was a wild mess of split ends. I was not pretty, but some boys thought I was “cute” even though I had those huge Gloria Steinem glasses. They didn’t suit my face at all.



After about age 35, I gained lots of weight. 50 pounds. I lost and gained hundreds of pounds over the last several years. Just as Dr. Dukan (who I will talk more about in a minute) says is typical dieting human behavior, when I hit anything over the 30 pound limit in my head, I started to cup down. Ten pounds kept off from Weight Watchers, ten more from becoming vegetarian, and ten more when I cut sugar. I still have about twenty to lose, and sometimes it creeps back up to thirty like recently when I hurt my knee and could not walk or do yoga for TWO months!


That thirty pounds is my bingo! And I start to eat healthier again. But with so many restrictions on my foods, it is a challenge to know what is right for me and what will work and what I can live with. I like my wine! But I think Dr. Dukan has got me covered. I can have a glass of wine twice a week on his diet, and even two glasses. That’s plenty. This has been a grueling weight, feeling the pounds creep on, helpless to stop the spoonful of ice cream from entering the mouth. If you’re still reading this,  you’ve been there.


Tomorrow I will get my physical therapy script from my doc and boy I can’t wait. I have not weighed myself since the knee injury because I know without much activity and with the recent descent back into the madness that is sugar I have added back on the ten that just won’t leave. The last food plan I followed had me cut carbs to the bone, eat a lot of fat “fat doesn’t make you fat” and it worked really well. I lost those ten pounds in two weeks. But I felt sick a lot because I don’t have a gall bladder so the fat didn’t agree with me.



I knew I had to find another food plan, this one for life, that would agree with my system. In waltzes Dr. Dukan. He is also anti-sugar which I know works for me. He is high protein, not high fat. Yay! Now that I am (reluctantly) not a vegetarian anymore, I can work his program. He’s got two ways of working it and the first one is very similar to the one I followed last time, with the severe withdrawl of all carbs and sugars. I’ll lose ten pounds in two weeks again.


But he has another plan I’m interested in that I don’t know a lot about yet as I only got the book yesterday and I’m reading all his research, prefaces, and theories. He’s wordy. But basically I think this one MAY BE the one to get those final twenty pounds off as it looks at first glance like it’s a plan I can easily follow for life. I’ll let you know, you beautiful eye candy!
Tagged: diet, dukan diet, healthy eating, protein, weight loss

Rockin’ Codgers

Last week my son and his family flew from Seattle to Detroit to visit Al and me. It was so fun to spend so much time with them. Breakfasts! Dinners! Baseball on television! Owen, Owen, Owen:) The first night, I picked them up at the airport, made dinner for us, and fed Owen chicken and string cheese. He played with his new toys and the other unbreakable things I had left around in my child-proof sweep. Then Owen had his bath and bedtime in the nursery nook I made in the guest room.

Al missed all that having gone to the Rolling Stones concert and not returning until 10 am the next day. No, I did not know he would be out all night. He usually comes home. About 5 am I went looking for my phone and there was a mostly inscrutable text about lost keys and dead phones. So. I texted the number (not Al’s) many times and made many calls but to no avail until maybe 7 am when Al called and explained his story which has nothing to do with other women and is complicated and a little tedious.

Saturday my family and some friends came over and wow was I knocked off my feet. I have been crutch-less for 11 days and so thought I could handle a big bash, but my feet, legs, knees, and entire body ached by the time everyone left. Worth the long happy day. My little Owen is a joy and none of my family had met him yet! I love my son beyond words and I had to hold myself back from grabbing him and hugging him too much. But I got in quite a few and goes without saying Owen was hugged almost constantly. Al worked his butt off for the party and our special day on Friday (we got to babysit all day!) with Owen too,

Now I am home alone. Al is helping his dad move and the kids are at a lake house up north. I could have gone but I needed a day. My editor sent me a few scene adds and on top of the writing I needed to rest and recover and have done that. Donna is coming over for lunch tomorrow (plenty of left overs as we always make way too much food) and I will be happy for a girlfriend day. In the middle of all this joy and the Al hoopla we lost a good friend, one of Donna’s oldest friends and somebody special to me. The kids had plans the night of the service so Al and I were able to pay a visit to the funeral home and that toast at dinner with many friends to our dear pal. Too sad. 58 years old. Cancer sucks.

RIP Cindee

Today I watched a movie about Al Pacino as an aging rocker ala Neil Diamond (so, really not a rocker at all) who gets a letter 30 or so years late from  John Lennon in response to his first interview. It would be like me getting a letter from Erica Jong, except Al Pacino’s character was rich and famous. So, really not the same except artist gets letter from idol. Pacino decides to change his life and become the man and artist he always wanted to be. I think I have mostly done that. I mean, honestly, I didn’t have a choice to sell out, haha. Which it turns out is probably good. Annette Benning was in the film. What movie is not made better by her in it???

Then to cleanse my palate I watched Montage of Heck, the Kurt Cobain doc on HBO. It made me cry. They had family video of Kurt at his first birthday and Frances Bean on hers and on Saturday Owen had a pre-birthday cupcake as his first birthday is in just a few weeks. Owen’s first sugar looked like Elmo, which his mom decorated, although I made the cupcakes. And the potato salad. Al made ribs. Aunt Louise brought copious amounts of dessert. Much wine and other spirits were imbibed.

Me, Dad & Owen

I was thinking if Kurt had lived he’d be a bit of codger now. Look at Foo Fighters. I have finally forgiven DG. If Courtney can forgive him, I can. I was 36, Mike’s age, when I first saw and heard “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on MTV. I asked Mike if he has found any new bands or is that going away for him too. I still find them, but less and less. Mike says same. Al just keeps listening to the same ones from when we were kids. Owen seems like he might be a drummer as his favorite toy was a spoon and a Tupperware container that he banged on every day.

This post is a montage of me this week. So many things with Kurt in his early years reminded me of my life when I was that age. That angst he captures so well in Teen Spirit. I’d recommend if you’re a rocking’ codger you look for Kurt’s doc, but be ready with tissue. I can’t figure out if music and writing saved him or killed him or if he just had low serotonin because of the heroin. Courtney gives her opinion. Watch it and tell me what you think.

Tagged: All Night Parties, First Birthdays, kurt cobain, Montage of Heck, Rolling Stones

Three Good Things

Ten happiness boosters may increase your happiness up to 40%. They are to savor life’s joys, drop grudges, get moving, give thanks, keep friends close, get with the flow, practice kindness, look on the bright side, avoid over-thinking and comparing, and recall three good things.

For the past week or two I’ve been posting on the UC Berkeley list, giving you my practices and ideas. I didn’t do great with kindness but I did figure out it is easy to be kind to those who are kind to me, not so much for those who show disdain, hatred, ignorance, or negativity. So I’m still working on kindness.

Looking on the bright side, I pretty much avoid anybody who bums me out. Distain me, not gonna sustain me. Hate me, never gonna mate me. Show ignorance, I’ll quietly give you a comeuppance, negative words, I’ll fly the coop at dawn with the birds. So that’s the bright side. I have a bunch of kindness in my life because the other stuff doesn’t get in much anymore. And if it does, it quickly gets swept to the curb with the other garbage.

Avoid over-thinking and comparing. Here is good news for older people. We like to use our brains but then they get tired so we rest. I meditate, my husband watches sports on the television. We are so over over-thinking. I have a habit now when something worries me, and I get to that circular reasoning thing where I just go round and round with a topic, where I eventually get dizzy and give it to the universe. Things have a way of sorting themselves out without my breaking my brain.

And comparing! Ha. What a waste. I hesitate to waste the words but in case you have not discovered this beautiful secret of getting older is comparison never ever feels good. Just the minute you find you have less necks than your neighbor someone across the street aged 22 is going to move in. So you know, give up the eyeing of the inches gained and the hair lost and your Amazon ranking and how many Twitter followers you have. It don’t matter, and neither does grammar. Ha. Just, when you start to compare anything, file it with the grudges.

Recall three good things. Saying “I do.” Birth of my babies. Birth of my grandbabies. The day my author copies of The Paris Notebook arrived. Opps that’s four. Or six, depending on how you want to count them because Al, Mike, Tim, Owen & Ben should each be their own good thing. And they are. The men in my life. Then there’s the writing.

Somebody asked me yesterday why I still blog. 13 years, haha. I said “I like it.” Blogging is another good thing. I’m sorry, Berekely, it is impossible to recall just three good things. But I think I may feel 50% happier having realized that.

Tagged: happiness, study to increase joy, UC Berkeley

American Songs

For so many years I could not listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd without a stab of resentment. How dare they sing that they “hope Neil Young will remember, southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” A really rotten response to Young’s poignant song “Southern Man” about the tragedy of racism and it’s pervasive influence on all things southern. Young was righteous; Skynyrd were fools.

Then I came across a quote from Young about this song duel. Young said something like “Southern Man” was a stupid song, it wasn’t his song to sing, and Skynyrd was right to call him on it. I was shocked. Wow. Now that’s practicing kindness. Eating humble pie. Talk about generous.

So what about the Dukes of Hazard? The General Lee? Wasn’t there a Confederate Flag somewhere stuck on that car or in that show? My son was four or five when that program, his favorite, aired. He had a Duke’s sleeping bag, that I bought him, that surely had a Dixie flag flying somewhere on it. I was ignorant about the flag’s darker connotations at the time and of course my son didn’t know beyond Luke and Bo, their speed and outsmarting of the cops in their bright orange General Lee.

So if I could be ignorant about the Confederate flag, Neil could be ignorant, and admit it, about generalizing and demonizing every single “Southern Man.” And I could see that I had held a grudge against the wrong band. Sorry Skynyrd! The guy I’m really gunning for is Burton Cummings. “American Woman” never fails to put me in a bad mood. Really, Burton? MY war machine? MY ghetto scene? I don’t think so.

Just like the confederate flag does not belong to southern men in general, raging war and rampant poverty are not to be laid at my particular doorstep. Or that of any American woman, who are all just sweet home grown girls at heart. We American Women feel the pain of poverty and war, but also that these problems are a bit too large for us to handle on our own.

Perhaps when our government elects a female President the war machine will wind down. Perhaps every hungry child will be fed. Burton Cummings, that is what is in the heart of this American woman today, and in the hearts of every single American woman I know. So stop singing that song when you come to Detroit. We don’t like it, but (despite its faults, and there are many), we do love our home. Most people love home, it’s where you go and they have to take you in. Ask anybody.

I love Canada. I love the southern states, too. I adore Mexico. I feel like I’m a citizen of the world first, America second. But “Practicing Kindness” (#7 on the happiness tip list) is something I need to work on with Burton and Guess Who. I love a lot of his music and most of his songs (there’s a little kindness) but every time one comes on Pandora (no, I do not buy his music, my little protest) I think about “American Woman.”

We in America are cleaning up the flag mess. We get it now and we are sorry. As Lynyrd Skynyrd wrote “In Birmingham they love the governor. We all did what we could do.” And they’re right. We do all do what we can do. American IS beautiful and American Women are awesome and I just want to tell that to a certain Mr Burton Cummings today. You’ve got a lot of talent (that’s me being kind again) but, here’s my lyric back to you, via Skynard: American woman don’t need you around anyhow.

As to my readers of this happiness project…I’m a work in progress. And kindness is a tough one when confronted with hate.  But let me end on a kinder happier note: Happy Birthday Alabama & America!

Tagged: American Woman, burton cummings, confederate flag, Dukes of Hazzard, guess who, kindness, lynyrd skynyrd, neil young, Southern Man, Sweet Home Alabama

Happiness Encore

Today seems a good day to review those ten happiness booster tips from Mindful magazine and UC Berkeley that I’ve been posting about:

1. Savor Life’s Joys

2. Drop Grudges

3. Get Moving

4. Give Thanks

5. Keep Friends Close

 I’ve been off the market for a few months owing to some injuries, and yesterday was my official day to release the crutches and walk unfettered in the world again. Yay! I had lunch with a group of friends, made plans with another friend to see an art exhibit tomorrow, and had a neighbor over for a glass of wine at cocktail hour.

Was I feeling cooped up? You bet. I’m so ready to be social and this is the weekend for it. We have a party with good friends on the 4th and then my Seattle family comes in next week. Al and I have been planning for a big party and some smaller “just us” time too. Then we’re going to visit his dad. Seems I’ll see almost every member of my family and some of Al’s in the next few weeks and all happy occasions.

#6 “Get With the Flow” and I can see some of what that will mean to me beginning on July 15 when I receive my edits from The Wild Rose Press. I also have another book contract to sign with Amazon Encore, something pretty exciting I need to look more closely at today. With book contracts and edits come writing and promotion and this is the flow I’ll be entering after a long winter of writing, writing, writing. Of course I’m still writing…just needing to fit more of the big picture into my flow.

#7 “Practice Kindness” is a big one for me. I always have love in my heart, but it doesn’t always translate into action in the real world. So I’ll be working on that too and letting you know next post some practical steps I took to practice kindness. And of course I hope to finish out those final three tips in my next few posts.

Happy Birthday, USA

Tagged: flow, friends, grudges, happiness, joy, kindness, publishing, thanks, writing