Nichole Bernier's Blog, page 9

If You Can’t Stand The Heat, Get Into The Kitchen

When my first novel came out two weeks ago, I had almost all my ducks in a row. I’d arranged a book tour to places around the country where I knew the most people, and let them know I was coming. I’d written magazine articles related to my book, and planned a launch party. But there was one area in which I really wasn’t well prepared, and it was sort of an important one. I hadn’t yet broken myself in for reading my work aloud once I got there.

I’ve done public speaking over the years, and used to appear on television a good bit for my old job. I’d even interviewed authors for a fun piece on how they became comfortable reading in front of a crowd.

But read my own writing out loud? Not even in the shower, or in the car with the windows rolled up.

It was a few days before my book was to be released, and I knew this was my Achilles heel. And that I’d have to do it all the time. So I sought out the toughest training ground— the harshest critics, the most easily bored and most vocal audience I’d ever seen.

The Sisters of Charity Nursing Home.

My children played piano recitals there several times a year, and each time without fail, they’d be heckled. At Easter, while my daughter plunked out a slow ballad from Titanic, a woman in the second row became increasingly agitated, looking around for a friend to share her resentment. Finally, she just shared it with the room. “Who are these children,” she cried, “and what the hell are they doing in my kitchen??” I knew I had to read there.

It was a Friday afternoon, just after lunch but before naps or game time. The residents came into the Rec Room in singles and pairs, wheeled in by nurses. The activities director, a perky woman named Fran, told me how excited they were to hear me read from my novel. “Many of them like to read quite a bit. Or, used to.”

Fran introduced me, and I stood in front of the silent and still room. It was almost entirely filled with women who’d outlived the men in their lives, perhaps nearly everyone in their lives. Some looked up expectantly. Some were slack-jawed and inattentive, asleep or listening to their own internal monologues.

“Thank you for letting me come today,” I said, taking pains to speak very slowly, because I’m guilty of speaking far too fast. “I’m excited to be here, before my book tour begins, because my children come here often to play piano for you, and you’ve been a very gracious audience for them,” I said. “I’d like to read to you a bit from the beginning of my novel. It’s called The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D, and it’s about a woman who inherits the journals of a friend. This is my first novel because I’ve written for magazines for my whole career. So this is a bit of a dream for me.”

They stared, no sign of reaction.

I read one page without incident, and rounded the bend of the second. I sensed squirming in the upper left quadrant so I read a bit louder, slower. I read about the nature of the two women’s friendship, the odd limbo of mothers who do not have much in common but the shared work of the early childhood years and companionable activities with children, day after day.

A woman in the second row jostled the shoulder of her friend and muttered something that sounded like dissatisfaction. I continued, a little rattled but holding firm. I would finish the passage, reading with as much inflection as possible. If I bombed, at least the odds were good they’d never remember who I was.

“ ‘But that’s the thing about people who don’t fit in a box’,” I finished. “ ‘When they go missing, they are missing everywhere’.”

There was agitation between the second-row jostler and her friend. One said to the other, “Who IS she and WHAT is she talking about?!” The other said, “I don’t know, don’t touch me!”

Fran stood. “Isn’t this nice? Nichole has come here to read to us from her very own book today. Do you know what her book is about?”

A woman in the front row, someone I knew was with me because of the intense eye contact she’d maintained, scrunched up her face. “NOOooo,” she said, in nearly a wail.

Fran changed course, which I’d been about to do, myself. “Maybe we can ask Nichole a few questions, like asking what it’s like to be a writer. Are there any other writers in your family, Nichole?” She had that encouraging look preschool teachers have with their students, willing them to answer a certain way and give them something to work with.

“Not exactly. There aren’t other writers, but my grandfather had a very special typewriter.”

“Did you hear that?” Fran said. “She loved her grandfather very much. And he left her his special typewriter. Some of you have grandchildren you love very much, don’t you?”

At the word grandfather, there was a perking up around the room. I went with it.

“He’d been a radio operator for the Merchant Marine in World War Two,” I continued. “He was on the last ship to be sunk after the war had technically ended, because the Germans in the U-boat didn’t know it. It happened right near here, right off the coast of Rhode Island.”

There were exclamations, noises of approval. Heads nodded that I’d thought had nodded off.

“My husband was a radio operator,” said one of the women I’d certain had been asleep in a perfectly clear voice, eyes lively. “He was on the aircraft carrier The Lexington. You should have seen the size of that ship.” A woman nearby started singing a war song softly, and the woman in the wheelchair next to her was chuckling. The room was coming alive like the swimming pool scene in the movie Coccoon.

We went on for some time this way, until Fran told me in was nearly time for the residents to head into Game Time. I finished up by explaining about the typewriter rescued from the sinking ship — that my grandfather left it to me instead of The Smithsonian, even though they wanted it, when he saw that I was heading toward becoming a writer.

As I left I walked across the front row clasping a few people’s hands and hearing their stories — anecdotes about the brother lost in the war, the inn opened on Block Island after Armistice Day. And I asked their names, and hoping they might remember mine after all.

Novel Catharsis

The day I accidentally started my novel, there was a torrential downpour. I remember sitting in the car waiting to pick up my children from preschool, rain streaming down the windshield. Like tears, I thought, and out of nowhere—because they’re always out of nowhere, the mental triggers of grief—I thought of my friend who’d been on Flight 11 on September 11th.

Four years had passed since the terrorist attacks, but the thoughts were still with me, much the same as they’d been when the shock was fresh. In the midst of mundane activities, I’d find myself wondering the sort of things that aren’t polite to wonder alound. About her last thoughts. Who sat beside her on the plane, and what they said to one another. Whether she’d had time to cry.

I had always expressed myself through writing. I’d been a magazine writer for a decade, and I kept a journal to scratch the itch for anything more personal, more cathartic. But suddenly it wasn’t enough. As much as I love reading fiction, I’d never had an urge to write it, not even so much as a short story. Yet after I got home that rainy day and put the kids down to nap, I wrote a dream sequence about a woman imagining her friend’s last moments. Not on a flight that had been hijacked and driven into a skyscraper, because that was too close to the bone. A generic plane crash, if such a thing can ever be said to be generic.

It didn’t occur to me that this would be part of anything more than an unusual journal entry. But that raw spurt of writing would become chapter three of a novel, to be bought by Crown four years later, just before the birth of my fifth child.

We each have our own method of catharsis, of letting the constantly replaying tapes finally spool themselves out. Some people establish charitable foundations, plant memorial gardens, or throw themselves into athletic feats fueled by confusion and grief. Some go quiet until the tears run dry.  

Writing the novel was my way to make sense of the thoughts I couldn’t quite put a name to, or put to rest. I’d just had my third child, and after I’d tucked all three into bed at night I’d settle into writing this thing that was not a thing—not an article any magazine was paying me to write, so too indulgent a use of daytime sitter hours. But I kept writing, and the further I wrote, the more I shed anything that resembled my actual friend, her actual husband, their actual baby. The nameless piece of writing became peopled with strangers familiar only to me, driven by unique motivations, idiosyncrasies, pain, and joy. Most fiction writers I’ve come to know are propelled by “what-ifs,” and these were mine: What if someone who kept journals all her life died suddenly? What if the journals showed an interior life that was nothing like what her friends and family expected—including where she was really going when she died?

Fictionalizing the facts of the story freed me up to dig deep into emotion I could imagine, and expand upon in my characters. The widower, who receives consolatory lasagna when he’s seen mowing his lawn while his motherless children play in the driveway, when all he wants to do is mow his own damn lawn like other fathers. The children, baffled by the suffocating kindness of strangers. The best friend, slowly becoming unhinged by the anxiety of parenting in a world where everything seems dangerous, and possible.

I set the story in 2002, so that my characters would be experiencing the same tenuous sense of safety I remembered. There was anthrax, and there was Mad Cow disease. There were bomb threats and fear of contaminated reservoirs. If the Ebola virus had arrived at an airport, microbes bobbing down the jetway of an incoming flight, it would not have been surprising. Many of my friends felt the same way. We walked around numb, waiting.

Two days after the terrorist attacks, I spent the afternoon fielding media calls for my friend’s family. I developed a handful of quotes to focus on her life rather than on her inconceivable death — pithy sentences about road races with a baby jogger, about her flaming red hair and ridiculous laugh, and the way she’d navigated the challenges of returning to work after her maternity leave. I believe I even said she’d “hit her stride.” After I returned the last call I sank to the bedroom floor, nauseated by reducing a person to a sound bite, and disgusted with myself for doing it.

What would she have wanted said about her? I wondered. What would she have thought should be her legacy?

Interestingly, few of the newspapers or magazines mentioned her strong career in retail, beyond the fact that she’d been traveling on her first business trip following her maternity leave. It struck me that in the end, most of us will not be remembered for what we do, but for who we are—thoughtful friends, generous volunteers, dedicated advocates, loving family members. But for some people who are passionate about their work, what they do might just be integral to who they are. That became chapter 29.

I never thought of myself as someone with a novel inside her, but now I can’t imagine myself without it. Similarly, I have a friend who never thought of herself as much of a runner, but she just finished a marathon—fueled by a need to keep a neurological disease at bay—and that reluctant achievement is now at the top of her psychological resume.

In any kind of recovery, it seems there is an element of reach, of going beyond our comfort zone when it is failing to provide comfort. We don’t know what we’re capable of until we embrace something we never thought we could do — sometimes, as an antidote to something we cannot bear. 

What I’m Reading Today: WILD, by Cheryl Strayed

Part of the busywork of being an author-about-to-launch is writing essays for book blogs about a variety of things. This weekend I received a request to write about either a) something I’m reading right now, or b) who I’d envision in the movie version of my book. Since b isn’t even something I can wrap my mind around, I wrote this, and wanted to share it since I’m often asked to recommend books.

I’m reading WILD by Cheryl Strayed and every night my heart is like a crime scene. The memoir recounts a journey in Strayed’s mid 20s when, after her mother died and her marriage disintegrated, she went hiking the Pacific Crest Trail alone for three months. The goal was to reawaken her soul, which for a long time she’d numbed with all the unhealthy substitutes we find for love.

Though the expedition was made out of desperation, it wasn’t carried through that way. Yes, she was physically unprepared and poorly packed — the things she carried in Monster (her massive backpack) would have brought a team of oxen to their knees. Poorly fitting boots made her toenails turn black and fall off. But there’s calm wisdom in her raw unsentimental drive to conquer the trail. It’s as if a remote corner of her unanaesthetized brain was sending out morse code and she had no choice but to listen: You must do something. You must do something to save yourself.

This is living like you have nothing to lose, only to gain. It’s not about courage, though of course there’s that, so much as it’s about necessity. And to look at the beautiful place Strayed has arrived in her life — marriage, child, and writing that makes me weep — is testament to the importance of listening to the morse code.

It also speaks to the interpretive power of journals over time; she relied upon hers to create this memoir, decades after the trip. This speaks to me too because found journals are a centerpiece of my novel. Appreciating the level of Strayed’s detail here, brought up from notes and memory so many years later, requires a reader to believe in the strength of a person’s need to document and examine their lives as they’re living it. It might be a difficult leap for someone who has trouble imagining doing this. But not for me.

Author One-on-One: Nichole Bernier and Dani Shapiro

Dani Shapiro: This is your first novel after years of being a magazine editor and writer.  What made you decide to write this story?  Joan Didion describes material she wants to write as having “a shimmer” around its edges.  What was this shimmer for you?

Nichole Bernier: I have always been intrigued and haunted by the notion of legacy, the trace people leave behind once they’re gone — how others define them, and what they’ve done to define themselves. I lost a friend in the September 11th terrorist attacks, and in the days afterward, I fielded the media calls for her husband so he wouldn’t have to describe his loss repeatedly. I tried to offer short memorial statements that were meaningful and true but in the end they were still sound bites, and I couldn’t stop wondering what would she have wanted said about her. What was the difference between the way I saw her, and the way she would have wanted to be seen, and remembered?

My book is not in any way about my friend, but grew out of the what-ifs: What if a mother left behind hints of a more complex and mysterious person than their loved ones thought they’d known? The shimmer for me was the incomplete obit, the discrepancy between the public and the private self. We all die with bits of our story untold.

DS: The backdrop of your novel is the year following terrorist attacks, a time that I’ve written about too.  What made you choose that tumultuous period as your backdrop? 

NB: That was an extraordinary time when it felt as if the range of threats — anthrax, mad cow disease, poisoned reservoirs — were not only possible, but likely. I was a new mother that year, and I think many of us had the impulse to grab our loved ones and run. But we didn’t know where to go, or from what. Most of us moved on from that place of paralysis. But it was fascinating to me to create a character who could not: someone who was confident and competent, but felt the strain of keeping a family safe when no one knew where safe was.

DS: The spine of the story is the inheritance of a trunk of journals. This was an ambitious structure, and I’m curious why you chose it.  Do you feel there’s any correlation between journals and today’s blogs?  Or does today’s blogosphere make journals seem historic and quaint?

NB: Initially, I thought of journals as a way to give voice to someone who was no longer living, and provide a source of strength to someone left behind, struggling in a world that felt dangerously arbitrary. I wove the two women’s storylines to show how they might have had some of the same experiences, but perceived them differently. But it turned out to be more difficult than I thought; the parallel timelines had to consistently meet in some narrative way — thematically, or with some common event — so the reader would feel the way the friends connect, but also pass one another by.

The evolution of blogs has always been interesting to me. In journals, people are working through questions looking for comfort and insight, essentially asking themselves, What would the wisest person I know advise me on this? It’s a conversation with the best part of oneself.

Blogs can be many things — entertaining, poignant, cathartic. But even with the most sincere of intentions, blogs are crafted with the consciousness of another reader. It’s the difference between a candid photo and a portrait. Not much in our world is truly private anymore, which makes journals all the more rare.

DS: A big part of your novel concerns two mothers struggling to balance their jobs — or finding ways to keep a finger in work they loved — while being engaged in raising their children. As a mother of five, how do you manage both raising your kids and finding time to write?

NB: It’s a challenge, and I won’t pretend it’s not. I’m not usually at the computer when ideas come along, so I jot notes on whatever scrap of paper happens to be nearby, and sometimes type on my cellphone when I pretend to be taking pictures on the soccer sidelines. Time is scarce and precious, so there’s no room for procrastination anymore; when I sit down to write, I’ve been planning what to work on in advance. More than anything it helps to have a supportive spouse, and my husband knows the greatest gift is the gift of time.

Still, no matter how many kids you have or how supportive your partner, there are only 24 hours in a day, and being busy forces you to triage what you value most. After I started my novel most of my hobbies fell by the wayside. But it clarifies what’s most important to you — to know, say, that you can enjoy life without making gourmet meals or running a marathon, but you can’t not write.

I also think it’s good for my children to see that their mother loves them and loves her work, too. In a way, the kids have come to feel an ownership in the writing life; we have a lot of events at our home, and the kids enjoy talking to authors and passing food trays. It has been fascinating to watch their evolving awareness of writers as real people behind the bylines — people who started out loving to read, just like they do.

The interview may be found on Amazon.com.

The One Who Won’t See It

I saw the first copy of my hardcover the other day. I won’t have it in-hand until next week, but my publisher needed a mockup for a magazine photo shoot. So the jpg appeared in my inbox, cheeky as the day is long with its trompe l’oeil wrapping and 3D twine tie.

It didn’t matter that I’d already seen the cover image on the uncorrected proofs for months. This format made the six-year trajectory of writing feel complete in a way it never had, all the changes herded in. I couldn’t wait to introduce it to family and friends, most of whom hadn’t read it yet. Then I thought about one who would never see it. She left her mark on every page about the legacy of the lost mother, but would never know.

My godmother, my mother’s sister, would have been over the moon that I’d written a novel, and the subject would have resonated with her. Like my mother she was everything that is right about motherhood while still carrying that invisible backpack of her own aspirations, some achieved, some forgone. She’d held several ambitious jobs in education administration before having children, and juggled the work after, too. Her talents and interests trailed behind her like the jellybean paths she left from each of her children’s doors on Easter morning. But they, and everything else about her, stopped in their tracks when she was 54.

She and my uncle were still in the hotseat of parenting years when the leukemia she’d beaten once came back. She was the center of her four kids’ worlds; she was also beloved at the school where she worked as a guidance counselor — that much was clear from the line out the door at the funeral home. Everywhere I turned that night there were fragments of stories about my aunt, which was appropriate, since she was the most meandering storyteller I’ve ever known.

The last time I saw her was mid-March of 2005. I flew from Washington DC, where we were living then, to the hospital in suburban Boston. I was two months pregnant, which she didn’t know yet, and I was both eager and heartsick to tell her. When my second child was born, my aunt had called herself the fairy godmother, and gave our daughter a glittery wand with tinsel streamers. I hung it over the crib twined in the mobile because it felt like a blessing and a promise. Nothing could go too far wrong with your fairy godmother watching over you.

Standing at my aunt’s bedside that bleak March day, I couldn’t stand knowing she would never meet my third child, or be a beneficent overseer of whatever the years would hold for us all. It was horribly selfish and I was angry at myself for thinking it, as her own four children went in and out of the room all too aware she would never see them marry or have children.

When it was my turn to go in during one of her lucid moments, I stood as close as I could at the left bedrail and told her I was expecting another baby. I wasn’t sure she heard, because she rasped into some family story as if she were continuing a conversation that had been interrupted by her last nap. There was a small bitterness to her remembrance, so out of character that it told me more than her appearance did that she was in the chute.

When her story was finished, one of her daughters held the cup and straw for a sip of water. Then she looked in my direction and offered a nonsequitur that made perfect sense to me. “Remember, I am the fairy godmother to all the babies.”

As I wrote a tribute for the back of her funeral program, I was all too aware of my blind spots. To me she was the queen of that house where everyone wanted to be for holidays, and where her children’s friends wanted to hang out. She was the mother who knit sweaters and colored the milk green on St. Patrick’s Day. I had a vague sense of her aspirations, a rough idea that she’d been pursuing real estate architecture before she’d gotten sick again. There’d been suggestions that she was hungry to leave a larger mark on the world. As rich as I thought her life and achievements were, she’d sought some measure she hadn’t yet defined.

In the end, I knew little of what she wanted her legacy to be. For sure it included healthy children, a home full of fun, making sure loved ones felt loved. But I knew there was more to the story. I also knew that even though she loved me very much, I wasn’t privy to it. In the end we all die with bits of our story untold.

My aunt’s oldest daughter is now married with infant twins. I’ll be going to their first birthday party in June, a few days after my novel is published. If I have to shop every day of the next two months, I’m going to find them a magic wand. In a world where nothing is certain, we can all use the protective oversight of a fairy godmother.

Then I’m going to find my daughter’s wand, its silver streamers plucked bald over the years. I’ll tap each of the three boys my aunt never met — the one I was carrying when I said goodbye to her, and two more who came after him. And then I’m going to give it a little wave over my book.

 

 

Random Contest Day

It’s May, so I can ask:

What’s your most-anticipated summer read? (no, you can’t say mine, silly) Contest over on my Facebook author page today!

Tell me what you can’t wait to crack open this summer (it doesn’t have to be a new release, though it’s fun to hear what folks are talking about), and win one of my favorite all-time novels, bought just for you at Wellesley Books. Random drawing at midnight next Monday, May 7th.

Okay, it won’t happen at midnight. I hope to be asleep by then. But your comment has to be entered by midnight on the Facebook page (click the “like” button to be able to comment on the page), and I’ll post the winner in the morning over my first morning joe. Which — my bit-of-sanity tip — comes via my thermos on the nightstand.

Good luck, and I can’t wait to see your summer list!

PS: I’ve compiled some public “most anticipated summer books” lists below.

BookPage 20 Summer Standouts

Most-Anticipated Debuts of 2012

The Millions: The Great 2012 Book Preview

Library Journal: 80 Best Bets for Spring/Summer 2012

 

 

 

Unexcused Absence

Last night I dreamed I was back at high school and — who hasn’t had this dream? —that I’d missed an entire semester of classes. No, I wasn’t naked in the hallway. But I had to find my way through an ominous maze of hallways to the principal’s office, then make the case for why I deserved to be let back into class.

“Why were you away so long?” he asked.

I couldn’t think of an answer. Why had I been away, missed all that math and science? There was no way I’d catch up in calculus now.

Then I realized I was a bit older than my fellow students, and that I hadn’t missed just a semester, but decades.

I stammered, “Well, I’ve been busy.” My throat went tight at how lame it sounded. “I’ve been writing, and doing this literary blog. It’s sort of like editing a magazine.”

He gave a sad nod (sympathetic? or just pathetic?), and handed me my new class schedule. It wasn’t until after I walked out that I thought, Damn, I forgot to say I’d five kids too, and wrote a novel. Those are good reasons, aren’t they?

My dreams are usually much stranger than this — apocalyptic landscapes, gang wars in burned-out buildings. This one was so transparent I was a little disgusted with my subconscious’ lack of imagination.

Although I’ve kept writing since having children, I haven’t worked in an office, really in the thick of it, for almost 15 years. I used to fly off on assignments to all kinds of places, interviewing executives or reporting on hurricane locations. I was known for a byline, not the nutty status updates about my kids. And that’s about to change in a few weeks when I start to travel for my first novel.

But come on, subconscious. The old going-back-to-school dream? It’s not like I haven’t done my homework. I’ve researched the business side of publishing, gone to conferences, made connections. I’ve been working on getting comfortable reading my work (well, sort of), and I clinched a great summer sitter to help with the chaotic schedules. By any calculus it’s a dream come true. Especially for an unshowered truant in a minivan.

 

Say What You Mean To Say

Words matter. They matter whether you say them or write them, because you never know how you might impact someone. And words don’t have an expiration date.

That was the message of a blog post by a colleague of mine at the literary blog Beyond the Margins. Awhile back she’d written a cheeky piece about how to succeed as a travel writer, poking fun at the glam, gourmet, celebrity-chasing culture that pervades articles about hot destinations. But a young writer took her seriously, and unbeknownst to her, he became depressed about the likelihood of writing anything the world would care about. He came back over a year later and commented on her post, telling her that whenever he was lacking momentum on his travel memoir, her words had “haunted” him, became the “demon he had to wrestle” to keep faith in his work. She clarified what she meant (irony!), and offered to be a set of eyes for his book when it’s finished.

But most of us don’t get the chance to say, Here’s what I really meant.

Just yesterday I received an email from someone who’d been in my graduating class at journalism school, and who’d heard I was just about to publish a novel I’d written while in the thick of the young-children years. She contacted me because she was starting to write one, herself, just after she’d had her second child. We exchanged memories about school, and she recalled — ha ha! — how at a graduation party she had told me she was taking an unpaid internship. Apparently I said, You can do better.

I’d like to think she’s remembering incorrectly, and that I actually said something along the lines of, WE can do better, because heaven knows I made poverty-level wages that year after school. Or that I said it in an emphatic, affirming way — You can do better! Someday, we all will!

But I don’t know what I said, or exactly what I meant. I don’t even remember the graduation party in that blur of a week, capping a rabid year working toward a degree not technically necessary for our field. All of us, subliminally haunted by the pressure to prove it had been worth it.

I only know that that’s what she remembers of me. But that thankfully, she didn’t take it badly enough that it kept her from reaching out 20 years later to a fellow mom, still and always trying to do better.

 

Goodreads Giveaway: Want a free galley?

I just found out my publisher has offered 45 preview copies of The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D for a giveaway on Goodreads… to enter, just click here.

Now personally, I'd rather you not win one. I mean, these are galleys. They have typos. There's even a word in there that doesn't exist in the English language, someone's mashup of two words introduced during the first round of copyedits.

Not that it bothers me or anything, having grammatical imperfections in the book going out to reviewers and bookstores and contest winners…. No, not me.

But if you like the idea of reading the book before everyone else, and finding the word that doesn't exist in nature, go ahead and enter.

And if you win, let me know through the contact page on this site, and I'll send you a signed bookplate apologizing for the mashup word (and revealing what it is). 

Good luck!

Hobbies? What Hobbies?

A friend was talking about her Pinterest boards recently, and how she'd added a new board for "hobbies." Since Pinterest was her latest hobby, she laughed, it was like a hobby within a hobby.

"I don't even know what I'd put down for hobbies anymore." I didn't mean it to sound as plaintive as it did.

"Well, of course," she said, making a sweeping gesture that I understood to take in my kids, even though they weren't with us. "Because you have five of them now."

I went away thinking about hobbies, about the things I used to enjoy that, once time became limited, hadn't make the cut.  What would I put on the boards? It became a statement of values, a mental shorthand for something philosophically larger: What makes the board.

Under the auspices of writing an essay, I decided to use Pinterest an exercise in soul-searching. I created three boards: HAVE BEEN, AM, BECOMING. And I posted (or "pinned") images that reflected each phase of my life.

In HAVE BEEN, there was skydiving, writing, running, fostering orphaned baby animals, golfing, skiing, horseback riding, traveling. Gourmet meals. Gorgeous handmade cableknit sweaters. Glamorous stiletto sandals.

In AM there was yoga, writing, kitten fostering, patent-leather Dansko clogs, and the Von Trapps — well, minus the singing, the wealth and the nanny.

In BECOMING, there were to be — yes — golf and yoga, writing and travel. I also want to take inn-to-inn trips abroad, by bike or horseback. Also the dream of someday working for Smile Train, an international organization aiding children with cleft palates. And baby alpaca: I want to have a small alpaca farm. But the centerpiece is an arresting portrait of an octogenarian woman: she wears in an evening gown with her eyes closed and elegant arms outstretched like she is embracing the all of herself.

I made my boards, like planting a flag on the moon, and I've never gone back. But I learned something in the exercise, something comforting. I may well have winnowed my life down to just a few things right now. But there are still the shadows of all that has been the essence of me. There are new interests that have grown out of the experience and empathy of years raising children. And if I'm fortunate enough to live to be 80, I hope to sit at peace with my arms open wide, grateful that the best of my energy and intentions lasted to make it to the Becoming, and bring them all into my bony embrace.