Anne Rutherford's Blog, page 2

I’m Granny

Let me brag about my grandsons. If you don’t want to hear this, then run away. Save yourself. I’m about to be insufferable, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. It’s in the DNA to brag about our descendants, so we just must listen to new grandparents every once in a while, sort of like having to eat rubber chicken at conventions or white knuckle teaching teenagers to drive.

When my daughter first told me she was expecting, she informed me that I could start making a baby quilt. So I gestured for her to follow me to the quilting storage boxes to show her the stash of fabrics I’d already bought for it. I was quite ready to be a grandmother. I began sewing immediately, and rushed to finish the quilt before the due date. By the time it was done, Michael was ten days old. The thing was a simple appliqué block covered with embroidered flowers, in bright batiks and a rainbow of floss. Seven months of needlework, and I rushed the last bit of embroidery.[image error]

Michael is, as of this writing, Six years old, and he’s my first grandchild. His brother, CT, just turned four. They are, of course, adorable. According to the law of infants, Michael was a Gandhi and CT a Churchill. Now that Michael is losing his front teeth, he occasionally looks like Alfred E. Newman, but in an adorable way. CT is one of the most photogenic little boys I’ve ever seen. He’s got eyes the color of a blue-eyed dog’s, and everyone who sees them goes, “Ooh, those eyes!”

I think it’s rather odd to have descendants once removed like this. I’m daycare every other week, so I get flashbacks of the days when my own children were that size. Old reflexes kick in, and I surprise myself that I remember how to do any of it.

But then when they are with their father, I find myself occasionally looking around and going, “Where are the kids?” Oh, yeah. Odd to have such a life-changing thing and be such a small part of the larger picture. But that’s part of maturing, I guess, and at my age I should be a lot more mature than I really am.

I’m lucky in that in the afternoons they sometimes let me take a nap. I try to make sure at least one of them is also asleep, otherwise I would wake up to a fully trashed house. Or else one of them (usually CT) outside and wandering around in the front yard where neither is supposed to be.

Sometimes I read to them. I have saved all the best children’s books my own kids enjoyed, and have recently acquired a full set of Winnie the Pooh books. I also have all the old Disney Classics on DVD, which they sometimes like but more often they want to see Thomas the Train or something involving LEGOs. They are skilled with the remotes and can watch whatever they like on the Kids’ account, so long as it doesn’t have a dollar sign on it.

They call me “Granny.” Like in the Beverly Hillbillies? I don’t think so. More like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey. Picture the oldest daughter saying “Grannehhhh…”

In Other News

I heard from the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? people yesterday. They said, essentially, Thanks but no thanks. Better, I think, to have a definitive rejection than to wait until gradually you are forced to realize you’ve been rejected. They also warned me that there was a limit to the number of times I can attempt this. After five rejections they say I should take a hint. Apparently they get a lot of people throwing themselves at this wall.

Um…I think I’m good. I’m certain that whatever it was that made them reject me isn’t going to change any time soon. I’ll just sit in this corner over here and pretend I didn’t really want to be a millionaire. What? Comfort and health care in my old age? Not for me.

Filed under: Life Tagged: audition, Family, self image, television

Cattle Call Again

Moo. That’s me.

Last night when my daughter came home from work, she informed me that Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? was having an audition cattle call in Antioch this morning. She thought I should go, because I stand undefeated at the Trivial Pursuit genus game since it was invented. Nobody likes to play with me anymore, and I don’t really blame them. My Achilles heel is sports, but the rest of the categories are mine, all mine.

“You should go,” she said.

I was thinking about it, but at the same time I really, really didn’t want to end up doing the Walk of Shame like I had when I auditioned for the fourth season of Master Chef and got no callback. At least I had always known I wasn’t really Master Chef material, but Millionaire is Trivial Pursuit with prizes and to fail that audition would be an eternal embarrassment. I would never hear the end of it. Ever.

“You should go,” she said.

I told her I would think about it.

There wasn’t much time to think. The audition times were 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. the next day. Antioch is nearly an hour’s drive from here, the other side of Nashville, during Friday rush hours. I would have to get up at 6 a.m. and drive down with no coffee or breakfast (who could eat?), and take a multiple-guess test on God-knew-what. When it came bedtime, I had to make a decision. I sighed and told Alexa to set an alarm for 6 a.m. I had no choice, for if I didn’t go I would never hear the end of it. And they’d be right. A coward dies a thousand deaths.

Nervous? You betcha. I did a little stress barfing on the way there and had to pull over briefly to compose myself. I stopped for gas, and bought a bottle of Fiji Water. (Never mind that other stuff, Fiji is the water that makes my mouth water.) After that I was fine. Mostly.

Until the GPS sent me to someone’s house in Antioch instead of the event center I’d programmed in. So I turned around to find a place where I might ask directions, and found my destination in a strip mall I’d passed. So far my luck was running hot.

I got there just in time to miss the first group to take the test. I sat on the floor of an anteroom and listened to unintelligible instructions and sporadic laughter from the inner room. There were only three chairs for about ten of us, and I just knew when I got up off the floor the Millionaire people were going to see me struggle to my feet and they would sadly shake their heads at the fat old lady who thought she should be on television. So I stood up before they could.

It seemed to take forever for the first group to finish. When they did, we in the anteroom watched the folks who didn’t pass the test make their Walk of Shame from the building. My heart went out, and it rather sank as I realized how many there were. I glanced inside at those who remained, waiting for their call-back interviews, and it appeared fewer than half had passed. I took a deep breath and decided I was going to be sent home, too. I would slink out without meeting anyone’s eyes and pretend I wasn’t there, and never speak of it to anyone.

Several people in the anteroom were talking about other auditions and other shows they’d actually been on. One man had auditioned for this show three times, twice in New York. Another did a lot of bragging about how he stands out in a crowd, but I’ll tell you what: I’m from Los Angeles; the pink blazer and shaved head don’t even approach my lookythere threshold. One woman had actually competed on Jeopardy. She and Pink Blazer had been on Wheel of Fortune.  I was an egg.

Finally we were allowed into the testing room, where we received pencils, scan cards, and instructions. They passed out the tests, and we were off.

The next ten minutes were actually fairly enjoyable. I’m a much slower reader than average, given my light sensitivity which gives me a dyslexia sort of trouble, so I did my best to read quickly. But even so, I felt confident in my answers. I noticed that a surprising number of the answers I had to get by elimination. I couldn’t tell whether the test was designed that way, but that was my experience. But though I hurried,  when we received the one-minute warning I had to start making random marks and didn’t mark the last two questions at all.

Dang. Well, I guessed I now knew why there had been so many who hadn’t passed the test. I sat very still while the cards and tests were retrieved by the testing crew. I told myself that I was relieved of the stress of making a trip to Las Vegas, and running the risk of making a fool out of myself on national television. But even so, my eyes watered up a little bit. It would have been an adventure, and I like adventures.

They started calling the numbers of those who had passed, and I heard my number.

I sat up. Really? I got in? No Walk of Shame? My day suddenly got way better, and I no longer minded risking embarrassment on TV. The girl sitting across from me hadn’t made it. She and about half the rest of the room were invited to leave and better luck next time. I got to stay. I got to stay!

What came next was what they call a “call-back.” They wanted to interview us to see whether we’d be presentable to a TV audience. A Nice Lady called me into a smaller room, where she asked me about my plans for the prize money, my childhood, my writing career, why I auditioned, why I’m a trivia wiz, and why I dyed my hair blue. The pressure was off, and I chattered happily about myself.

Nice Lady told me that if they want me in Las Vegas this summer they will contact me within about a week and a half. Watch this space.

Filed under: Trip Report Tagged: audition, memories, self image, television, trivia

Sick Leave

Urp. Spent the week struggling with an intestinal bug I got from the youngest grandson. You haven’t lived until you’ve had projectile vomiting and diarrhea in the same moment. So I’ll just crawl back into bed and see you all next Saturday. Meanwhile, here’s a pretty picture to hold you all over.

[image error]

Have a good week.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Role Model, Not Runway Model

I’ve heard a great deal about the new movie, Wonder Woman, based on the old DC comic. All over Facebook, everywhere I look, people are kvelling over it, so I figured I’d better go see it before I heard so much there was was no longer any point in buying a ticket. Particularly since the buzz I was hearing was exactly the opposite of what I’d expected to hear.  In my lifetime, “strong female character” usually meant “scantily clad sex goddess.” Where breasts were freakishly oversized and impossibly perky, and waists were too narrow to pass a pea. I expected this Wonder Woman to be no different from the smattering of comic book heroines who had gone before, but now I was hearing, “Nay, nay, she’s not like those others!”

I was skeptical, even though these reports came from many I respect and trust on this. Esther Friesner. Jennifer Roberson, women who know from the Fantasy genre. But I’d been burned too many times before.

I take you back to 1966. Star Trek.  The much vaunted, ground-breaking, women-and-minorities-on-the-bridge show. The one that started out with Majel Barrett playing the second-in-command. But by the time the series was picked up and aired, she’d been swapped out for a man and relegated to the sidelines as a nurse with a crush on that man. Where all the women on that bridge wore mini skirts and cleavage as deep as the Snake River Canyon, and all had jobs socially acceptable for women in the mid-twentieth century. Three cheers for Nichelle Nichols, but Lieutenant Uhura was still a telephone operator, Nurse Chapel was, well, a nurse, and Yeoman Rand was a secretary trotting around with an enormous cleavage, fake eyelashes, blonde dye job, and steno notepad. Who had a crush on the Captain. I was twelve and unimpressed. Even worse was the final episode of the series, “Turnabout Intruder,” in which Captain Kirk’s body was taken over by a former lover who wanted to be a man. The moral of the story being the eternal question as posed by the captain, “Why can’t women just be happy as they are?” I adored Star Trek, and felt horribly betrayed by it. I wanted to be able to do things without being told that, “Nice girls don’t…” I’ve known my whole life I wasn’t a nice girl, and Star Trek went boldly nowhere for me.

In the decade following, 1976, I was excited to learn of a new adventure series about female investigators. I thrilled at the idea of women going out and doing things. Kicking butt and taking names. Fighting crime. Being applauded for using their brains and brawn.

Ha!

You know who I’m talking about. The night Charlie’s Angels first aired I eagerly planted myself in front of the TV, fully expecting to be vindicated at long last. But as the hour progressed, uneasiness crept in. It was like biting into a bright, red, polished apple and finding it mealy and full of worms. The women weren’t in charge. They were ordered around by a disembodied voice named Charlie. They weren’t all that smart; they were guided by a eunuch named Bosley. They kicked no butt, they took no names. Mostly they ran around with impossibly fluffy hair and absurdly big teeth. At the end of the episode, when a black-suited-and-helmeted figure was revealed to be the blonde one, and she removed her helmet with a flourish and a shake of her head to restore her coif, I was done.  Charlie’s Angels was not the breakthrough I’d dreamed of.

Neither was Kate Jackson’s next outing, The Scarecrow and Mrs. King, where every episode ended with a huge fistfight in which Ms. Jackson cowered in the corner, watching Bruce Boxleitner save the day. She made me want to smack her sideways.

That same decade, the Wonder Woman TV series did not attract my attention. Cleavage and hair, dancing not fighting, always for the boys not the girls. I never, ever wanted to be Lynda Carter, and didn’t watch even one episode.

Moving along, into the new era of live-action comic book movies that are all about the CGI, these days I’m old enough to get that these movies are for teenage boys who are looking for a poster to tack to the ceiling over the bed. I’ve spent the past forty years expecting little from female adventure characters. Not that I ever expected a female superhero to be real, I’ve given up hope of ever seeing one who could be credible and share the screen with an equally strong male character. So going into that theatre, I expected little from Gal Gadot.

(We interrupt this post for a spoiler alert for Wonder Woman. Proceed with caution.)

Oh.

My.

God.

From the beginning of this movie there is no sense of catering to teenage boys. The Amazon warriors all move like warriors, wearing their Greek-ish outfits similarly to the men in 300.  These women are athletic enough to make the CGI moves credible. They have muscles that look as if they could do the things they are shown to do. They are attractive, but not all boobs and flowing hair.

Ms. Gadot is a gorgeous young lady, and entirely credible in the role of a young goddess out to save humanity from itself. No smirky, sly, over-sexed bombshell. She is straightforward, has the courage of her convictions, is intelligent, brave, and utterly unaware of the condescension of men around her. She barrels through, full speed ahead, taking little notice of stuffy old men who think she should be at home sewing her trousseau.  Sometimes played for laughs, but not clumsily, and her earnestness remains consistent throughout.  Gal Gadot plays Diana as full immersion in a personality unaffected by the socialization of sexism. What a joy!

Also, I saw the thigh-jiggle I’d heard about. Yes, Wonder Woman’s thigh jiggled on landing, like a real woman’s would. Her breasts were normal: not flat, not enhanced, not crammed into a Wonder Bra. Her hair was normal. Pretty enough, but never impossibly fluffy and not once did she toss her head to make it flow. Sometimes it was even messy. I wanted to cheer.

Finally, Chris Pine (that fellow who redeemed the role of Captain Kirk) as Steve Trevor, provided a magnificent foil/love interest for Diana. Steve, though often at a loss to know what to say, is the kind of guy unfazed by a woman who is not afraid to do stuff and follow her own conscience. The kind of guy who can fight alongside her effectively as an equal without having to prove himself superior or in charge. Yes, they do exist, and they should be encouraged to reproduce.

Please, let’s have more adventure stories like this. It’s too late for me, but I’m certain there’s a generation of girls who will eat this up and go on to do great things.

Filed under: Entertainment Tagged: bookses, creativity, female characters, movies, role models, rules, self image, women's issues, Writing

Half a Cat Too Many

Hello. My name is Julianne, and I’m a packrat.  Okay, maybe a hoarder. A border hoarder. I’m able to throw things away, but it takes focused resolve and a commitment to not pull things from the Goodwill pile before they can make it out the door. And I do get rid of things. Junk. But not nearly enough of it. My bookshelves are not just crammed with books, and books stacked on top of books, but in front of the books are crowds of knicknacks. Greeting cards I can’t bear to throw away, executive toys I haven’t played with since the seventies, more clocks than anyone could need, collections of stones inscribed with inspiring words like “faith” and “peace,” a faux Roman coin I bought in a souvenir shop in Carlisle…junk. I tell myself that the only reason the path through my office is so narrow is that my daughter and grandsons are temporarily housed in my guest room and my stored belongings needed to go somewhere. I watch hoarder shows on cable and tell myself that at least there IS a path through my office and I keep it sanitary.

I have a friend who acknowledges her shopping/hoarding problem only because she has rooms she can’t enter because they’re too full of stuff she bought but never opened. Stacks of that stuff have fallen against the inside of the door. I tell myself I’m not a hoarder. Just a packrat. I come by it naturally; my dad was constitutionally incapable of throwing anything away. After he passed, it was discovered he had about a dozen BB guns stashed here and there for no particular reason. They were found amid the books, magazines, old slides, model airplanes, model cars,  shot glasses…

He kept them clean and more or less organized, so you see…packrat, not hoarder.

Scariest among the hoarders are the people who have too many cats or dogs. Folks with fifty or a hundred or a couple hundred animals. Sometimes living in such horrible, filthy conditions they have to be rescued from the people who thought they were the rescuers. I see these folks pop up on Animal Planet often.  Among normal people there’s a fascination with cat owners who don’t see they are so overwhelmed by the urge to nurture they can’t see the harm they’re doing. I know the urge, and I’ve struggled with it myself. Taking in cats can be a slippery slope.  Every homeless animal makes me want to take him or her home. People who know I’m a sucker for cats and kittens always think of me first when they encounter a stray or a pet they can’t keep. But I have to turn them away, because I know exactly my cat limit. It’s 2.5.

Well, yeah, it’s incredibly hard to find that half a cat, so I waffle between two and three. I currently stand at two, am mulling taking on one more kitten, but am resisting the urge by imagining the extra cat hair, litter box, vet bills, and especially the pissing wars that can break out when personalities clash. Over the past thirty years of cat and dog ownership as an adult, these are things I know well.

Tasha was the first cat my husband and I took in after moving to Tennessee. She was a young adult shorthair tortie who appeared one day and stayed with us for a few years.

In the late eighties my husband brought home three abandoned littermates. Four cats was plainly too many. We found a home for one of them. Later Tasha disappeared; I like to think she was taken in by someone in the new condos behind us, the way we’d done. We were then left with Spot and Star. Star, a calico, disappeared almost immediately after we moved in ’93. Spot was, of course, a striped shorthair tabby. (What else does one name a striped cat but Spot?) So for the next seven years we held steady at one cat. All was under control.

[image error]Silas

But then my daughter brought home an orange-and-white stray Ragamuffin kitten, about six weeks old. He looked like a fluffy creme-sicle. Silas was the best cat buddy I’ve ever had. I knew the instant I saw him he was special, though he’d been rejected, dejected, neglected, infected, and infested in just about every way possible. The vet wasn’t certain he would live, but he did, and he turned out to be filled with relentless life. I nicknamed him Zoom Kitty, because as a kitten he had two speeds: all engines full, and asleep. He lived up to all the wonderful things you hear about Ragamuffins. All was well, with two cats, until Spot passed away at the age of thirteen. and Silas lost his second mommy. He was ten months old.

The following year my husband brought home a six-week-old female who had come into the bus yard riding in the engine compartment of a pickup truck. We named her Aeryn, and later I identified her as possibly a Siberian mix of some sort. She looked very much like a Siberian. (Thank you, Animal Planet and Cats 101.)

[image error]Aeryn

Then, while I was away on a research trip to Scotland in ’03, I phoned home and received news of a new kitten that had followed my daughter home. It had only been three months since we’d acquired Aeryn, but one more cat didn’t seem out of line. Marley was a blonde medium-hair, who as a kitten closely resembled Bill the Cat from Bloom County. He grew into a pretty guy (a pretty fat guy), but at first he looked very much like the sort of kitten one would get from a homeless teenager who couldn’t take care of him. Which is what my daughter had done.

That was when we tipped to half a cat too many.

[image error]Marley

Straight away Marley’s presence brought trouble. Not his fault, but when my daughter brought him into the household she neglected to take him to the vet. When I returned from Scotland, I assumed she had.  For the next several weeks she kept giving him baths to get rid of fleas, which puzzled me because I’d assumed some topical flea killer would have been part of the vet visit. What I finally discovered was that there had been no vet visit, and Marley had brought in fleas and tapeworms.

It took three weeks. Four sets of medications for three cats and two dogs, two bug bombings, the yard sprayed (twice), topical flea killer for everyone (twice), and two hundred dollars later, we were finally free of tapeworms and fleas. From then on, no unvetted cats for me.

The difference between two cats and three is much more than the difference between one and two. The third cat seems to double the hair, the expense, and the behavioral issues. Marley was mellow enough, but the pissing wars weren’t pretty. At one point the kitchen stove became disputed territory, and I assure you there is no stench more appalling than burning cat piss. Also, Marley liked to chase Aeryn around the house as if he’d forgotten he was fixed, and we discovered Aeryn was epileptic. Stress triggered her seizures. We’d always known she had a screw loose, and now we knew why.

So…we were learning that though having two cats might seem to leave room for another, three cats was just a teensy bit too much.

But then my daughter began bringing home every stray kitten that crossed her path. I had to tell her to find another place for them. I was at my limit, and when a friend of mine died, leaving behind her eleven-year-old cat named Smoky Blue, I had to dig in my heels. As much as I would have loved to save every kitten on the planet, space and resources are always finite. Even the ASPCA knows that. Smoky went to another friend.

But two months later Silas died of heart failure, a problem common in Ragdolls and Ragamuffins. Meanwhile, Smoky was being handed from one adoptive family to another, unable to get along with other cats. A few months after Silas died, yet a third friend of mine told me she was going to be forced to take Smoky to a shelter because she couldn’t keep him and nobody wanted an eleven-year-old cat with bad habits. I volunteered to take him, though that put me back at half a cat too many.

Smoky was a cat and a half. He really should have been an only cat, but there was no choice in our house but to get along with the other residents. But Smoky was also in poor health. After a year and a half of chronic barfing, inappropriate peeing, hair loss, weight loss, and general crankiness, we learned he was suffering from kidney failure. We put him on an expensive prescription cat food and consulted with the vet regarding end-of-life strategy. His condition improved, we put down pee pads in the one spot he chose to visit (the doorway into my office), and closed him into my office at night to reduce the competition for territory and expensive prescription cat food.

The other thing with Smoky was that he’d been declawed. I hate that euphemism, declawed. One should say “The cat was scratching the sofa, so we took him down and had his front toes cut off.” I learned that many of Smoky’s least desirable behaviors are common in declawed cats. They can’t scratch, so instead they bite. They can’t jump and climb. They can’t balance. They’re crippled in ways humans often don’t understand, and it makes the cat cranky. All we could do was keep Smoky safe and fed.

Then my mother-in-law had to move in with some cousins who were allergic to cats, and she had to get rid of her beloved Maine Coon, Muffin. My husband asked if we could take the cat. I hoped another accommodation could be made, but when it became plain my MIL would have to lose the cat forever, I agreed to take her.  We were up to four adult cats now, and none of them going anywhere.

Muffin was a five year old only cat, and poorly socialized. When she came to us it took a full month to get her to come out from under the bed in the guest room. The first time I found her sitting on top of the bed, and she let me tippytoe in and take her onto my lap, it was a major victory. I’d never in my life seen a cat purr and growl at the same time. She left after a minute, but next time she stayed longer, and eventually she was sleeping on my bed and taking up more than her half.

The Gang of Four were almost never all in the same room. Smoky owned the office. Muffin had the top of my bed and Aeryn slept inside the box spring. Marley had the kitchen and living room. Muffin guarded the litter box in the bathroom, so I had to set up another one in the guest room. But then I took in a boarder. She lived in the guest room.

With her cat.

Sassy stayed in the guest room, with her own private box. We didn’t see much of her, but Aeryn would sit by the door and sniff underneath it with the hairs standing up on the back of her neck. I felt the pissing wars coming on. Five cats in the house was more than I could take. They required more attention than I could give. There were twice as many cats as there should have been, but there was nothing I could do about it. Every day was a struggle for normalcy, every evening a ballet to get everyone fed the correct food in the correct amount without conflict. The dust bunnies in my house all had real fur. It was that way for about six months.

Then the boarder moved out with her cat. Shortly after, my mother-in-law left her cousin’s house to take an apartment near us, and reclaimed Muffin. It was a happy day when Muffin went back to her real mommy. I was attached, but everyone was happier this way and I was tickled that my mother-in-law hadn’t given away her cat to a stranger.

Then, alas, five years after we took Smoky in he finally passed away from the kidney problem. He’d been on the expensive prescription cat food for more than three times as long as the vet’s best-case prognosis. He was approximately sixteen years old, and it was time.

Last December we lost Marley to liver failure at the age of thirteen. He’s now buried in the back yard with Spot, Silas, Smoky, and two dogs, Ziggy and Riley. We were down to just one cat, Aeryn, for the first time since Silas came in 2000, and Aeryn was the same age as Marley. Plainly this would never do. I looked around, wondering where to find a kitten. I’d never had to actually look for a kitten before. They all just were brought to me. It felt very strange.

[image error]Morrighan

So I signed up for a pet-finding online service. The first email I got had a picture of a fluffy gray-and-white female who was marked like Silas, but had odd-looking eyes. It turned out she’d been born prematurely, without eyelids, and had required surgery to enable her to close her eyes and save her sight. The cat rescue who’d taken her in, FLUFF, had paid for surgery for her and two littermates. When I met her she sat on my lap and wouldn’t budge. Her medium-length fur was so soft she sometimes slid. I took her home and named her Morrighan.

Now I’m finding kittens everywhere. I want them all, but know I can’t take them all. Morrighan is my shadow and my lap magnet, and she makes me laugh exactly as Silas used to. I’m holding steady at two cats.  See…packrat, not hoarder.

 

Filed under: Life Tagged: animals, cats, hoarding, memories, my library

My Favorite Books

When I returned from Spokane, I brought with me my dad’s old copy of Mein Kampf, one of the few things he wanted me to have he hadn’t already given to me. I almost couldn’t find room for it, but eventually shoehorned it onto a shelf of European history. One more book for the TBR stack.

I love books. In my personal library I have nearly 5,000 of them, so picking out a favorite is just impossible. Sometimes I browse my shelves, which line most of the rooms in my house, just to remind myself of what I’ve got, what I’ve read and what I’ve not yet read. I like cheap books, and love to buy them when they’re available, to read “someday.” Most of the unread ones are among those my father passed along to me when he decided to downsize his library. So many arrived at once, in box after cardboard box, that I’ve been swamped for about eleven years. It took me until just a few years ago to organize them all, and catalog them in my database, so now I can search on the computer and not spend all day in front of the book shelves searching for a volume I just know must be here somewhere…

A great many of my books are mysteries, and some of my favorites are among them. My dad handed over some complete series of Anne Perry, Ellis Peters, and some others. I have all the Janet Evanovich Numbers books, not because they’re great mysteries but because they make me laugh and everyone needs to laugh once in a while.

Most of my very favorite books were written by Stephen King or Clive Barker. One of my treasures is a signed first edition copy of Weaveworld. Another is a signed first edition of “Bag of Bones.” I adore King, and think the most frightening book I’ve ever read was The Shining. Those  topiary animals scared the snot out of me, and since then I’ve read everything by King I could get my hands on. Several years after The Shining I read The Sun Dog by flashlight during a lightning storm. I sure know how to have a good time.

I wasn’t always into being frightened and grossed out. During the third grade I discovered Walter Farley and The Black Stallion. There was also The Island Stallion, but the Black was my dream. I must have read that book five or six times, and since I’m not a skimmer that’s saying something.

Later on, reading slowed because of life getting in the way and my habit of reading slowly, which turned out to be a light sensitivity that made it difficult to see the page properly. I avoided thick books until high school when I picked up Michener’s Hawaii and discovered I was capable of finishing a novel more than a thousand pages long. My parents wouldn’t let me go to R rated movies, but they would let me read the novels, so I read a lot of thick books which were mostly better than the movies based on them. The most fascinating of those was The Godfather, which I read several times and saw the movie. It was my first glimpse of a culture other than my own, and I boggled at the whole “family” thing. I believe it was that fascination that helped me to understand the Scottish clans I learned about and wrote about much later on.

Aside from Stephen King, I’m more a fan of individual books rather than authors. I do like Hemingway, and enjoyed For Whom the Bell Tolls. I adore Oscar Wilde’s plays, and especially his creepy novel A Picture of Dorian Gray. A more recent selection that impressed me was The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. I love time travel stories. Tim Powers’ The Anubis Gates is my bible for time travel, and I kept it well in mind when writing my own time travel books. Isaac Asimov’s I Robot is my favorite science fiction, and in fact the computer I’m writing this on is named “Speedy” after one of Asimov’s robots. And, speaking of needing to laugh, I’ve read M*A*S*H many times.

So many books, so little time. There is no way for me to name a favorite book, but in my own library those are the highlights.

Filed under: Books and Reading Tagged: bookses, my library, mysteries, reading, Stephen King, Tim Powers, Writing

Final Visit

I’d thought I was going for a final visit. My father had been sick for a long time, and had been living on borrowed time since his heart attack in 2005. I pictured myself spending a couple of weeks hanging out with my dad, looking at old family photos, saying things that needed to be said, answering questions and settling misunderstandings.

My flight reservation was for 4:28 p.m. on May 2. That morning I got a phone call, and the caller ID said it was Dad. Half asleep, I picked up and when I heard a man’s voice say my name I groggily thought it was him. Surely calling to say he was feeling better, and he’d see me later.

But it was my stepbrother, telling me my father had passed away half an hour before. Suddenly my visit became a trip to a funeral.

I used to like flying. Before 9/11 it felt like a Grand Adventure to climb on a plane and head off to places I’d never been before. Scotland, New York, Montreal, Frankfurt…then the TSA entered the picture and it’s never been the same since. But today there were no hassles. The world had turned…soft. Dreamlike. As if everyone knew I was not really here anymore, and that no matter what happened in transit, it would still be better than the morning I’d had.

I landed in Spokane shortly before the car rental counter was due to close down at midnight, with an hour and a half drive still between me and Colville. One of the handles on my suitcase had been broken off, but I had more pressing things to deal with.

I turned on my phone to call my husband to tell him the plane hadn’t crashed, but the thing went into a beeping fit and turned itself off. Huh. Turned it on again, and it beeped some more before blinking off. It appeared I would need to plug it in once I got into the car.

The nice car rental fellow gave me a key and sent me to slot J4 where I was supposed to find a cheap, wind-up-toy sort of car. Economy was all I could afford.

No car in J4. I peered at the key fob to see what it said, but my reading glasses weren’t anywhere near my face and all I could see was a big J4 scrawled on the fob in black sharpie. And even I could see there was no car in J4.

I pushed the door unlock button on the fob, and the car in J5 blinked a “hereIam.” I blinked back. It was a 2017 silver and black Camaro. Convertible. I was tired enough to go, “Oh, dear.” I knew for sure the car rental guy was going to come scurrying out of the terminal any second, and take away the fob he’d mistakenly given me. He couldn’t possibly have meant for me to have this car. But I was too tired to do anything but say “screwit” and make a note to argue with them later.

The trunk was absurdly tiny, but my bag made it in. I climbed into the driver’s seat, and couldn’t see over the dashboard. It was dark, and I was afraid to feel around for random buttons lest I accidentally put the top down and couldn’t get it back up. So I tried to see what I was doing in the dark. (See above: no reading glasses.)

I got the car started somehow, though there was no actual key on the fob. Also a first for me. Good thing the dashboard gave me an error message telling me to put my foot on the brake, or I’d still be there, pushing that button. I found the cigarette lighter plug and plugged in my phone. Tried to turn it on, but it only beeped and pooped out again. I started to become frustrated.

The car was one of those newfangled, quasi-manual shift cars with no clutch. I like a standard transmission, but I don’t think they make those anymore. I had never, ever seen one of these with no clutch. I had not the faintest idea how to shift this thing.

I had a GPS with me, and felt around, hoping to find a second cigarette lighter plug. No luck. I had to unplug the phone to plug in the GPS. I didn’t much like being unable to call my husband right away, but I had no clue which way to go to get to the road north.

With the GPS booted, I went to enter my destination, which was my dad’s house. I realized I did not know the house number. Which was on my phone. Which I couldn’t turn on.

I unplugged the GPS, plugged in my phone, then sat for a moment, beyond frustrated and holding back panic.

I noticed an OnStar button, and pushed it in desperation though I figured I would get a robot voice asking for a credit card number. But instead I got a live person, to whom I spilled my guts about my situation. She happily sent me the directions to Colville via the onboard GPS.

So I backed out of the space, nearly an hour after my plane had landed, and made my way out of the parking lot.

That was when I realized the shifting procedure wasn’t going to make itself apparent. The shifter did nothing once it was in drive, and there was no obvious control for changing gears. I could hear the engine winding up, and had to pull over to think about this. I was having nightmare visions of driving all the way to Colville in first gear and arriving sometime near dawn.

As I poked around the dashboard, looking for the bloody shift control, my phone rang. It was my husband. I picked it up, certain the thing would turn off as soon as I touched it. When I heard his voice, I burst into tears I was so relieved.

He talked me in off the ledge, explained to me how to shift the car (paddles on the steering wheel…who knew?), and then tried to help me figure out which way to pick up the road to Colville. Because he’s spent the past forty-five years driving everywhere in North America and some places south of the border, he knew where I should go. However, he couldn’t know exactly where I was because I could see no signs. I had to hang up, plug the GPS back in, and see if I could shift the car well enough to get out of Spokane. Then I looked up dad’s house number on my phone, entered it into my familiar GPS, and proceeded on my way.

An hour and a half later I pulled up at my father’s house, where my father no longer was.

My stepmother and two of my stepbrothers were there. Over the next few days we all picked carefully through the minefield of memories, photographs, and paperwork. We pulled together the details of Dad’s life, and I helped write his obituary. It was  a surreal experience.

He was all about airplanes. He learned to fly before he learned to drive. After high school he studied aeronautical engineering and began military flight training in the Naval Reserve. He declined an appointment to Annapolis so he could continue his flight training, then was called up for active duty in the Korean War. He finished his training in Pensacola. His flight gear and log book are on display at the National Naval Aviation Museum there.[image error]

During his eight years of active duty, he flew fighter jets off the U.S.S. Boxer and U.S.S. Hornet, earning seven citations and service medals. After the war, he flew as a test pilot and was assigned to the U.S. Naval Air Missile Test Center at Point Mugu, California. I was born on that base.

After his discharge from active duty, he went to work at Lockheed Missiles and Space Corp. Still with the airplanes. In his forties he took a hiatus from there, finished out college, picked up an MBA, and worked as a flight instructor, instructor trainer, and aerial photographer. He tried to teach me to fly, but I couldn’t get past the unshakable conviction that the instant I took control of the plane it would plummet from the sky. I still have the logbook that shows half an hour of flight time.

[image error]One of my favorite pictures of myself was taken by my dad when I was about three years old, as I was running across the yard to hug him. When I was four, he came home from somewhere with a copy of Black Beauty for me. I looked inside and said, “I can’t read this; there aren’t any pictures.” He said, “Then learn to read.”

And I did.

In 2002 when my second novel was released, I was visiting my dad for a family reunion. We went into Barnes & Noble and found seven copies of Outlaw Sword on the shelf. I said, “Cool. Let’s see if they want me to sign them.” He laughed, thinking I was joking. But he stopped laughing when I took the copies to the service desk and the manager was happy to have me sign them. As I did, my dad stood there looking like he was going to pop from pride.

[image error]On May 18 he was buried in a veteran’s cemetery outside of Spokane, with full military honors. Jet airplanes taking off from nearby Spokane airport added an oddly appropriate soundtrack as we mourned a former fighter pilot. In the distance the United States flag flew at half mast. Three riflemen fired three volleys. Strangers in uniform saluted him, with all military precision and respect

I knew him for sixty years, and now I can’t imagine the world without him in it.

Filed under: Life Tagged: Aviation Museum, death, Family, grief, memories, Pensacola, travel

Dramatic License

Still in the Pacific Northwest, coping with the aftermath of my father’s death. Today I offer the Author’s Note from the first book I wrote as Anne Rutherford, “The Opening Night Murder, ” where I address the issue of dramatic license in historical fiction.

In my associations with other authors, often I’m drawn into debate about the moral obligation of historical fiction writers to be true to historical fact. Other authors I know claim their stories never deviate from history by so much as a single word or thought. Anything less, they say, is Untruth and perpetuates Confusion among the uneducated and ill-read masses.

They lie.

I agree that unless one is deliberately and openly writing what is called “alternate history” one should stick as close to the known facts as humanly possible. Hollywood often makes us groan and fidget to see, for instance, William Wallace in a kilt or Jane Grey dewy-eyed and in love with the husband foisted on her by her father. Or Mary I fat and ugly. Or a svelte Henry VIII with a buzz cut and bedroom eyes. I could go on, but I’m sure Gentle Reader gets the picture. Hollywood often gets it wrong, and we expect better from literature.

However, in any work of historical fiction there is a point at which known fact fails us and the drama must be served. It is impossible to know exactly what was said or done in private chambers, and even more difficult to know the inner thoughts of the people whose stories the author is trying to tell. At some point one must start making things up. Storytelling is the glue that makes sense out of random facts. One does one’s best to keep the conjecture to a minimum, and to stay within reasonable limits of plausibility, but there is no getting away from the fact that one’s job is to fill in blanks left by historical documents that tell only a fraction of what went on.

In The Opening Night Murder, to avoid being chained to the history of either the King’s Company or the Duke’s Men, ordinarily I would have invented a fictional theatre to house my fictional troupe and characters for my story. But then I still would have had to place it on an actual London street where no theatre existed. No matter how hard one tries, there’s always the line where fact butts up against fiction.

So why not use Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, located near what is now Porter Street in the Southwark district of London? Unfortunately, that theatre was torn down in 1644, sixteen years before our story opens.

Dang.

However, this is fiction. If I can invent a theatre and place it on a spot where no theatre actually stood in 1660, then why not resurrect the Old Globe and put it where it was originally?

Further, with a little hand-waving, why not let this fictional troupe of actors perform Shakespeare’s plays even though only two theatres were allowed a monopoly on “serious” dramas? It’s true that the King’s Company and the Duke’s Men were given patents and Shakespeare’s works divided between them, lesser companies were allowed to perform older forms of comedy, mummeries and mime. But it is also true that one reason for the patents given to the King’s and the Duke’s companies was to control new playwrights who might satirize the king. So my fictional troupe has been given fictional permission to perform the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which could not ever be about the current regime.

Although it is my sincere wish not to annoy my Gentle Reader, who might cry, “But no! That didn’t happen!” I reply, “Of course it didn’t happen. In the words of another great playwright, Oscar Wilde, That’s what fiction means.

 

Filed under: Writing Tagged: Anne Rutherford, bookses, creativity, historical fiction, mysteries, rules

Brief Hiatus

On Tuesday, May 2, my father died. This week I’m helping my stepmother make arrangements and decisions, so I won’t have a post until next Saturday. Meanwhile, I leave you with these thoughts from Joseph Kennedy III:

Joseph Kennedy III writes:

“It is among the most basic human truths: Every one of us, some day, will be brought to our knees by a diagnosis we didn’t expect, a phone call we can’t imagine, or a loss we cannot endure.

That common humanity inspires our mercy. It fortifies our compassion. It drives us to look out for the sick, the elderly, the poor, and the most vulnerable among us.

…

Yesterday’s bill — yesterday’s devastating bill — does the opposite.

The bill is more than premiums and tax cuts. It is a cold and calculated world view: It scapegoats the struggling, and sees fault in suffering. It is deadset on dividing us based on who we love, where we come from, the direction of our faith, and the size of our fortunes.

We see this worldview in their tax plan, their budget cuts, their immigration policy, their civil rights assaults — and yesterday, in their cruel health care plan.

We must reject it.

We must decide, instead, to take care of each other — because, but for the grace of God, we will all one day wake up in need of a little mercy.

This nation’s character has never been defined by the power we give the already strong — but by the strength we give the weak.”

Filed under: Life Tagged: Family, protest, trump

Cattle Call

 

Due to a family emergency, this week’s column is a favorite from four years ago. There is a brief update below.

I’m not going to be the next Fox Network Master Chef. Let me tell you how I know this.

For those who are Chef Ramsay clueless, Master Chef is one of about half a dozen “reality” shows produced by Chef Gordon Ramsay, a chef of haute cuisine who owns restaurants in London, Glasgow, and Los Angeles. As a television personality, Ramsay is quite a character. He’s known for his foul mouth and wide mean streak, yet his shows strike a chord in that he is sharply tuned in to other people, and that is what makes his shows work. In Master Chef, a hundred amateur cooks are chosen from across the country to compete in several weeks of cooking competition elimination challenges, from which only one emerges the winner of $250,000. Simple enough on the surface, but not so simple when you understand that the contest is not about the food so much as it is about the people. That is why, when the producers went looking for a hundred cooks for Season Four, they called it an audition. This isn’t a contest, it’s a drama.

 

So I decided to bop down to the audition in Nashville last Saturday. I’ve been cooking for family since I was eleven, and I figured with forty-five years of experience behind me I might have a shot at this. I, too, am a character and there is no reason I shouldn’t fit in with the folks in that competition. The worst that could happen is that they could sneer at me like Ramsay and his buddies often do, and send me home. I’ve been sneered at; they don’t scare me.

 

My best recipe is a pumpkin pie my mom used to make, which I made traditional in my family and it morphed into something slightly different. I call it Jack-O-Lantern Pie. Every Hallowe’en I carve a jack-o-lantern from a large pumpkin, set a candle in it, and put it out on my porch until the trick-or-treaters are done for the evening. The next morning I cut it in half, bake it until tender, then puree it. I freeze the puree for pies on Thanksgiving and Christmas, and one large, reasonably moist pumpkin will usually cover me for four deep-dish pies. After nearly thirty years of baking pies with fresh pumpkin, I can hardly look at canned pumpkin and decline to order pumpkin pie in any restaurant.

 

So I got up at dawn on Saturday to bake a pie. I often don’t make my own crust, but this time I did, and fashioned little crust-leaves for decoration. It was a thing of beauty, easily the finest pie I’ve ever made. I set it in a flat basket for transport, covered it with a new, white dishcloth, and set out for Nashville like I was headed for grandmother’s house wearing a red, hooded cape.

 

When I entered the waiting room there was a light, cheerful, friendly feel to the place. Folks sat around, waiting for their nametag number to be called, most with coolers and carriers sitting at their feet. I took a seat and turned on my Kindle, for I could see there would be a long wait. I had no idea.

 

The applicants were processed at a rate of twenty an hour, so it was two hours before my number was called. A small, bearded man hurried in and out, who turned out to be the one responsible for the atmosphere staying light, cheerful, and friendly. Otherwise, I’m sure, there would have been mutiny. He came and went, joking and smiling, and explaining to everyone what was going on at any given time. I believe he saved lives.

 

As we waited, the smell of food wafting through the room kept reminding me I had neglected to eat breakfast that morning, for my stomach was nervous and I figured I would be able to grab some lunch when I was done feeding pumpkin pie to the judge. Silly me. It was well past noon, I’d been up since six o’clock, and was ravenous. Still we waited.

 

Finally my group of twenty was marched into the judging room, lugging our coolers, carriers, and baskets. Several people carrying clipboards stood around or scurried here and there. We were instructed to stand by a table and not touch the food until told. A short, dark-haired girl came around to squirt our hands with hand sanitizer, the plating and judging procedure was explained to us, and then we were allowed to plate our food. We had three minutes.

 

I never would have thought it could take so long to put food on a plate. The first piece of pie I cut came out in two pieces. I set it aside and cut another, which obeyed nicely and didn’t fall apart. I dumped the first piece back in the pie plate and set it on the floor next to my purse, then proceeded with the whipped cream and cinnamon candy syrup, finally decorating with the pie crust leaves sprinkled with cinnamon. I was well pleased with my presentation. Three minutes up, hands off the food, and we waited.

 

First to come around was the Head Guy judge, an Hispanic-looking fellow with a pleasant smile and a gentle voice. He spent a couple of minutes with each applicant chatting first then taking a very small taste with a plastic fork. He was a bit distracted by the guy in the cowboy hat, though. Everyone who has seen this show knows there’s always one contestant from the South in a cowboy hat. I guess that’s to signal the rest of the world that he’s from the South, for we all know that Southerners wear cowboy hats everywhere. This one had brought two jars of moonshine to serve with his dish. (Let me note here that in Tennessee corn liquor is legal so long as it’s aged and taxed according to law. Which, to my mind, makes it not moonshine, but maybe that’s just me. In any case, I have such a jar myself, and I assume the stuff in those jars was duly aged and taxed.)  Head Guy saw this, and in the middle of his chat with the guy next to me turned and made a beeline for the guy serving alcohol. After a couple of shots, he returned to his task, but didn’t stay long. He hurried back to Cowboy Hat to ask for one of the jars, which he set aside before once again resuming his job. Everyone in the room laughed, but not very happily.

 

The smell of food in this room was stronger than in the room previous, and I was lucky my stomach didn’t start growling.

 

My turn. Head Guy had some nice things to say about my pretty piece of pie, and when he tasted it he said “Very nice.” So I was relieved to learn I wasn’t going to be sneered at. He asked me about the jack-o-lanternness of my pie, and further queried about why we call them jack-o-lanterns. Since I’m History Geek, I was happy to answer his question. He ended with “Good work,” and moved on.

 

He was followed up by the little dark-haired girl, whose question to everyone was “Tell me: Why Master Chef? Why now in your life?” Hard question to answer, since this was entirely a lark for me and I was only there to see how far I would get. I knew they wanted to hear about how I was hanging my entire existence on this contest and my heart would break if I didn’t get on the show, but I just couldn’t do it. That would be a lie. So I told the truth. I said it sounded like fun. I could see I was impressing nobody. But we segued into a chat about my grandson and his food allergies, so it wasn’t a total loss since I got to talk about the grandbaby. But then when she asked what I do, I told her I write novels for a living and her eyes glazed over. Hrm.

 

Then came more waiting. A lot more waiting, as we stood behind our tables. I looked over to my right at some fish tacos and my mouth watered. All that food in that room smelled so good! I like fish tacos. The woman to his right had something with a great deal of cheese. I like cheese.

 

People across the way began tasting each other’s dishes. I was so hungry! I hadn’t eaten since the day before. It was nearly three in the afternoon. The dish-sharing spread, and people were tasting those fish tacos and the casserole further over. My neighbors asked me for a taste of pie, and I gave them gladly. I nibbled a bit myself, but hesitated to ask others for theirs because I was afraid I would make a pig of myself. I was so hungry.

 

However, the girl to my left had something with Brussels sprouts that looked irresistible. Brussels sprouts can be very good if they’re done right, and these were very small. I asked for one.

 

Oh. My. God. It was the best Brussels sprout I’ve ever had. You could die from this Brussels sprout. I asked for the secret, then I asked for another taste. I could have eaten the whole plate.

 

We waited some more, then the judging folk read off the numbers of the applicants they wanted to stay behind. Nobody was surprised when Cowboy Hat Guy was called. Maybe I could have done what he did, but bribery just didn’t occur to me and I haven’t worn a cowboy hat since I was six. Brussels Sprouts Girl was called, and she deserved it. I was not called, and I probably deserved that. Clearly I am not, as they say often on this show, “Master Chef material.” I and my fellow rejects made that long walk to the door, just as hundreds of others have done in the Master Chef kitchen. We were blessed that we didn’t have to do it on camera.

 

I’ve been to cattle calls as an actor in Los Angeles, and I have to say those are a little easier to take. Usually what happens to an actor is that one is told to go home, then one goes home and waits for a phone call. Realization can take weeks, and it’s gradual. Last Saturday I knew I was rejected when they skipped my number and they told me to leave. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am. Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.

 

I don’t really know why I went. Or even why anyone goes to something like that. I guess it’s a need for others to see how special we are, and I think that’s a common enough feeling. But there are six billion people on the planet and that makes specialness either really common or impossibly rare, depending on how you look at it. In a way it’s bizarre and maybe a little pathetic. I stand guilty on both counts.

 

I’m not sorry I went. I had a day of smiles, was complimented on my Jack-O-Lantern Pie by someone who would know, and I now have a bag of fresh Brussels sprouts in my refrigerator waiting to be sautéed in bacon grease and maple syrup. Dang, those were good.

 

 

That year was the fourth season of Master Chef, which was won by a fellow from Italy named Luca. I cheered him on to victory, entirely over my disappointment at not getting a free trip to Los Angeles. I still enjoy the show, though it’s true the premise is wearing a bit thin. I tinker in the kitchen, and once a week I attend a pot luck dinner with a cluster of friends who are quasi-foodies like me. I’ve successfully made those Brussels sprouts a few times. I’ve given up my dream of being yelled at by Gordon Ramsay, and have set my sights on more reasonable goals.

Filed under: Life Tagged: creativity, food, hobbies