Anything Goes

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
Now heaven knows, anything goes

And good authors too who once knew better words
Now only use four letter words writing prose
'Cause anything goes

I have been busy. I've been editing Gill's new book "Babe Gains" for women of all shapes and sizes. I imagine it is difficult for some women to believe that she believes every body is beautiful because she is gorgeous (though as insecure as the rest of us). 

I have also spent a good few hours writing an advertisement for the store - sort of tricky because who wants to buy luxury when under house arrest (not quite true but nearly). Although I included it before, I am removing it from this post as I had to rewrite it (as several people at the store did not think it optimistic enough.) 

Please forgive me if I repeat myself but I don't want to take the time to check back on past posts. I used to spend hours writing a blog but no longer. There is not enough hours in the day to do what I want to do so I'm treating this venue as a letter to friends who will understand and love me anyway. Seriously, I just want to have fun. And please stop reading if a post bores you. It's just me putting out all and sundry for selfish reasons - to write and find my voice again. (And yes, my courage.)

I received the most wonderful gift - a year's subscription  to MasterClass where I can learn a number of skills from the masters of those particular fields. (This eats into my day too but a class is around 10 to 20 minutes and they are fun.) For a number of days, I've been joining Margaret Atwood in her Creative Writing Class. She appears a little nervous facing the camera. At first, I found her dry but the more classes I take, the more I find her endearing. I have gone back and listened to her class on POV several times. 

POV is a big trouble maker for me. When I came out of hiding and took the first 17 pages of my novel to Dublin to my first ever writing workshop, I was terrified. The professor running the program announced at the first get-together that my work would be critiqued first. I was beyond scared. What if my fellow writers tore it to shreds? I might never write again. This reminds me of an audition for a high school musical. I tried out for the lead female singer and, of course, didn't get it as I cannot carry a tune. What if similarly I am told I cannot write? 

I dragged myself to the first day of workshopping, thinking my heart might fly out of my chest and burst, it was racing so quickly. I found a chair at the round table and sat, head down as I didn't dare look anyone in the eye. Although my story was written in 3rd person, I was certain that everyone in that room knew it was about me  
The professor (JMcC) welcomed us and asked what is the first thing that one asks when critiquing someone else's work. Silence. You ask if it is literate. Is Yvonne's story literate? Silence.

I thought I was going to die.

After what seemed to be forever, he answered his own question: Yes. (This gave me some relief.) For the next two hours, each writer in the class, told what they thought of my work - the strong points and the weak ones. The strong out-weighted the weak. I was truly surprised at what some thought of the main character - a repressed Roman Catholic - and how several found all kinds of biblical references. My work had more depth than I had thought. (I didn't tell them that none of the references were intentional, that the main character was me and I was not RC.) After the class, McC asked to have a word with me. He said that he didn't often suggest this but he thought my story would be stronger if written in first person. He also said - something he noted that he seldom did - that he would like me to stay in touch as he wanted to see where I went with the story. I skipped away in a cloud of happiness.

I went home and changed all the "she"s to "I"s but my psyche didn't like it nor did the two male characters of the story. I tried and tried and tried to finish it. Finally I locked it in my filing cabinet, returning once in a while to continue but without success.

Recently when I was sorting through my filing drawers, deciding what to keep and what to shred, I read my original Dublin manuscript. I read over all the summaries that the prof and other writers wrote at the end (except for the prof's, I kept only the final page from the others). I questioned myself, wasn't it worth one more try? 

Every morning I have been reading Elizabeth Gilbert's "Big Magic" and I'm loving it. Gilbert doesn't much hold with the long suffering artist. She writes that creative work should be fun, a delight - the subject matter can be serious - but still the hours working should not be full of angst. Life is too short. 

So I have given myself two weeks to see if I can have fun with it or I will force myself to shred every failed attempt, journal, and letter that has anything to do with it. I vowed that I would spend two hours a day doing this. (I've been spending around four.) The first few days were hard going. I paced a lot, thinking that I might as well start shredding.

And then I listened and re-listened to Atwood's POV lecture. She spoke of several of her novels that were written in one person and when she couldn't make it work, she'd switch to another. This idea lingered with me for a day and then it took hold. There is no harm in trying. And really truly what does it matter what person it's in as long as I'm enjoying myself. 

The next day, I started switching back from first to third and I smiled. Much easier. But then I hit a snag - a few pages did not want to be converted. I left them and continued. By the next morning, I had a crazy thought: why not just leave them? I can insert them somehow - perhaps in italics - perhaps at the beginning of a chapter. And then I had another irreverent thought - what does it matter? Who am I writing for? I don't even know how to write a novel. I am an avid reader - often of crap - so I must know something. 

I have a week left to decide to continue or to shred. I just want to have fun. 

Yutori

Yutori has various meanings. It refers to allowance in terms of time and space, to allow the mind to float freely, or drift with the currents of thought. 

This morning I awoke with so many ideas to write about that I didn't know where to begin. It's as if I have been stagnant for so long, I will have to run a marathon to catch up with myself.

Why am I being bombarded with ideas at this point in time? Has the pandemic slowed me down, given me time to listen? I am reading Elizabeth Gilbert's "Big Magic" and did watch her TED talk on "Your Elusive Creative Genius" and, if I am to believe her, ideas are creative spirits (independent of a particular person) that float around the universe searching for a home.  They land on this poet, writer, artist, or musician seeing if he or she is receptive. If they are not welcomed, they find another.

As proof, Gilbert tells about meeting Ann Pachett at a library meeting and after Pachett spoke, Gilbert was so excited by her words that she went to her and told Pachett she loved her (Gilbert is very effervescent). Pachett looked Gilbert in the eye, paused, and then with both hands holding Gilbert's face said that she loved her too. Their friendship grew through letter writing, sent through the post office not the computer. After several years, they met in person again and spoke of their writing. Gilbert explained that she had started a novel, was interrupted, and when she returned to work on it, found herself no longer inspired so she had to let it go. Ann said she was very excited about her new novel but insisted that Gilbert speak first about the novel she had to let go.

Now here is the curious part. Gilbert told the location of her novel, the plot and described the main characters. Pachett just stared at her until Gilbert asked her to describe her new book. In practically the same words as Gilbert used, Pachett described the same location, plot and characters. It's as if the idea, when it thought Gilbert was taking too long, flew away and gave it to Pachett.

I love this idea of inspiration coming from an outside source. It reminds me of 1990 when I was living in France and I had begun letter writing - potent strong letters - and one day, while I was vacuuming mindlessly,  an idea hit me and I stopped the vacuum and grabbed pen and paper and wrote and wrote and wrote a perfect story. I did not pause to think, my hand kept moving wanting to catch every word and every sentence. I felt as if the story was being dictated. A similar thing happened early in my life when I was rehearsing for a dance competition. I remember beginning the dance and then it was over. My teacher and fellow students just stared at me and then applauded madly. I have no idea who was dancing but it wasn't me.

So I believe Gilbert - inspiration comes from something beyond ourselves and we simply have to work and if we are lucky, we'll receive help. Although I'm sad about the years that I haven't written, I cannot say that they've been wasted. I've done a lot of other things and though those things don't include making money, I have lived a rich life. This reminds me of Stella Bowen, an Australian writer or was she a painter? In "Stravinsky's Lunch" Drusilla Modjeska outlines the lives of three Australian artists and in her section about Bowen, she describes how Bowen gave up a lot for love. She was married to Ford Madox Ford whose career took precedence over hers.

I really must read this book again as I have forgotten so much but what I do remember is that Bowen felt that conversation was as important to her life as art. (Oh dear, I must refer to the book as I want to make sure that I am remembering this point correctly. Yes!) In the last two sentences of the section about Bowen, Modjeska writes: If her life teaches us anything, it is that more than one thing matters, and maybe in the end it is the conversations we have - both in love and in art - that will come trailing behind us through those pearly gates. I like to think so.

I have gone off on a tangent: I think I am reassuring myself that's it's alright that I took years off from my writing. I have not missed out on a wealth of conversations. You are fine, I tell myself. It's never too late. I pause here. I learned early that thinking well of oneself is a bad thing. I must be humble. I must not be self-centred. A friend/teacher/mentor questioned this belief: who else can we be centred around if not ourselves? This does not mean we are selfish. It means that we are grounded and in control of our life. If I am a useless piece of nothing, I have no story, nothing of value to impart. I do not believe this.

I am full of roving thoughts. I admire Truitt in her journals - her compilation of roving thoughts become an ode to living and loving and aging. Like her, I would like to make my children lives easier and I try in simple ways but I know in my heart that they will have to face whatever by themselves. They are not me. I am not them. I do not presume that I know better than they simply because I have lived longer. I think of Jung saying something to the effect that a child springs from the parent and lives their unlived life. If this is so, I hope that I have not made life too burdensome for them.

Do not read me!

I assure you that you do not have to read me. I won't know. At this point, I'm sharing myself for myself - for the purpose of clearing my full files. Too much stuff has not seen the light of day. This "stuff" is most likely boring. It may be out of date. Surely the world must have moved on since I wrote these "ditties" (for lack of a better word)?  I fear that I have not and to do so, I have to throw it all out here for better or worse. I will not pussyfoot around anymore. I will not worry about cliches or phrases or words that don't please me. "Out you go, out of my closet, out of my life."

That felt good.

You see I am preparing for death. Hopefully later than sooner but Fanny's dying taught me that it can happen when you least expect it. I want to clear my office so whoever has to get rid of my souvenirs will have an easy job. I also want time to create some new stuff and furthermore, I want to have fun doing it.

This morning, I found "Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation" on our cookbook shelf. I read the first poem and smiled. Someone in the heavens must have known that I need it at this very moment:

"When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world."

--Mary Oliver

Past Desire

As I continue to sort through my filing cabinet, I am finding some pretty good stuff that I wrote years ago that has never seen the light of day. I have told few people that I've returned to blogging and I only know two who are keeping up with me. This is a warning: I hope to become more and more outrageous. Once upon a time I said that I wanted to become a writer who wrote what others were afraid to say. I wasn't brave enough or perhaps it was too lofty an ideal. Now that my time is running out, my reticence is pissing me off.

Way back in 1994 I wrote a paper about Mary Meigs and Maxine Hong Kingston and how they were silenced by their mothers. (It was a damn good paper and my professor gave it a high A and said that I should have it published. Did I? No!)  I included a quote from Adrienne Rich noting that it has never been easy for women to assert her rights: "If we have come to a point when women can stop being haunted, not only by convention and propriety, but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves, then it is an extraordinary moment for the woman writer - and reader."

I am making excuses for myself. No more!

While going through my files I found "Desire". I wrote this short piece when I was going through my Anais Nin phase and after a friend told me that she was leaving her husband. He no longer desired her. The only sexual pleasure she received was when she pleasured herself. I was embarrassed by her candour. I wrote this for her:

Desire

She desires her husband often. He desires her seldom. Sometimes she thinks his lack of want is because she is no longer firm and ripe like the cantaloupe he eats for breakfast. He tells her this is not so. Men of a certain age have difficulty becoming aroused. It's not lack of erection that bothers her most: it's his lack of wanting her.

She slips off one spaghetti strap of her thin nightgown and exposes a breast. She admires its softness and strokes the nipple until it hardens. She imagines lending him her eyes so he can admire it too. She slips the other strap down, pulls both arms out and lets the gown drop to her feet. She knows if she asked him, if she phrased it affirmatively - "Do you find my breasts beautiful?" - he would say "yes" but she doesn't want to ask. She wants him to tell her, without prompting, that her body pleases him. 

She wishes to write a love story, a lust story, describing her body being aroused per her instructions. She would tell him to move slowly, pause often so she could record his moves, her arousal. When he strokes her thighs, nibbles at her rose petals, she would write to the tune of his tongue. Would he allow this or refuse to share her with the page? 

Her eyes move down to her soft belly, sunken navel. She caresses the marshmallow surface that expanded beyond belief with each of her children, remembering the dark line running down her middle, dividing it into perfect halves as if to remind her that she shares herself with another. 

She looks beyond her belly to the dark forest hiding her petals and private opening, where more often than not, she is the one doing the exploring. She would like to tell him of the treasures to be found there. 

At night in the dark, she watches him step out of his clothes, abandoning them at the foot of the bed, climbing into the queen-size bed and tucking the covers around his body, not seeing the woman who is watching, waiting for his embrace. Eventually, she too drifts off to sleep to dream...

I see that this is incomplete. I imagine that I didn't know where to take it but now a little devil in me wants to end it with Erica Jong's "to dream of a zipless fuck".

In retrospect, I think my friend too passive. Too many women wait for men to take the lead. I would like to be (or am I already?) a virgin in the ancient sense of the word, a woman who is one in herself like the woman in Gauguin's Noa Noa who belongs to no man, who seeks pleasure for herself, and does not care what others think of her.

Wife and Whore

I wrote this in 2005 for a creative writing assignment at university. I did send it out to a literary contest but I retitled it and called it "Guilty Pleasures". Stupidly, I sent it in as "Quilty Pleasures". When I noticed my error, I was mortified and doubted the judges read beyond the title. My professor gave "my story" top marks. (I am such an idiot.) (I would so like to change a word here and there but I won't.)

Around six years after I completed my degree in Creative Writing, I went to an event at the university and ran into several writers who had been in the program with me. One asked how my writing was coming along. "It's not," I replied. "Oh no, you are such a good writer. I thought you'd be famous by now!"


I never thought I was good enough. 

Wife and Whore or Guilty Pleasures

The graceless maiden plunked two cups of lukewarm coffee on the plastic tablecloth.  She serves my friend and me every other Saturday morning, in the booth by the window,  and though we have been coming to the diner for over two years, I have yet to see our multi-pierced waitress smile.  Without a word, she slid back to the counter and my friend noted that we hold little interest for the young.  By all appearances, we are two middle-aged housewives indulging in the ancient activity that sets social norms.

At first, we did gossip about a fellow journalist who had left her husband for a younger woman but, in the middle of one of my snide remarks, my friend leaned forward and, with an intensity I have seldom seen in her, began firing questions at me.

“Would you as a writer betray a confidence for the sake of a story?”

“No.” I said.

“What if what you are told is not labeled ‘confidential’?”

“I don’t understand.”

“What I’m asking is whether a writer can use, with integrity, all for a story unless the person or people involved specify that what is being said is secret?”

“You mean that anything I say to you now—idle chatter over coffee—might appear in a story?”

“Yes, unless you explicitly tell me that what you are saying is private. Listen.  I have to talk this through with someone.  Do you remember a couple of years back when I was given a grant to write in Italy?”

“Yes.”

“While I was there, I fell for an Italian writer.  He was at his summer home though, soon after, disappeared to his permanent residence in the north.  As we couldn’t get together to consummate our passion, we wrote each other long steamy letters.  Our affair was, in Henry Miller’s words. “a literary fuck-feast.”  His wife knew about the relationship, read our correspondence, and even wrote me herself.  When my husband arrived, I told him in detail about my infidelity and the letters.  Six months later, we returned to Canada.  The Italian and I continued to exchange letters for a while but without next-day-mail-delivery and the opportunity for an occasional fling, our passion died.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this before?” 

“I didn’t want it turned into a sordid little love affair.  And for all our liberal discussions, I wasn’t sure how you’d react.  Anyway, enough time has passed. I’ve decided to write the story of my fling using my journal entries and our letters. 

“My husband is furious.  “Don’t make public what should remain private,” he yells.  “You’ll destroy me and the family.”

“An understandable reaction,” I muttered.

“There’s more,” she said.  “I’m getting static from the other side of the ocean.  When I wrote and told my ex-lover about what I was planning to do, he became angrier than my husband.  ‘I do not want my letters translated,’ he shot back.  ‘I wrote for your eyes only. If your story is published, I’ll write my version.  And just for spite, I’ll throw in a photograph or two.’”

“Photographs?  Are you out of your mind?  Why would you expose yourself and these men to ridicule?  They’ll probably hate you.”

She shrugged her shoulders.  “I am a writer.  Have you read “Portrait of a Marriage” in which Vita Sackville-West describes her affair with Violet Trefusis? No?  Within the text, Vita says she needed to tell the ‘entire truth.’  She despised the hypocrisy of her world and hoped, at a latter date, others would understand her ‘type’.  After her death, her son found the manuscript in a locked briefcase. He published it because he felt it was ‘among the most moving pieces she ever wrote.’”

“She didn’t publish it herself, did she?” I replied.  “She didn’t embarrass her husband, family, and friends.”

“She lacked the guts.  I know it wouldn’t have been easy but she should have published.  She could have been more influential.  There are writers who don’t hide their sexuality.  Thanks to them attitudes change.”

“Give me an example.” I said, refusing to let my friend off easy.

“Jane Rule for one.  Several years ago, at the Writer’s Festival in Vancouver, she spoke openly about ‘coming out.’  She said she writes about both heterosexual and lesbian love because the two exist.  She believes males and females—Timothy Findlay sat beside her—should have the choice to follow their natural bent.  One young woman in the audience stood up and thanked her. It was an intensely emotional moment.  The woman said that she would never have been able to accept herself if it weren’t for Rule’s writing.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s one... “

“Erica Jong is another,” my friend snapped.  She doesn’t shy away from sex. In her book about Henry Miller, she said...”

My friend paused, opened a notebook, flipped through it and read: “But what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t take chances?  Hating Henry... was about my own fear of self-exposure... without taking chances one cannot tell the truth, and what use is it to be a writer if one doesn’t tell the truth?”

“Truth,” I snorted.  “Your truth will likely be sloughed off as yet another female confession.  Is it worth it?”

“Yes, damn it, yes.  Maxine Hong Kingston, in an interview, spoke about truth.”  She paused and flipped once more through her journal.  “Kingston said, ‘There’s a lot in society that says, don’t tell this secret, don’t tell that... What you have to tell is not beautiful, or unacceptable, or too crazy... It’s always important to tell the truth because if you don’t there are all kinds of terrible social and psychological consequences.’”

My friend’s voice was shaking.  She began talking faster.  “People are afraid of the truth.  They’re afraid if they show and tell all, they’ll be judged by family or friends or that big man in the sky to be abnormal.  What the hell is normal?  Can you think of one family that doesn’t own an eccentric or a black sheep?  Sometimes it takes several generations to reveal the wayward aunt, the two-timing father, or worse.   Then and only then, can they laugh at their relative’s antics.  What’s more, they are pleased that one of their own provided a good story. 

“Must someone die before we tell the truth?  We have to face the facts about family and self now.  If we don’t we’ll never be free from neurosis.”
 

I raised my hand.  “Stop.”  Needing time to digest all that was being said, I signaled the graceless maiden and ordered another coffee.  After she had poured and left, my friend continued. 

“If the truth be known, I’m glad that distance freed me from my family’s tight-ass attitude.  Mom and Dad would have had heart attacks if they’d known what I was up to in Italy.  My affair, even for me, was frightening.  But, damn it all, it was also fantastic.  For the first time in years, I liked myself.  What’s more, I came to know my strengths.  Words poured out of me.  And, after twenty years of marriage, my husband revealed himself.  He was magnificent.  When I first told him, he said that if I had done it, it must have been necessary.  Now the fool forgets the beauty of the story.  He doesn’t see his actions and reactions as indicative of his love and intelligence.  He worries what others will think. 

“For his sake, I’ve agreed to mask his identity and the Italian’s with different names and nationalities.  I’ve agreed to use a pseudonym.  Still, both of them are afraid of being recognized.  They do whatever they damn well please and then accuse me of being immoral.  Like most men, they say they want a wife in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom, but when I give them what they want, they yell, “Don’t tell. Don’t tell.”  Both think that I write for my own amusement at their expense.”

 “Hold on,” I interrupted.  “In a sense you do write for your own amusement.  You’re not completely selfless.”

“Okay, I’ll concede you that point.  A good story, even given the hard work, is a pleasure to write and see in print.  And this one, with all its wild sex, is sure to find a publisher.  Still I’m having a hell of a time getting it down.  Some of it is damn painful.  These men worry about their precious reputations while I’m bent on destroying mine.  Evelyn Conlon, an Irish writer, once said that when a man writes about lust and promiscuity, the reader assumes he is using his imagination; when a woman writes about the same, she is speaking from personal experience.

“Is it a sin to want experience?  I feel that I should apologize.  Ridiculous.  I will not let others dictate what I can or can’t write.  I will not let others edit my life.  Carolyn Heilbrun says that a woman’s usual fate in literature is marriage or death, the end.  I can’t live such fiction.  Nor write it.  What do I do to my children if I leave them thinking that everything was always rosy in their parents’ marriage?  What happens when they discover that their own marriages aren’t fairy tales?  Do I really do them a favour keeping my big mouth shut?”

“Perhaps not,” I snapped.  “But why advocate infidelity?  Do you think every woman should break from convention?  Should I go out and find a lover to add heat to my marriage?”

“No, no, no.  You sound like my husband.  He thinks I’m hot to brag about my ‘little affair.’  He sneeringly asks if I have nothing better to write about. Honestly, I don’t know what is more important than our love relationships.  I’m not saying, ‘Do as I do.’   Every story that’s written is not an incitement to action. I describe my pain and pleasure.  I didn’t go to Italy looking for an affair.  It happened. 

“You can’t deny that adultery exists.  So why can’t I write about the reality and not some flimsy fantasy like “The Bridges of Madison County?”  Or are you one of those people who believe that if you ignore something it will go away? Look around you.  In the last few years, how many of our friends’ marriages have fallen apart?  Stop judging.  That’s not what writing is all about.”

“You’re right, you’re right,” I muttered.  “But I was raised in a family where whatever happened between the family’s four walls was private.  Once when my parents were having a violent argument, my little sister called the police.  While I huddled in a corner shaking with fear, she had the nerve to act.  How I admired her.  Who knows what would have happened if she hadn’t?”

“I was brought up the same way.  ‘If you can’t say something nice about a person, don’t say anything.’  Can’t you see I’m scared shitless?  I’m going against the grain.  I must.  Time is passing.  Ever since I was little, I’ve been devouring books.  Writers have given me permission to accept my wayward thoughts.  They have shown me different ways of looking at the world.  I am filled with words.  Carl Jung said that we lead small lives if we keep to ourselves.  Well, I have this grandiose idea that it’s my turn to give.

“As far as I’m concerned, the greater betrayal is to stop talking, to stop telling the truth.  I’m terrified of sending my story out into the world but I’m more terrified not to.  I don’t want to become another statistic.  Tillie Olsen, in “Silences”, wrote that eleven out of twelve women writers are suppressed before they find their voice.  No matter what anyone says, I will tell my story.”

“You have guts, my friend,” I said.  “No sense. But you definitely have guts.”  I raised my coffee cup and saluted her.

I left my friend mulling over her coffee.  I hate to admit it but I envy her her passion.  I envy her idealism.  As I finish writing out our conversation, I fear that I am betraying her.  No.  She didn’t specify beforehand that the discussion was confidential.

"Happiness is a butterfly"

I have been doing a lot of thinking lately, and a lot of reading, and if I am to think about this time when I am housebound as a retreat (re Elizabeth Gilbert), I want to retreat, to take the time to sort myself and calm myself down. I am feeling so scattered and lost. Yet I am not unhappy.

I'm reading four books plus my old journals and my head is swimming but I'm catching glimpses of excitement. ... so let me try to make a straight path or slightly curved one and bring myself into focus.

On Facebook, Gilbert copied out a page from an old journal. Her instruction to herself for a free and happy life is simply "No outside validation" and "Gratitude for all things".  The whole page is a repeat of these two phrases.

I imagine that if one commits acts of kindness just for oneself and not applause this would make one feel good - an embrace to self. And if one was grateful for everything, including self, (especially self?) that would make you/me happier.

It used to be so easy to be happy.

When I think of my children when they were young and my grandsons now, I see that all were born with an abundant capacity for happiness. And every one is unique with a definite like or dislike for various activities, food, people - and was from day one. We, the adult, listen to the child and watch with fascination at what fascinates him or her. We allow the child full range unless whatever could injure the small precious human being.

Somehow, somewhere most become weighed down with responsibilities, doing what one thinks one should be doing and losing the exuberance and playfulness of the child. I remember Michael telling me about an assignment in school. He was to write about what he valued most and, though I cannot remember the response, he wrote "fun". I was impressed. (Once, in my teens I told my mother that I wanted to have fun and she said, "Yvonne, life is not supposed to be fun.")

In his teens, Michael begged for an Apple computer because he wanted to create animations. He said if he could have this, do this, he'd be the happiest guy in the world. Rob and I bought him his computer.

As far as I know, he no longer creates animation. I imagine him saying that he has to make a living to support his family. He has creative work and extraordinary talent but it is not animation. My question, at this moment, is does he regret not following his youthful dream?

The reason I'm thinking this is because of a friend's request for poetry and I look at my book shelf and alight on Roger Housden's "Ten Poems to Change Your Life" in which he includes "Love after Love" by Derek Walcott.

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. 

I have read several interpretations of this poem. Huston suggests that Walcott is giving us hope, that at some point in our lives we will - through effort or by chance - recognize the self we were born with in all its uniqueness.

Another review states that Walcott wrote this poem after a relationship failed. "From the outset the suggestion is that the individual will start to acknowledge an inner self," he writes and "What has been a split psyche can become whole again."

For me, it's a kind of permission to listen to my inner self - perhaps to recognize what Housden calls "the particular energetic response to life" that I had from my beginning.

"Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." -  Nathaniel Hawthorne