Margo Christie's Blog, page 2

Nostalgia: Sweet Remembrance of the Pain of an Unhealed Wound?

Nostalgia:  Sweet Remembrance or Pain of an Unhealed Wound? If nostalgia is, like Don Draper of the AMC series Mad Men  says, “The pain of an unhealed wound,” why does it feel like a warm, fuzzy trip down memory lane?  Perhaps the answer lies in a Psychology Today  article, in which the author asserts that people reminisce as a way of reaching for pleasant memories when dissatisfied with their present lives. (Marina Krakovsky, “Nostalgia: Sweet Remembrance,” May 2006).   If that is the case then nostalgia is both – the pain and the cure for it. The early ‘60s-set Mad Men  gives us both.  Beneath its veneer of glamour lies an ugly reality:  The 60s was an era of blatant inequality, in the workplace and at home.  Peggy Olson, Draper’s ad agency protégé, works harder and has better ideas than her male counterparts.  Yet she’s paid less and asked to locate drinking glasses during a staff meeting.  Women on the side are par-for-the-course for married-man Draper; yet wife Betty is admonished, somewhat violently, for harmlessly flirting.  And let us not forget the institutional racism of the pre-Civil Rights 60s.  The black elevator operator seems innately to know his place and never gives an opinion; and the Drapers’ maid, Carla – a grown woman with a family and concerns of her own – is labeled their “girl” and expected to drop everything to fill the crisis-level needs of their destructive lifestyle.   Yet if people reminisce as a way of reaching for pleasant memories, then it follows that the unpleasant are what we choose to forget.  In the words of Charlotte Wilder, we watch   Mad Men  for a glimpse at how much "simpler, cleaner, better" life was when "women wore aprons and men came home on the 5:40 train." ( Wilder, Huff Post, June 17, 2012 ).   Mad Men   gives us "simpler, cleaner, better" in spades.  Men wear tailored suits, accessorized with cufflinks.  They don hats out-of-doors and never fail to remove them in the presence of ladies.  Indeed, one episode shows boss-man Draper reproaching his younger counterparts for failing to do so in an elevator.  Ladies wear fitted dresses – oh-so glamorous and attractive are they to the men, who seem never to miss an opportunity to notice them.  In short, everyone in Mad Men  is physically attractive and aware of the fact.  When compared with pajama pants and bedroom slippers worn as street attire, lingerie worn atop a blouse rather than under it, it seems easy to prefer the former.  And who can’t see the value of an article of clothing being remembered for its quality, not its ubiquitous corporate logo?  My novel, These Days, deals with both aspects of nostalgia, as well.  My heroine, Becky Shelling, dreams of a long-gone time.  It’s a dream she inherited from her father, an under-employed jazz musician who hearkens to a pre-jukebox era when “every hole-in-the-wall bar had a band.”  Though he dotes on Becky, much of Ernie Shelling's time with his daughter is spent in collective escapism.  They watch old movies, listen to old music, and visit showgirl Teri the Canary who, like them, hearkens to a better time.  But it’s the ‘70s not the ‘40s.  Bars that don’t rely on jukeboxes for entertainment feature DJs spinning Disco tunes.  Thus, what Ernie really yearns for is a second chance, a return of opportunity.  Like George Valentín in the Oscar-winning film The Artist, he longs for a time when technology had not yet destroyed his livelihood.    For 14-year old Becky, who doesn’t yet know the meaning of nostalgia, all this hearkening gives the impression that the world her father yearns for is possible.  When Ernie disappears, this vision becomes all the more desired for its inaccessibility.  Left with step-mom Arlene and step-sister Abbie – both of whom live according to present-day, struggle-ridden realities – Becky becomes mired in the illusion that it is only through reconnection with her father that she’ll realize her dreams.  Enter Lenny Moss.  Smooth, charismatic and handsome like Becky’s dad, Lenny longs for a long-gone time, too.  Yet Lenny is more than just a misplaced dreamer.  He’s a powerful real-estate mogul; practical and in tune to the speculative opportunities of the city's crumbling core.  His nostalgia is limited to a time when men ruled and women knew their place, and he’s only too willing to keep Becky in hers.  Yet, though Becky’s nostalgia has led her to a nightmare rather than a dream, it’s safe to assume she wouldn’t have fared so well without it.  It helped her cope with the pain of her father’s desertion, giving her pleasant memories without which she might easily have become a melancholy drunk like George Valentín, or an egomaniacal sex-addict like Don Draper.  In his 5th smash season on Mad Men, Draper continues to barrel down a self-destructive path; and Valentín, though able to remake himself as a tap dancer, is pushed to the brink of suicide first.     

This Working Girl's Writing Life - Week 3

I’ll Know I’ve Made it as a Writer When . . . . . . I finish a whole manuscript.. . . I learn how to rewrite that whole manuscript.. . . I get five/ten/fifteen/one hundred/etc rejection letters from real-life agents.. . . I knuckle down and rewrite the book again. And again. And again. Etc.. . . I get a request for the whole manuscript from a real-life agent. The above is taken from the blog of Australian Sci-Fi writer Justine Larbalestier , whose list includes more than 40 criteria -- many of them hilarious, most of them poignant, all of them a bitter bite of reality.  As I read them for the first time, my reaction was to wonder why I keep at this writing game.  It's fiercely competitive; overly-dependent on who you know and your ability to network.  The profit margin is so iffy agents and editors are highly-unwilling to take chances on unknowns.  Add to that the fact that fewer and fewer people reads novels anymore, especially novels of the type that I write. I write literary fiction.  In a nutshell, that means character- rather than plot-driven.  That's not to say there's not a plot.  There is, of course.  Characters have to get from point A (problem/crisis) to point B (resolution) somehow, and that somehow is the plot -- the series of events that move the character along.  The difference between literary novels and the more mainstream genres is that literary novels are heavy on character development.   In other words, character growth and struggle are the plot.  There's no crime to solve; no mystery to unravel; no fantastic, futuristic device to drive the action forward.  There's a sympathetic character we can identify with.  This character wants something very badly; is often in a moral or psychological quandary over what they want and how to get it.  We want what they want because we like them; and the plot lies in how they change and grow as a result of getting or not getting what they want.         Literary novels are among the least popular these days.  In this high-tech age where questions are answered with the click of a mouse, readers want immediate action.  They don't want to get to know characters; don't want to bear witness to their uncomfortable wriggle out of a dilemna.  So why not write crime thrillers or murder mysteries, you might ask.  I'd likely improve my chances at getting to the fifth criteria on Justine's list -- getting a request for a full manuscript from a real-life agent. The answer is that I do what I do because I love it.  I write literary fiction because I love to read literary fiction.  I have more interest in what makes people tick than in how to solve crimes or build time machines.  In short, I'm intrigued by what French writer André Malraux called "The Human Condition."  Asking me to write fantasy or mystery would be like asking James Brown to record the greatest hits of The Carpenters. I love a novel that makes me cry when its characters cry; leap for joy when they triumph.  I love the sense of fellow-feeling I get reading about something I've felt or experienced.  I love knowing characters so well I feel I've lost my best friend when the novel ends.  I love giving this to my potential readers (if, indeed, I ever get any!).  I love symbolism.   Real life is full of it and, when used to good effect by a literary masters like Scott Fitzgerald and Toni Morrison, it's pure genius.  I like a novel that reminds us where we've been and gives us a glimpse, perhaps a foreboding, of where we're headed.  I don't want anything as quick and tidy as the unraveling of a crime.  I want to know why we do what we do, even when the insights are ugly. When I hit my mark without even trying; when a passage or a chapter that kept me awake countless nights finally comes together, there's nothing better than this writing game.  When I get to know my characters so well they seem to write themselves, the feeling is better than any high I tried in my sorely mis-spent youth.  That's what keeps me going when, despite finishing surprisingly well in the 2012 ABNA, despite the stellar reviews I now can use in my pitch, I haven't yet gotten to Justine's #5. On that note, I'd like compose my own list of writing criteria. You know you're a writer when you keep slogging away at novel #2 even though novel #1 has yet to get much notice. You know you're a writer when writing is the first thing you do every morning, 7 days a week. You know you're a writer when every time you encounter a unique individual or situation, you think "There's a story there." You know you're a writer when the thought that your novel may never see the light of day wells you up with tears. And finally, you know you're a writer when you've written a novel-length manuscript complete with deep, compelling characters and a believable plot; when, despite the fact it never got edited by anyone but yourself, it finished in the top 1% of a major novel contest.  More to come! Cheers and Peace, Margo           

Hollywood's Original Bad Girl Had no Use for Labels!

Today's Creativity-Inspiring Quote comes from Mae West -- Hollywood's Original Bad Girl.  Awesome for daring to be bad in a time when women were expected to be virtuous.   

"Whenever I have to choose between 2 evils, I always like to try the one I haven't tried before." 

- Mae West

 

Be yourself!  This one inspires me to be choose "evil" whenever "evil" fits the bill!

The World of Book Publishing: A Sneak Peek.

As some of my non-writer friends have asked when my book would be available, I've decided to put together this summary of the publication process, as I know it.  First, let me touch on the difference between traditional publishing and self-publishing.  Traditional publishing means dealing with a major publishing house.  Random House, Penguin and Harper-Collins are the three biggies that come to my mind.  They all have smaller subsidiaries -- "Imprints," as they're called in the literary world, these little guys tend to work with niche fiction and debut authors, whereas the main imprint tends to sticks with proven winners in mainstream fiction.  Thus, if I -- a nobody in the fiction world at this point -- were to get accepted by one of the biggies, it would likely be with one of the smaller imprints.  But I'm jumping way ahead of myself.  First, I have to land an agent. In today's competitive literary market, where editorial staffs are stretched thin and the "real" money is in best-sellers, editors at the major houses generally won't waste a blink on an un-agented manuscript.  For that matter, agents usually won't blink at manuscripts that didn't come to them via referral from someone in the field -- a published writer, for example.  The importance of networking in this biz cannot, therefore, be underestimated.  So now it is time to sing the praises of Twitter.  Is the band rehearsed and ready? Unlike Facebook, where you get slapped on the wrist for trying to "friend" people you don't already know, on Twitter you can follow anyone.  It is then their choice to follow you back.  In the writing world, where so many are striving for so few chances at getting noticed, it is rare that a writer won't follow another writer back.  This has been true for about 90% of the writers I follow.  Voilá!  After a mere three months of tweeting, I have a Twitter following!  And if one of my followers happens to be a published author who's visited my website, read my  excerpts and likes what she sees?  Well, maybe the sky truly is the limit. Now on to self-publication:  There are many avenues for self-publishing these days.  As a matter of fact, many of these avenues have been around for generations.  Without further research, I can think of at least one self-published writer who became a legend in his time -- Baltimore denizen and father of the short story, Edgar Allen Poe.  That's not chicken liver, folks!  Self-published writers are in good company, indeed.  That said, writers who self-publish and see success from it have what is known in the biz as a "platform;" that is, a following.  Many of them teach.  In a community college writing course I took a few years ago, the instructor used 2 of her self-published novels as teaching material.  The end result?  All 20-some of her students had to buy her novels.  I thought that was a rather cheap way of getting sales but perhaps she had more than a few books gathering dust in her garage.   And there are other ways.  California-based romance writer  Katherine Owen  boasts sales of 8,000 copies of 3 novels in the past six months, mostly through e-book sales on Amazon.  Most self-published e-books go for $2.99, leaving the author with a $2.00 profit.  Pretty paltry, you might think.  I did.  Said so, in fact.  Then another writer friend pointed out that once the publisher, the agent and everyone else with a hand in the traditional publishing pot gets their cut, the writer is left with the same $2.00. So self-publishing is an option.  For now, though, I continue to build my Twitter following while sending out query letters and exercising great levels of patience with the agent-finding process.  On that note, I received my first personalized rejection letter today.  From a well-established N.Y. literary agency, it stated that while my work wasn't right for their agency at this time, they hoped I'd keep writing and take heart in the fact that there are agents out there who'd be interested.  This might not sound like much, but it's a ray of hope in a world where, usually, when there's no interest, there's no reply.  Period.  And, as  ABNA 2011 winner  Gregory Hill advised, the minute you get a drop of encouragement, start writing your next novel.  Perhaps this is that drop.  Cheers, Margo

We ALL Have Something to Say!

Today's Creative Quote comes from renouwned American dancer and choreographer Martha Graham: 

There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening, that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one you in all of time, this expression is unique.  And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. 

This reinforces in me that my experiences are unique and worth sharing with those who have ears to hear of them!

Wow! It's been awhile. How the hell have you been?

Dear Social Media: Wow!  Has it really been nearly a year since I've written.  I must admit I've missed you., contentious as our relationship has been.  See, I'm a product of the pre-technology 1970s, when communication was face-to-face and you had be be standing still , connected to a "land line" to make a telephone call.   You, on the other hand -- streamlined as a 1960 T-bird like you are -- you stand ever-ready to embrace whatever's new and improved.   For you, typewriters are outdated relics.  I grew up with one; typed my college terms papers on it.  Oh, the dried-up bottles of White-Out I've seen come and go! Now  I must admit feeling a little inadequate at first, faced day-to-day with your eager anticipation.  Perhaps that's why I went astray.  Yet, self-proclaimed nostalgia-maven that I am, I have to admit I've begun to see your merits.  It is through you that I've gained an audience -- a meagre one to be sure, but hey, beggars can't be choosers.  Novice that I was to your eager young ways, I had things to learn, expectations to adjust.  And here's where the old adage of "Can't teach an old dog..." couldn't be less true:  I had to go away and age a little, come back with something to say.  I had to realize that being connected on Twitter and Facebook didn't mean anyone was listening.  So now I'm back, better than ever, ready to tweet, post, like, comment, and opine away! Yours Forever-more, Margo Christie, 21st Century Writer

Writer Life Epiphany #4

Whatever your art, never be afraid to ask others in the field for their help.  Those who are put-off by this matter about one-millionth as much as those who will reach deep insides themselves and provide a hand-up.

John McPhee on Writer’s Block, or How I applied McPhee’s Wisdom to my own Struggle to Write a First Draft

John McPhee on Writer’s Block, or How I applied McPhee’s Wisdom to my own Struggle to Write a First Draft

 “Block.  It puts some writers down for months.  It puts some writers down for life.  A not always brief or minor form of it mutes all writers from the outset of every day.”

 So begins New Yorker staff writer John McPhee’s April 29 essay on the condition that plagues every writer that’s composed more than a grammatically incorrect tweet or two.  While it’s nice to know writer’s block is so common that McPhee, now in his 50 year publishing in the New Yorker, is still stymied by it, I’ve been so blocked in my own writing that I felt the need to dig a little deeper, to figure out ways of applying his gems of wisdom to my own current block.  Perhaps what I've written will ring hopeful with you. With one novel and a second prize in Amazon’s 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award under my belt, I’ve been blocked in writing a second novel ever since the idea for one first came to me, nearly 2 years ago.  I was able to commit a fully-fleshed outline and one page of a first chapter to paper.  Then I began toying around with where to take the narrative from there.  There were several feasible and quite interesting ways to go with it, and I managed to write a few scenes.  I even threw in a very colorful secondary character and gave her a very real place in the central character’s story.  But I couldn’t settle on any of the 3 or 4 scenes I wrote.  The secondary character is still very much alive – she’s too special to kill – but none of the ensuing scenes won the approval of my hyper-critical self-editor.  What was wrong?  I knew I could do this.  I’d done it before.  I’d even finished a major novel contest in the top 1% of 5,000 worldwide entries.  So I spent several weeks appraising the process by which I’d written THESE DAYS, and discovered that, although it often seems as if the novel had somehow written itself, that was far from true.   Don’t get me wrong – there is a certain amount of self-propulsion that all writing takes on.  Characters personalities take shape; they begin to speak in their own voices.  If you don’t believe me, just try to make them do or say anything seriously “out of character” and, mark my words, you’ll be rewarded with the stickiest, most miserable writer’s quagmire you’ve ever known.  But this shaping of characters happens only after you’ve done what Anne Tyler describes as “moving them mechanically across the page” for awhile.  Initially, characters are puppets, they move and say and think and do only by the writer’s hand.  Play around with them in this fashion for awhile, and about two-thirds of the way through that painful first draft, they will begin to move with more of their volition and less of yours.  It is only through this “playing” that you get to know your characters – their thoughts, fears, hopes, motivations – well enough to write their actions precisely as they, themselves, would write them.  I guess this is the essence of what it means to say the novel wrote itself; after a while, the characters in THESE DAYS did seem to write themselves, but only after playing around with them in this fashion.  So this phase equates to the courtship phase of an engagement.  You wouldn’t embark on anything as life-changing as marriage with someone you hadn’t bothered to get to know, at least not when sober and with mind not clouded by sex!  So why expect to write anything life-changing with characters you don’t yet know? In thinking about the process of writing THESE DAYS, I recalled at least a dozen scenes that had either been cut or revised so dramatically as to hardly be recognizable.  Many of these, especially the earlier ones, would not only have made for a wholly different story, they’d have made for a wholly different central character.  Becky Shelling, the central character in THESE DAYS, is a star-struck teenage strip-teaser enamored with the glory days of burlesque.  It’s the 1970s and burlesque is all but dead.  The strip joint in which she works is a thinly-disguised brothel.  She’s the owner’s young, impressionable and sorely manipulated mistress; and she’s determined to cast her situation in the best possible light by reviving the good old days of burlesque.   In the final version, Becky, as a child, is enamored with show biz and dreams of being a chorus-line dancer.  Her father is an underemployed jazz musician with the melancholy habit of romanticizing the “good old days.” When he abruptly disappears, Becky is left with an emotional wound that has her looking for love in all the wrong places.  She ends up a dancer, but not the kind of dancer she’d always dreamed she’d be.   In the first draft, I wrote Becky as a fledgling artist.  Her father is still a jazz musician who is off the family scene more often than on, and he still ultimately disappears.  But when he’s home he indulges his daughter in art classes.  I now believe I originally wrote Becky’s situation that way because THESE DAYS is based on my own experience as a teenage strip-teaser from a broken home.  My first passion was art, so why wouldn’t Becky’s also be?  Because Becky the struggling artist would’ve made for a wholly different novel than Becky the would-be showgirl.  Her father’s disappearance might still have had her looking for love in all the wrong places, but I could not have tied it together so neatly with a passion for show biz learned from her dad and subsequently sidetracked by his disappearance.   

“How could anyone ever know that something is good before it exists?  And unless you can identify what is not succeeding – unless you can see those dark, clunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops – how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?” – John McPhee, on the necessity of getting something – anything – down as a rough, first draft.

 One of the scenes that got cut in the early stages was one in which Becky confides to a retired stripper that she feels trapped in the situation she’s in with emotionally-abusive Lenny, her strip-joint owning benefactor.  Lenny exercises control over Becky through the giving or withholding of love and approval.  He watches where she goes, what she does, who she sees.  I originally wrote this scene in the home of the older stripper.  No surprise I couldn’t work out how Becky gained the confidence and wherewithal to visit, of her own volition, another woman’s home.  In its essence, this scene remained, but in the final version it takes place in the strip joint where the retired stripper, now a barmaid, works.  Cookie Sweet is a long-time friend of Lenny’s; they’ve worked together in the past and she's currently employed by his best friend.  He trusts she won’t taint the mind of his impressionable young mistress.  As it turns out, he’s wrong.  But this set of circumstances is far more feasible than the earlier one. 

“The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once…. The hardest part comes first, getting something – anything – out in front of me…as a first draft.  [Once you have] that, you have achieved a sort of nucleus.  Then, as you work it over and alter it, you begin to shape sentences that score higher with the ear and eye.  Edit it again – top to bottom.  The chances are that now you’ll be seeing something that you are sort of eager for others to see.  And all that takes time.”

 And then there’s what McPhee calls the “interstitial time.” 

“You finish that first awful blurting [of words], and then you put the thing aside.  You get in your car and drive home.  On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words.  You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem.  Without the [first draft] – if it did not exist – you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it.  In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working out it twenty-four hours a day – yes, while you sleep – but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists.  Until it exists, writing has not really begun.”

 I reached this point about halfway through the first draft of THESE DAYS.  My mind not only worked 24/7 on the story – on what I’d written and subsequently planned to write – but also on the characters, their motivations, their histories, what they desired, what they feared.  They lived in my head – Becky, the teenage stripper; Ernie, her jazz musician father; Lenny, her philandering, strip-joint-owning boyfriend; Cookie Sweet, the burlesque-queen turned barmaid in whom she confides.  I knew how they would react to any given situation; and when I didn’t, when what I thought I knew simply would not mesh, I knew it was because I was trying to force something unnatural on them. I’ll leave you with this gem of McPhee’s wisdom of 50 writing years, one that encapsulates all of the above and yet is too easily forgotten during that wretched phase of first-draft writing:

 “The essence of the process is revision.”

Good Luck in your own writing life!

Day Two: Amtrak: Wild, Wonderful Nevada!

Sunday Sept. 1 Spent all last night putt-putting through Utah, the train moving dreadfully slow.  At one point I awoke to the most star-filled sky I've ever seen.  Out my tiny berth window I could make out the little dipper, its points twinkling brightly in a landscape of black.  We were in the middle of nowhere, no electric light anywhere save that coming from the train.  At daybreak, we entered Nevada at the cowboy outpost of Elko.  I recall hearing on NPR some ten years ago about a cowboy poetry festival that takes place here.  Naturally a body, even a hardworking, uneducated one, would wax poetic when surrounded daily with wildness and nature. There's something about Nevada that speaks to my soul in a way that Utah does not; even Colorado in its color and beauty seems tame by comparison to untamed Nevada, full of tumbleweeds and sagebrush.  It seems the perfect place for the free of spirit to live without bounds or laws, unencumbered by tradition.  It stands to reason it's the only state with legal prostitution! We just passed the trashiest looking ranch -- empty steel drums strewn here and there, rusting into the dusty earth.  Cattle, scared by the train, trotted off uncorraled into the rugged hill.  A rusted out late 70s Toyota pickup sits twisted into the dirt.  Makes me wonder if there's a heirarchy of ranchers around these parts, these slovenly types the bane of those with pristine manicured patches, picket-fenced and perfect in their neatness.  These slovenly types either wake late or give up on work early, and yet the cows know no difference.  These likely are the ones who get their cattle stolen, a la Annie Proulx's cowboy tales; or maybe they're the ones who steal.  Who knows?  The cows sure don't. Something in the decrepit nature of this attracts me.  It's dying, like the factories of East Baltimore.  Dying but still standing, hanging in there, testimony to its own resiliance.  For five years I lived on Grundy Street in Highlandtown; for five years I gazed out my second-story kitchen window at the empty Black and Decker factory.  I loved its windows, so empty and  square and symmetrical.  I loved the dull sullenness of it -- "Here I am.  Another day and I haven't grown prettier, but nor have I gone away," it seemed to say.   Growing up in an alcoholic home, where Mom cheated on Dad or at least toyed with the thought of it, it seems natural I'd be attracted to such seediness.  I lived with slow-broiling death every day! Another retired couple at breakfast in the dining car; many retired couples on the Amtrak.  First I meet the lady.  John is still in the berth and I'm in the observation car, drinking coffee, waiting for the dining car to open.  She sips her coffee two tables away and complains -- a lot.  She seems to see everything in the negative.  Her shoulders shudder, her face pinches, her nose seems to twitch at what she finds unappealing about her husband.  She's off on a roll, talking about his camera habit.  "He has gadgets and wires," she tells me.  "And he can't keep track of anything!"  I want to tell her she's lucky he's got a hobby.  But I like observing her, the way she seems to collapse into herself with the force of her complaints.  She's from Mississippi.  When I mention our 4 planned days in San Francisco, she talks about its strangeness and the liberal in me gets its hair up, thinking she's about to go into a tirade about gay folks.  But no, it's the homeless that bother her.  "It's sad how many," she says, and now that John and I are on our last day in San Fran, I know she's right.  The homelessness is out of control here, and yes it's sad.  Surprise me out of my shortcoming!  I'd boxed her into Mississippi southernness, thinking her a gay-bashing bigot!  Over breakfast she admits she's an alcoholic -- 31 years sober!  I give her heartfelt congratulations. Winnemucca Nevada:  The sun is up over those black hills yonder, so dark compared to the brick red and washed white of Colorado.

Day One: Amtrak Journey West: Colorado's Western Slope

After weeks and months of planning and anticipation, we're finally on the California Zephyr, bound for San Francisco, a city I haven't seen in more than passing for 23 years!  It's my first time in an Amtrak sleeper, and I'm tingling with vintage excitement at the idea of travelling like folks did in the 1940s movies I became obsessed with at age 11 or 12, while watching TV with Dad in the musty club basement of my mustier youth. Today we mounted the massive Rockies and passed through the canyons and valleys along the Colorado River of the Western Slope.  The river is low; it snakes and bends and inhabits the soil through which it passes.  They become one - sand, soil, water, rock, burnt low grasses that never get green but remain always greyish, sage I believe it's called.  Striated red shale cliffs give way to washed out white, streaked here and there with black, the color having something to do with the mineral composition of the soil.  The soil is sandy and the rocks are fracturous, yet these mountains have stood for millions of years.  The guide in the observation car said these mountains are actually the second set of Rockies to cleave Colorado in two, the first set having emerged from the molitnous Earth the first time tectonic plates shifted and pushed everything below into daylight, like giving birth to an unformed mass that would harden, taking shape, becoming the Rocky Mountains we in Denver take for granted daily, a lumpy shadow on the city's horizon.  We love to look at them but they're trecherous, cold and barren, a wasteland that could eaily take the live of this lifelong city-dweller.  I like looking at them through the window of a climate-controlled passenger train. Travelling by train produces great short-term friendships, the communal seating arrangement in the dining car making a byproduct of getting-to-know-you.  Most, though not all, fellow travellers comply.  At breakfast we were joined by a retired South African couple who now call Hilton Head, South Carolina home.  The man was liver-spotted and pasty, with white hair and whiter, bushy eyebrows.  The woman looked, though likely wasn't, younger than he, open-faced and smiling, with a sweep of thick blond hair and clear blue eyes that laughed and searched for points at which to connect with us, her fellow diners.  She was a housewife, he a retired architect, professional, a little uppity, loaded with opinions.  As he started into a story of travelling by plane once from Johannesburg to Atlanta, a story of airline debaucles and airline employee rudeness, his wife pressed her fingertips to her temples in an effort to steady herself (She seemed nearly to tremble!), and exclaimed, "He was livid!" as though to excuse his boorishness aforehand.  So sure she seemed that we, too, would be patience-tried by the righteous indigation with which he told a tale she'd no doubt heard many times before.   Later in the conversation. John and I told them we were transit workers, and they seemed a bit surprised.  I banter intellectually with the best of them and John keeps pace, too.  The man said he thought my split shift job seemed bottom of the totem pole (my phrase -- I'd used in earlier in the conversation when describing the seniority-based bidding that determines my schedule).  I replied "It's not so bad, really," but later wished I'd said "Beg your pardon, but no element of my life is bottom of anything.  Later, as I passed back through the dining car enroute to our sleeper, they happily waved, ensuring me I needn't say everything that passes through my own self-righteous mind. Later:  Sitting in the window of our sleeper, our window on the world, watching the Rockies fly by, I thought, in gratitude, of how I'd done so much with this one life.  I've been to Windows on the World at the World Trade Center in NYC.  Been to the observation deck of that gone forever-now building not once but twice, once with Mom in 1982, again some ten years later with my first husband.  Mom took me also to Tavern on the Green.  It occurs to me now more than 30 years later, 6 months after her death, that Mom loved to show me things, her need to be the center of my world satisfied by showing me worldly things.   As for me, I'm satisfied that my life has been full of lessons like these.