Is there such a thing as writer's remorse?

 We've all heard of buyer's remorse, that condition of buying something, often on a whim, then questioning or regretting the cost, action, or the item. I have personal experience with that but won't revisit those events at this time. 

I also admit that my mouth has gotten ahead of my brain at times and I've said things that later I wished I'd phrased differently or not said at all. Once words leave our mouths they cannot be unsaid. But what if the words were unspoken, but written? Oh, the implications! Yes. on at least one occasion I've written something in a letter, and when said letter slid through the slot at the post office it was too late to change my mind about the contents. What if the words were not in a letter, but in a published work?

As I mentioned in my last blog, I've been working on a cozy mystery that I started ten or so years ago - that I unearthed it and began the task of editing it again. I soon found editing to be not only tedious but seemingly an unending process. Checking for spelling, word usage, and grammatical errors can be one thing, polishing the story another. Then there was the decision to search for an agent and publisher or self-publish. My decision to self-publish may be what triggered my possible writer's remorse.

Had I decided to seek an agent and publisher there would have been someone not only to decide if the story were worth publishing but also to assist me in making possible changes. In choosing to self -publish I did not have that guidance from the pros. However, I did not do this entirely alone. I had help in formatting and cover production, for which I am very thankful, but they could only work with what I provided. Then came the next part: uploading it to KDP, ordering proof copies (which showed that I had errors to correct) making changes, and ordering more proof copies, which I am awaiting as I write this. So there could be more problems before this thing is actually published, and several chances to back out of the whole thing.  

But here I go, doing it anyway. It seems important to hold the actual book in my hand or see it on my e-reader. Perhaps this is a holdover from my school days when deadlines had to be met for turning in term papers or finishing a project. But self-doubt has reared its ugly head, whispering to me in the wee hours, "Are you sure this isn't going to be an embarrassment that you brought it to the light of day? Should you have just left it in the drawer and chalked it up to just writing practice rather than publishing it?"  

One thing I can say is that it wouldn't be the first time I've been embarrassed over something and that I usually managed to move forward afterward. So I'm giving it a go. Good, bad, or in-between, I'm putting it out there - soon I hope. Let the remorse fall where it may. 

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda

  

 I’m sorry about neglecting this blog for so long. My excuse? There isn’t any good one, but there are some. Yes, I did go through a major move. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to hire a moving company that packs everything; I didn’t hire a moving company at all. I’d carted most anything that would fit in my small SUV to my new condo in south Alabama during my many trips back and forth. After all, I planned to keep both places for a few years, using the condo as a get-away place until I decided to make Fairhope my permanent home.  

My definition of insanity is putting my house on the market before I was ready to see if there was any interest in the property, thinking it would take months to sell. It sold the first day it was listed. And the buyers insisted on closing in precisely one month. I went into a tailspin. A cousin was pressed into service, helping me transport multiple loads of treasures to any place that would take them. She and a friend also helped me pack, pack, and pack some more. As the deadline approached for closing and the chips were down, there was nothing to do but hire a rental truck and driver to take everything else from the house (and there was way more than any of us thought) to a rental storage unit in my new town. The driver transported it all on the first Saturday of March 2020. Does that date ring a bell? Yes, it was about a week before Covid became an issue, and we all went into “stay at home” mode. 

It should have been an easy decision to get my condo organized, unpack all that was there, or perhaps go to the storage unit to go through things there and make more complicated decisions on what to do with all the extra stuff. Shoulda, coulda, woulda, or whatever that saying is. But none of that happened. I went into Covid mentality of “it can wait until tomorrow since I can’t go anywhere anyway,” so I didn’t take care of any of that. 

Fellow writing friends all said it might be a good time to write a lot. But I found that very few did. Although, in my defense, I did read. A lot. My library card was gold because I could download e-books without venturing from the sofa. Since my brain was more or less addled, I often selected cozy mysteries because they were a faster read than some of the heavier non-fiction. I fell in love with the characters in the cozies, just as I had some years ago, to the extent that I’d attempted to write one myself. As things began to lift, I finally pulled out that old manuscript determined to clean it up and publish it. 

I took a workshop, “How to Publish Your Novel for $100.00,” at the senior center. After all, I’d already done most of the work, right? Wrong. Editing is one of the most tedious jobs in the world. But I had to do the preliminary work before turning it over to someone else to do the final edit. 

Covid exposure caught up with me. I have not had it, but my friend tested positive, and I’d been around him several days that week, having dinner together, riding in the same car, and sitting together talking at my house. I immediately went into self-quarantine and canceled all upcoming social events. This time I decided to use the time at home for something other than sitting on the sofa. I’m happy to report that the book is being formatted and will be ready to download for publishing soon! I hope I’ll let you know soon – before the end of summer because it might be a good read for your trip to the beach.    

 

Life Lessons Learned When Disassembling a Daybed

1. Reconsider ever buying any piece of furniture that has to be assembled.

2. Should you weaken and buy such an item and manage to successfully put it together, for goodness sakes, keep the assembly instructions and the allen wrench that came with it. Trust me, when you decide to take it apart fourteen years later you will not remember the sequence, nor do you know what you did with said allen wrench. By the way, these are also called hex wrenches - with good reason. And I don't mean because the ends are hexagonal.

3. One of the most useful phrases to remember when getting anything apart is "righty tighty, lefty loosey." Keep repeating it to yourself over and over, because the whole thing is so trying that after a while your brain no longer functions without this reminder. 

4. Every woman needs a basic tool kit if she is crazy enough to try to do things herself, especially of she is over seventy-five. Through the decades, your fingers won't be as strong and the screws, bolts, etc. will be much harder to turn, so some locking pliers are essential to turn the little hex wrenches. Who designs a tool with such a short handle anyway? 

5. Have a plastic baggie handy for all the little washers, screws, and bolts. If some of them are small, it might be a good idea to put a piece of white paper under where you are working because if some of the things drop, finding them in the carpet - or where they bounce to on hard surfaces - can be an added aggravation.

6. You probably won't remember if you assembled the piece by yourself when it was new or not, but trying to figure out how to hold sections as it comes apart by yourself can be dangerous, especially when something is heavy. I narrowly missed an injury when a section fell and almost got my foot - the same foot I've broken twice in the past. So my advice is: enlist help. Or better yet, get someone to do all the disassembly.

7. Remember item #1? If you are smart enough to take my advice listed there, you won't need to know any of the rest of it. 

P.S. It used to annoy me to no end that some girls or women played the "helpless" routine. Now I wonder, "why didn't I take lessons from them." 

Jubilee?

 

August 21, 2020, Morning by Mobile Bay

 People who know me well are aware that there are two things that I don’t do well: mornings and exercise. But it is perhaps possible to change my attitude toward each. How? Recently I have been meeting my friend at the pool at his condo at eight o’clock (yes, in the morning, believe it or not.) Like most of us, we’re bored by our self-quarantine, safer at home status. No events at the museum, no writers’ meetings, no concerts, no dinners with friends – you know what I mean.

 We began meeting to watch the sunset across the bay, seated outside near the pool, or at the pier. Sometimes only two of us, at other times, from four to six others, all outside, socially distanced. When the pool opened, that gave another option to see each other and get some exercise since the fitness center closed in March. Since neither of us are sun worshipers we meet when the pool is still shaded and we have it to ourselves. I stretch, walk in the pool, and do some exercises that I remember from water aerobics class for about 45 minutes. We are both through by the time another person arrives around nine.

 The pool overlooks a stretch of the bay with Mobile in the distance. Every day the sky and clouds are different; the water changes, and as a bonus, there are dragonflies swarming in the adjoining grassy area. Often there are gulls, pelicans, and one or more herons to entertain us. From time to time, a large tanker or cargo ship/barge is coming in to or leaving from the port of Mobile.

Today as I approached the pool, I saw a large number of gulls floating in the water and an equally large number of them sitting on the pier of the neighboring boathouse. I walked closer to the see if I could tell what something else was in the water, thinking it might be some vegetation that had floated nearer the shore. But it was moving in an unusual manner, and there were other swirls changing the surface of the water. Gradually I realized that we were having what is known as a jubilee, or at least a small one. A jubilee happens when the wind currents, water temperature, and the oxygen level in the water bring shrimp, crabs, eels, and fishes of various kinds closer to the surface of the water and the shore in their attempt to get more oxygen. Where water meets land some of them beach themselves in some places, and one only has to bring a bucket to pick them up; or a gig, net, or other equipment to harvest them in shallow water. Because of the concrete sea wall, nothing was landing onshore where we were, but crabs had climbed up on the posts in the water left from destroyed piers. The swirls were fishes of various kinds and sizes. Some almost as tiny as tadpoles, then minnow size, on up to fish as long as my outstretched hand. All were swimming in swirling clusters, thrusting their mouths above the surface of the water in search of oxygen laden air.

 At nearly nine o’clock we observed a man tossing in a net from a nearby pier. He said he’d caught mullet, shrimp, and crabs. I walked over to another section of the seawall where the water is shallow at the very edge, with rocks breaking some of it up into smaller pools. I didn’t see the small stingray my friend had seen earlier, but saw an elongated fish called a needlefish, and a mass of very tiny catfish smaller than my little finger. Although there had been shrimp in and around the rocks, I could not see them.

 The gulls sitting on the pier or floating lazily in the water had already had a feast and were no longer feeding. As we watched, the clusters of fish seemed to retreat to deeper water or back out into the bay. From what I’ve heard or read, jubilees don’t occur that often, and even if those watching for them check water temperatures, et cetera during the time of year and places where they tend to happen, they are not easy to predict. Often they begin after midnight and are over by the time most of us wake up in the morning. So it was indeed a surprise to see this one today.

 Words fail me when I try to describe the sunsets, the changes in appearance and surface of the water, the smell or feel of the air around the bay. Nor can I adequately express why I love it so. Who knows? Maybe I’ll even come to love mornings.  

As Welcome as the Flowers

Do you ever have a song pop into your head and get stuck there? Sometimes last week “Mockingbird Hill” came to me from out of the blue. It had been years, maybe even decades since I’d heard the song, yet I remembered most of the tune, and fragments of the lyrics, but only fragments. I thought about looking up who sang it, and perhaps the lyrics that I couldn’t remember, but hadn’t gotten around to it when I heard the news of the horrible shooting at the synagogue in Pittsburg. There are not words to express all that I felt upon hearing the news. I still cannot find a way to say something about it, yet I feel compelled to do so, of how it brought back memories of when I felt a similar sadness.  

            I grew up in a small town in Alabama, and knew only one Jew, the husband of a dear family friend, so dear that I always called them Aunt Grace and Uncle Leonard. When I was a teenager we moved to Montgomery. In the large high school that I attended I made many new friends, some of them Jewish. One morning, as I walked down the walkway to the school I was handed a pamphlet, which I stuck in my books without looking at it. When I took my seat in homeroom, I realized that the girl in front of me was crying. Our teacher asked if any of us had also gotten the pamphlet, then walked up and down the rows collecting them before most of us could read them. She tore the papers as she disposed of them saying “I’ll not have such anti-Semetic trash in this room.” It was my first exposure to anything of that kind. Why would someone hate anyone because they were Jewish? It made no sense to me, but I knew this was very hurtful to my friend in front of me, in a way I couldn’t imagine.

            In 2008 a fatal shooting occurred in a Tennessee church that I had visited. Until then I had never been concerned about my safety. In my home church, I sat near the back, across from the doors leading into the sanctuary. For many months following the shooting, when someone unknown to me entered those doors, I became anxious, even fearful at times. Gradually that fear went away, but hearing the recent news has been unsettling. Even more disturbing has been the suggestion that we need armed guards at the places where we worship, our sacred spaces. If we are not safe there, where?

            I was thinking about all this when the song popped into my head again Sunday afternoon. The fragment of the lyric that I hadn’t remembered until then: "…there’s peace and good will. You’re welcome as the flowers on Mockingbird Hill.”

            Would that it could be so – that we could make our country a place of peace and good will where people are welcome, as welcome as the flowers on Mockingbird Hill.

Lament for a Store

I hadn’t expected my eyes to fill with tears or to choke up, almost unable to express my thanks to the person behind the pharmacy counter. Such sadness was unanticipated, yet there it was.

            I don’t remember exactly when or where I met the DeBortoli family. But it was about forty-four years ago around the swimming pool at the South YMCA where our young sons proudly showed off their skills learned in the Tadpole swimming lessons. It wasn’t long before I learned that Jim Debortoli was the pharmacist at a neighborhood pharmacy. Not only because of the friendship, but also because he offered something special: free delivery of prescriptions, I immediately transferred our business there. I usually went to the store, but after sitting through a doctor’s appointment with a sick child, it was a wonderful to be able to take said sick child home, knowing the medication called in by the doctor would arrive at my door shortly.

            Over the years the name of the store changed as Jim’s independent store was bought by larger drug stores. The store even changed location within the same small shopping center at some point. But the one constant was that our friend Jim remained the pharmacist, the smiling face behind the counter. Others joined him as the business grew, and I came to know many of them, especially after Jim’s untimely death several years ago. But to me it was always Jim’s store.

            In recent months, the pharmacy department was bought by Walgreen’s. The transition seemed to go smoothly. I still went to the same counter where I was waited on by the same staff. Today that all changed. I’d received the letter welcoming me to Walgreen’s, explaining the transfer of my records, et cetera, so I knew that as of today I would no longer go to Rite-Aid because it was also closing, but to Walgreen’s in a different location.

            What now? What happens to our neighborhood shopping center now that one of the main anchors is closing? I’ll adjust. I’ll drive a little farther away from my house. I don’t have a choice. Some might say “It’s just a store.” But to those of us who’ve been going there for over forty years it wasn’t just a store.  

            The Walgreen's pharmacist at the new location welcomed me today and explained the things I would need to do to be fully registered in their system. I’m sure the service there will be fine, and I’ll get to know her, and if I hadn’t gotten so emotional I might have been able to tell her that I was crying over the loss of a relationship that’s lasted for over half of my life. Such things, even if “just a store” are precious and are mourned for at their passing.

Robert Kennedy

On November 22, 2013 I posted something in connection with remembering the death of John Kennedy. It also contained the following:

"As powerful as that memory remains, it was the news of the death of Robert Kennedy that has the most connection for me. My grandmother was visiting, and the two of us were watching television together when the news broke. She gasped and said, "Oh, poor Ethel, with all those children." To understand fully, you need to know that my mother, the eldest of five children, was only eight years old when her father was killed. When a former employee of her father came to the door, she and her brothers clustered around Grandmother and heard her tell the visitor when my grandfather would return from an appointment. The man left, but walked only a short distance from the house, where he waited out of sight until my grandfather returned. He shot him at close range. My grandmother never mentioned how difficult it must have been for her, not only lose the love of her life, but to rear five children in a depression era world. In her softly spoken "Oh, poor Ethel with all those children" she revealed perhaps more than she realized. Her expressed empathy came from an understanding that most of us will never understand."

Hearing of the events planned earlier this week  to commemorate the anniversary of Robert Kennedy's death reminded me of my earlier post, but mostly of that hour or so with grandmother. Like many, we were glued to the television upon hearing the news.  Grandmother's life was very different from that of Ethel Kennedy. She was never in the spotlight, nor did she have the same financial resources. In almost every way they had nothing in common, yet in that awful moment of hearing the news on television, my grandmother felt an instant connection to Mrs. Kennedy. 

Grandmother died four years later, and we never again talked about hearing the news that day or about the day my grandfather was murdered. Now I wish I had asked her more about her life, but even if I had, she probably wouldn't have talked about the bad parts. She was truly a remarkable woman in her own quiet way. She lived the rest of her life in the same house, alone once her children moved away after they finished college or married. 

 On that day as we watched the news, it didn't occur to me that my grandfather had been killed almost forty-four years earlier. Realizing it now makes Grandmother's quiet utterance seem more remarkable. The time that had elapsed vanished, her reaction was instant as she remembered what had happened to her and what the years ahead might hold for Mrs. Kennedy.

But now, fifty years later, I can still hear her voice in my head, as clearly as if she were seated next to me on the sofa as she was that day. As I remember her sympathetic expression and all the unspoken things it revealed, I marvel once again at the courage with which she lived.