Beth Kephart's Blog, page 244

in anticipation

He was always smarter than I'll be.

"You are there," he said, when I answered the phone, his voice all light and energy. He wasn't calling with trouble. He wasn't calling to complain. He was calling just to talk, and we did.



I am a broken record; I own that. It's my blog; I can be. So this is just to say, at the end of this week, that this son of mine is a rare human being—full of stories of his own, graced with empathetic listening, witty as hell, understanding. Talking to him is jazz and lift. It's me unafraid and unguarded.



"Hey, Mom," he was saying at one point, following a story I had told. "Don't ever lose your confidence. Look at what you have. Look at what you've done. And remember: You've got a great family."



He was always smarter than I'll be.

Getting help (deep gratitude)

I've blazed my way through this life of mine—doing my best (and that's not always the best) at whatever chores stand here before me. I've not wanted to bother anyone else with the trivialities of my living, have thought it best to make and feather my own nest, which is also, of course, the nest of my family. Nick has been the one exception to this rule—building me a small stone wall, mowing my lawn, edging my flower beds, wheelbarrowing mulch, and digging me out of the worst weather. I don't know where I'd be without Nick. He's worth the price of this entire neighborhood.



The past two weeks, however, I've relented, asked for help. Hired a man to repaint the deck that was destroyed by winter weather. Hired Nick and his team to help me with my garden. Hired two young women to help me refresh the tops of ceiling blade fans, the bowls of lamps, the racket of blinds, the wood oils of the banister. I'm having a small dinner party. I want things to be right. My best is not always the best.



Perhaps it's because I've been emotional lately—faced with both anticipated and unanticipated losses and goodbyes—that the work of these good souls has so moved me. Perhaps because asking for and getting help is, for me, such a novelty. But yesterday, joined in my office by one of these dear young women, I could barely hold it together. She was dusting the books, rearranging the potted flowers, realigning the glass apples along the sill. She was talking, telling me about her second job, a merchandising job, she said, in which she helped arranged displays in retail stores. "I know that one," she said, pointing to Dangerous Neighbors. "I put it out on bookstore shelves all around here."



She said she thought it was cool that I'd written so many books. I said I thought it was cool that she commandeered dust, oiled down the bannister, had batted down the pincer-handed spider with her own skinny mop.



"I keep a really neat house," I said, "but I don't have your skills."



"It helps," she said, "if you're a little obsessive compulsive."



I don't know if people who help like she helped, who help like Nick always helps, know how valuable they are. I'm putting it out here, though, in this fractured universe. I'm putting out my gratitude.

Elizabeth Hand is Coming to Town

and that means I'll actually get to meet—live and in person—this writer with whom I've had such a wonderful, honest, intelligent virtual conversation since I first read Illyria last August.  My thanks to Colleen Mondor, who raved about Liz's immaculate sentences to begin with and opened Liz's world to mine.



Liz travels far and wide, both physically and in her own imagination, and she's coming to Philadelphia as a keynoter.  I'm thinking I'll take this colorful lady to Chanticleer, pictured above, if she'll let me.

In which I am not The Pioneer Woman

I had a pounding headache and a bit of a neural spin, so I retreated to the couch with this week's New Yorker.  The article "O Pioneer Woman: The Creation of a Domestic Idyll," Amanda Fortini's story about Ree Drummond, the blogger, found me. I read.



It's not as if I hadn't previously heard about this millionaire blogging phenom. I was just insufficiently informed about the size of Drummond's empire—the numbers of books and their rapid succession, the appearances, the 23.3 million page views per month and the 4.4 million unique visitors (according to the article), the million-dollars-plus revenue Drummond received in 2010 for her blog alone. She's a pretty lady with a big camera, a Marlboro Man husband, four kids, and a diesel-powered blog that offers photo tips, recipes, giveaways, and up-to-the-minute details of her life as it is on her Oklahoma farm (and, increasingly, in her celebrity haunts). It's all turned her into a mega-star—her stories about closet cleanings and book tours, dyed hair and laundry runs.



Who'd have thought it? She certainly originally didn't, so the story says. Indeed, Drummond started blogging because it seemed like a "fun, efficient method of keeping in touch with her mother" and her first posts were "... audio recordings of herself burping, and folksy, Reader's Digest-style anecdotes about country living, such as happening upon two dogs mating."



Is it my mood? Is it the weather? Is it any wonder that I wonder (don't we all wonder) how, of the reported 14% of online women who blog, a woman writing about burping and dog love rose so very quickly to the top? Can anyone ever, truly, predict stardom, Big Things, It?



We can't, I think. We can't prescribe it or force it; we cannot choose whose voice will smoke its way up and through, whose images and stories will dominate.



We can only watch and wonder.

Happy Birthday, Brother Jeff

(and yes, he got the blond hair and the blue eyes)

"The Most Useless College Degrees"

I didn't make that title up. I borrowed it from this week's Newsweek, which I scanned while in the midst of numerous afternoon errands. It's a brief little blip, apparently provided by The Daily Beast. It doesn't make me happy. Indeed, it makes me wonder. For it is, apparently, equally useless to be a writer, to grow our food, to design our clothes, to take care of our children, to make sure we and others eat sensibly, and to sing.



I quote in full:

10 Majors That Don't Pay

(taking into account career salary levels and the numbers of jobs available):

1. Journalism

2. Horticulture

3. Agriculture

4. Advertising

5. Fashion design

6. Child and family studies

7. Music

8. Mechanical-engineering technology

9. Chemistry

10. Nutrition

The garden is ready to receive

(now to start cooking for Dine In Help Out)

Deciding on Berlin

It will be our first real vacation in three years, and it has taken us months to decide how we'll use our six June nights in a foreign place.  Budapest was high on our list, then Marakesh, then Turkey. We toyed with southern Spain, with Sicily, with Rome. We were making reservations in Croatia when we stopped: Why not Berlin?  I wrote to Paul, my friend who knows and loves Berlin, who teaches it and writes of it. Stay in Mitte, he said.



And so we will. We are, at last, going somewhere that is not here. I will take my camera; I will see. If any of you Berlin travelers have recommendations, I am all ears.

When I dance

it all falls away—the web of bruises that I wear on the inside, the lacerations of my own self-doubt, the stutter and stall of anxiety.  I'm just there, at the studio, working with John on the tango's speed and pop, watching Kyle and Moira weave elegantly by, throwing my arms around Miss Cristina. Dance is the hardest, most frustrating, and most happy thing that I do, and even if I slide past my stops, even if I lose the pelvic angle, even if rise where I'm to have fallen, I am moving, and therefore alive—outside the reach of harm, ignorant (for a spell) of anything unright, everything cruel.