The sex parts are coming, the sex parts are coming

...soon.

No worries there. I’m trying to figure out how to put a You-Tube thingy on here. Well, actually, I’ve emailed BT and asked him if HE could tell me how to put a You-Tube thingy on here, because the instructions on Blogger give me no real and useful information (although they do give me one helluva fine headache).

Once I (BT) get(s) the You-Tube thing down, I’ll be ready to roll. So to speak.

And – Warning Warning Warning – there will be some nasty parts. I’m just saying -
I gotta be me.

Also, I found the picture I was trying to find for my little meme on BT's blog - about the long and good weekend in Dallas, from the 1970s. I'm the girl in the foreground, with her face turned away from the camera. The one with the lovely rainbow belt on. The one who spent most of the (purported) religious retreat weekend partying on a parked tour bus. (P.S. Those rainbow belts were back in style a few years ago, you know. My kids called them retro. Lovely.)

Damn. I had to hit 'edit post' - because I just looked at this picture again, and realized that one of the guys from Savannah, from the meme story on BT's (I'm not retelling the whole thing here) is IN this picture. The tall guy with the bushy brown hair and the orange-yellow T-shirt- standing in the back of the picture. He had some eyes on him that you wouldn't believe. I guess he still does. Mmmmm mmmm good.



Here's BT's blog address:
http://bloglesstroll.blogspot.com/. If you've never been to see him before,and you have even one tiny iota of a funny bone inside your precious body - well then, I'd say you're missing out.

Reading...

Why aren't kids readers any more?

Well – some still are.

When my girls were little girls, I read to them, and I mean I read to them a lot. It started with the board books and Pat the Bunny and Goodnight Moon and Brown Bear, Brown Bear and the singsong sillies of Dr. Seuss. My older daughter had One Fish, Two Fish memorized when she was two, and we’d laugh as we read along, her sitting in my lap in the rocker, with me reading the first part of a sentence, and her finishing it off, smiling and proud. She loved receiving books as gifts - especially big books.



As she grew older, we went to the library together and I let her choose her own books in the children’s section. Some were crap. Some weren’t. But I let her choose. And she watched me looking over my choices, and I’d tell her why I chose what I chose – how much I loved this or that author, and why, and maybe where they were from, if I knew, and why what they wrote mattered to me. And I’d tell it like a story.

My second daughter had the same experience, but doubled, as she watched her sister choosing books and reading them.

And I told my girls how much I loved books, right on down to how they smelled. And we’d open books and smell the pages together. And I told them the pages were a kind of magic, because when you opened up a book and began to read what was inside, you were opening up a new place to go and be inside of, and when you came back out again, there you were, right there in your snuggly chair, and wasn’t that amazing? They loved that – the magic of it. They read a lot.

When my second little one, Blondie, grew, and she came to about the age of five or six, she wanted to collect Sky Dancer books – commercial crappola, in my opinion, riding the wave of popularity of this cartoon show that was popular for a few years –but the books were colorful and magical looking, all pink and purple and sparkly, so we had a weekly ritual of driving a mile or so to our Barnes & Noble and looking at the display rack to pick a new one out, and when there wasn’t one, we talked to the ‘book lady’ and she ordered one for Blondie. Blondie loved that. And I never said her choice was bad – I said wasn’t it wonderful to go to the bookstore and come out with books to keep in her collection? Because there was always more than one book carried out the Barnes door in her little bag.

All of this happened just before the tipping point of the onslaught tidal wave of cells and laptops and MP3s and Game Things and on and on and on.

I didn’t realize until after people started talking so much about the death of reading, that the death of the singular pleasure of holding onto the pages of and reading a book could ever occur.

In my family, reading is like breathing. And I think it’s because of the magic world, the separate world, the girls learned they held in their hands when what they held in their hands was a book. They have all the gadgets, but still they keep reading.

I had some time to breathe freely one day, and in my newly breezy brain walked a memory of a trip my father and I took to the library when I was little. And how we sat together in lawn chairs in the back yard later on when we arrived home, him reading his book, me reading mine, sipping our iced teas under the shade of our gnarly never-pruned mulberry tree, each in our own held and separate world, yet still together. He taught me about the magic of reading. That it was never a chore holding on to the pages. That it was, instead, a tactile magic traveling. In a kind of a generational ceremony, what I’d done was pass the magic on.

I’m no perfect parent, that’s for sure. I’ve made mistakes and I’ve taken missteps, just like anybody does that’s doing a long, hard slog of a job that sometimes seems never-ending. Sometimes you get tired. Sometimes you screw up. Sometimes, you’re just wrong.

But I’m so relieved that, on the list of good things I managed to do, I passed this good magic on to my girls, because I think it matters.

How about you? What do you think? Are physical books gonna stick around, pages and all? Does it matter?

Ready?

Hi you all,

With a lot of help, and I mean a LOT of help, from Blogless, I’ve got this blog thing going.

I swore I wouldn’t do this until I’d finished the editing of my novel. Looks like that plan worked out really well.

BT said I wouldn’t make it past mid-May until I started blogging. Maybe he hexed me with that little nugget. Maybe I just wanted to anyway, and that comment of his was my good excuse. Anyway, here we go. Hope you guys have fun with it.

Most of this sat on my blog-that-wasn’t-a-blog for a while. (I used to change my avatar almost every week and change my “About Me” as a way to sort of blog. Then, sometimes, I’d copy and paste into my quasi-blog.) I added a little at the end…

Saturday, November 24, 2007

My husband, who isn't remotely a pilgrimage kind of person, (unless there's a pub within shouting distance), opted for marital harmony and drove me on my pilgrimage to see Dylan Thomas's writing shed in Laugharne, Wales.

This was a major feat for him. He’d tried desperately the year before to rush past a little marker of a sign along a back road in England and keep me talking so I wouldn't see that the sign said "origin of the Thames”. WHAT? I'd shouted. You don't wanna see the f----in' origin of the f----in' Thames? He'd pulled the car over with a sigh, leaned against the side of the car with his nose upturned in a way I've only ever seen a British man accomplish, and said, "It's a bloody stream, Rob. A bloody stream. A trickle." Well, that was just the point, I thought - and I wanted to find the 'bubbling up from the ground point', and I could have - if only there'd been a pub close enough for my husband to hang out in while I went on my history/geography trek. But no. No pubs. And it was less than a mile away.

But there was a nice dark pub close by in Laugharne, so I was able to wander down this road and see the shed I'd come to see. I stood for a while, drinking it in. That seemed appropriate.




Then it started drizzling and I walked back up the road and into the pub and met up with my husband and a friend of ours who’d driven over to spend the day with us, a big-boned lanky redheaded guy with a long, long handlebar moustache.

The three of us sat drinking at a small round table close to the fireplace. It wasn’t the season for a fire to be burning, and that was a good thing, because a man was sleeping at the table just in front of the fireplace. And he’d either gotten very drunk or very comfortable or maybe very both, because he was lying with the back of his head on the hearth, his long black hair splayed out around him. He looked damn peaceful.

What can I say? It was a sodden day all around.

I love walking into places like this. Whether they’re seaside towns with writer’s sheds and musty, dark bars, or somewhere else, I crave places that seem, when you’re in them, as though the rest of the world is a separated place, and you’re separate too, because you’re in them.

Anybody else?