Gin Phillips's Blog, page 3

More ’80s memories–Dad edition

#9–My father would take us crappie fishing at night, which was as much about the snacks to me as the fishing. We’d ride out to the middle of the lake, wind whipping hair and jackets, and there was always something ecstatic about that rush of wind. When we’d stop and drop our lines, we could take out the wrapped packages of, and I’d usually sit on the bottom of the boat, eating, watching my pole and the stars and the blinking lights on the Bass Tracker. Catching a fish was nice, but I was happy either way.

#10–My father and I were in the Gulf of Mexico—maybe Gulf Shores?—when I was still small enough to comfortable ride on his shoulders. I could swim, but the waves knocked me around pretty thoroughly, so after I’d swallowed a substantial amount of salt water, he hefted me over his head and held onto my hands with his as he waded deeper. He pointed at a long pier to our left, which seemed to go on endlessly. “At the end of the pier—that’s where the sharks are,” he said. “You want me to walk you out to where the sharks will swim around us?”

“Yes,” I said.

He laughed. The water was up to his chest, and the bigger waves were smacking him in the face because he couldn’t jump as well with me on top of him. “I thought you’d say no. I can’t really walk out there—it might be a mile deep, who knows?”

“Aren’t you a mile tall?” I said, and I was shocked when he said no.

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Why I Loved Gunsmoke

Childhood Memory #8

I watched Gunsmoke reruns with my grandfather most days—he loved everything about it, and I loved Miss Kitty, the beautiful owner of the Long Branch Saloon (and also maybe brothel?) Plenty of afternoons we would act out the episode once we turned off the television, with me playing Kitty and my grandfather playing Sheriff Matt Dillon.We had one toy gun in the house—a 1950s model made of real wood and metal—and in our role-playing, Matt Dillon never got the gun. He never got to save Kitty from kidnappers or outlaws. He got kidnapped or imprisoned or shot or whatever, and Kitty filled her gun with baby powder (which made a very satisfying cloud of smoke when you pulled the trigger) and came to rescue him. He called for help from underneath the dining room table, and she told him not to worry as she chased off the bad guys and then helped him to his feet.

I love my grandfather for many reasons, including for teaching me to love Westerns. But also for teaching me that stories are malleable things—if you don’t like the narrative, change it.

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Why I Sometimes Act Like I Was Born in the Great Depression

Another batch of memories in preparation for FAMILY LAW, which is set in the world of my own childhood. My grandmother turned 105 this week, and so these are all her. She’s at the center of many of my warmest, best memories.

5. My grandparents did not believe in wasting money on snacks during car trips. Not that we took many car trips. Mostly we drove up to my great-grandmother’s about three hours away, and my grandmother treated this expedition as if we were packing up the wagons and crossing the plains. She filled up a thermos with ice water—sometimes it was a mason jar, if she couldn’t find the thermos—and she built tidy stacks of Saltines and peanut butter. Sometimes Ritz with peanut butter. Sometimes apples or chocolate chip cookies or Lorna Doone shortbreads or some such, but always the ice water and crackers, and she would always sit in the front passenger seat with plastic bags jammed around her feet so that she could hardly move. My grandfather would drive, and my mother and I would stretch out luxuriously in the back with pillows and magazines. My grandmother would twist around and offer us a sip of water or cracker about a hundred times over the course of those three hours, and sometimes I would answer in a huffy tone that I didn’t want anything and I didn’t even like Saltines that much, but now I would love to hear the crackle of that plastic bag as she bent down to sort through her offerings, digging through Ziplocks and napkins, so eager to give me something I wanted.

6. We halved everything. My grandmother and her siblings grew up in the Depression, and I spent a lot of time around them. There was a general attitude of conservation. We got half a paper napkin at meals and a half stick of gum on car trips. We washed out ziplock bags and dried them on the dishrack. There was the tucked-away clump of plastic grocery bags—did anyone NOT save those grocery bags?—which would be used for bathroom trash bags and carry-out sacks for when you got sent home with Tupperware leftovers.

7. I wish I had let my grandmother properly teach me to sew. She was excellent at it—she made my early Halloween costumes by hand and occasionally made me an entire outfit when I was small. She sat me down for lessons a few times, but I was unenthusiastic. I got the basics of hemming, but I’m not that good at it.

I can see her threading a needle, sucking the end of it into her mouth, tying it off, settling into a rhythm of tidy stiches and looping thread. As a child, I found it boring. As I got older, maybe I found it too domestic? Old-fashioned? Subservient, even, as if you’d get stuck fixing things that men had broken? No, I don’t think I thought that deeply. More likely, sewing pressed the same buttons as my failed piano lessons—I just wasn’t willing to put in the work.

Now I see the competence in it. The self-sufficiency. The way my grandmother could take the old and make it new again. The way she could turn an idea into something you could hold in your hand.

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A Few Bits of an Alabama Childhood

My upcoming novel, Family Law, is set in the time and place of my own childhood—the ’70s and ’80s in Montgomery, Al. I haven’t written a distinctly Southern novel since my first book, The Well and the Mine, came out in 2008. As I get ready for this book’s release, I wanted to spend some time very consciously thinking about the South. I’ve been thinking, especially, about my own childhood. I’ve jotted down around a hundred memories—some of them quick flashes and some of them more fully unspooled.

I’ll share a few of them each week, and I suspect that for those of you around my age—children of the ‘70s and ‘80s—you’ll recognize some bits and pieces. As I look for threads that link all these  snapshots, one theme I keep seeing is how a connection to rural life was just barely under the surface of my urban childhood. The Great Depression was lingering, decades later, through my grandparents. Many of these memories involve heat. (Oh, the feel of sweaty thighs sticking to hot car seats!) Food. Family. I tend to think, if there is a universal truth of the South, that surely those themes resurface again and again, no matter gender or race or age or background.

But maybe food and family are the center of most people’s memories from any place at any time.

So here we go….

1. Most of the girls my age took group swimming lessons with Miss Mickey, a woman known apparently by all the moms, and five or six of us girls would cram into someone’s station wagon and getting dropped off at Miss Mickey’s house. The pool was in the backyard. The truth is that I don’t remember much of the lessons. Only flashes. The feel of the concrete edge of the pool under my pruney fingers as I practice my kicks. The burn of chlorine up my nose. The satisfying gasps for air after a full lap finished. Miss Mickey’s hands on my ankles, straightening my legs. Mostly I remember how, when lessons were finished, we’d wrap towels around our bathing suits—oh, the unsettling feel of water steadily dripping from the crotch of your suit—and Miss Mickey would hold out a bowl of dum-dums. We could pick our flavor, although too much indecision was not allowed. I always got root beer. Then we’d climb, still dripping, into the backseat of some other mom’s car, with one unlucky girl having to sit with the mom, and our legs would stick to the hot upholstery and the car would fill up with the smell of chlorine, and we’d eat our lollipops and see who could make theirs last the longest.

 

2. This is how I looked when I went to church as a child: hair curled from sleeping on those stupid sponge curlers, elaborate monogrammed dresses, black patent shoes and tights. I hated every bit of it. There were parts I liked plenty about church itself, but I’ve been thinking the eternity of the Sunday service. There were limited ways you could pass the time in the church pew, after you got old enough that you weren’t supposed to connect the dots or color or play tic-tac-toe against yourself. My stepmother brought a few hard candies—toffees or peppermints, usually—and the silent unwrapping of these candies and then the careful sucking of them passed the time a little faster. Napping was allowed for longer than coloring books were. I could lay my head against my father’s shoulder or on top of my mother’s thigh, although she didn’t care for it that much because I tended to study her face too closely from below and point out an interesting mole or weird bit of skin.

My father could not manage to be solemn for an entire service. Somewhere around the closing hymn—maybe before or after or during—he would lean against me, slowly and inexorably, giving me more and more of his 200-ish pounds, and eventually I would topple, bumping into my stepmother or possibly a stranger, and he would stand there straight faced.

3.  I’m aware that some kids grew up going to the good kind of wedding receptions—live bands, dancing, buffets, open bars—but I had no idea those kinds of receptions existed. The only ones I knew were in church fellowship halls or basements.

Paneled ceilings with fluorescent lights. Tiled or linoleum floors. Long tables with paper—maybe lace—table cloths. Cheese straws and nonpareils and punch, usually involving sherbet and Sprite/7Up. Thirty minutes, tops, of snacking and handshaking and hugging and chatting, topped off by hurling those little mesh bags of rice.

4. One more church memory: my father’s voice, unparalleled, singing church hymns. I still miss the harmonies of those old church songs. Dad could sing any part, but it was bass that I loved, how you could hear his voice spreading solid underneath all the other voices– It is well with my soul— holding the weight of every single soprano and alto and tenor.

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New Novel in May

I submitted Family Law to my publishers nearly two years ago, but–thanks to the pandemic–it’s taken a while to become an actual hold-it-in-your-hands book. Not that I’m complaining: I didn’t want my book to come out in this past year. It was worth waiting.

Set in Alabama in the early ’80s, Family Law follows a young lawyer, Lucia, who is making a name for herself at a time when a woman in a courtroom is still a rarity. She’s received plenty of threats for her work extricating women and children from troubled relationships, but her own happy marriage has always felt far removed from her work. When her mother’s pending divorce brings teenaged Rachel into Lucia’s orbit, Rachel finds herself captivated not only with Lucia, but with the change Lucia represents. Rachel is out-spoken and curious, and she chafes at the rules her mother lays down as the bounds of acceptable feminine behavior. In Lucia, Rachel sees the potential for a new path into womanhood. But their unconventional friendship takes them both to a crossroads. When a moment of violence–a threat made good–puts Rachel in danger, Lucia has to decide how much her work means to her and what she’s willing to sacrifice to keep moving forward.

Written in alternating voices from Lucia and Rachel’s perspectives, Family Law is a fresh take on what the push for women’s rights looks like to the ordinary women and girls who long for a world redefined. Addressing mother daughter relationships and what roles we can play in the lives of women who aren’t our family, the novel examines how we shape each other and how we make a difference.

I’ll be posting plenty more in the coming weeks!

Family Law cover

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Halloween

Of all the things I love about October, the costumes at our Halloween party might top the list. This year’s theme was THREE, and we had some logistical issues. Ten minutes before the party started, I realized the two heads I planned to attach to my son’s Three Musketeer costume–so he would be all three musketeers–were too heavy. Sometimes even duct tape and splints cannot work magic. So he was a singular Musketeer, and now we have some extra heads around the house.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We had  the three blind mice (plus the farmer’s wife and the carving knife); a bar code for the Number 3; the Father/Son/Holy Ghost (outstanding!); the three branches of government (also outstanding!); Tall, Dark and Handsome; Three-Hole-Punch Jim; Babe Ruth; Tua Togavailoa; Black and White, a genie, and bunch of other things I know I’m forgetting.

Here’s me below. I am a musical pun…answer in caption.

Three Dog Night/Knight.

 

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This Is What We Do On Our Last Day Before School Starts

Fanta of the Opera

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Paperbacks Out Now

Paperbacks everywhere…a different cover in Canada, the U.K., and the US!

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Off to See the Wizard

Sometimes I think I’m wasted as a novelist: I could maybe do theme meals full-time. For small children. It’s sort of a niche market. But below is our dinner before going to see The Wizard of Oz at our local theater. We’ve got Tin Manwiches, Emerald veggies, potato tornados, Over the Rainbow Sherbet, Toto-Toast with Jelly, and Munchkins from Dunkin’ Donuts. (My son came up with those last two. I am training him well in the art of amusing food.)

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Fierce Kingdom Around the World

I find that when I’m trying to finish up a manuscript–more on that later–blogging and social media in general seem to fall by the wayside. (Also on the fall-by-the-wayside list: Haircuts, dentist appointments, lunch dates with friends, all forms of house maintenance, including lightbulb replacement.) Well, I’ve finished up a draft and sent it off to my editor…so here I am.

There’ve been some fabulous reincarnations of Fierce Kingdom all over the world. Here are a few:

Slovakian edition, which is the only version where my name actually changes…in a very cool way. The one-of-a-kind Japanese edition with its anime vibe. And the French edition, which wins the prize for the most straightforward title.

 

 

 

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