By the time Dan tumbleweeded through the front door and into the dining room with my Lady, Auggie and Bess had pushed their chairs back from the table in healthy respect of keeping a certain distance from the remaining rubble of pie. Auggie and Bess looked Dan up and down while Dan looked the tumult of plates up and down, and before fifteen minutes of interesting conversational tidbits had criss-crossed the dining table, Auggie turned squarely to face his wife and said, “Well, honey, we really need to get going.”
“What?!?” Madeline said, nearly before the words were fully out of his mouth. “Really?!?”
“Really. Come on, babe.” And with an incredible efficiency of movement, he grabbed Bess’ hand, pulled her up from her chair, and led her towards the front door while both of them exclaimed the virtues of the food and the wine and the company, until the door shut behind them and their continued words drifted into the evening air.
On the other side of the door, the entire atmosphere inside the house shifted by the time Madeline took the twenty or so steps back to sit at the dining room table, side by side with Dan. He gave a faint chuckle. “Nice folks.”
“The best.” Madeline said.
They sat facing the table laden with the evening’s detritus. As if he had read the crusted plates like so many tea leaves, Dan said, “This house is so you. You are everywhere.”
“Really?” Madeline retorted, more than a tad skeptically, as he had arrives less than a half hour before and seen only two rooms. “How’s that?”
“It’s so clear what this house is. It’s the place that you created, and have worked hard to protect – a haven to encircle all of the people you love.”
“Geez,” Madeline thought to herself. “Just how much longer do I have to wait to fuck this guy?” But what she said aloud was, “Huh.”
“There is love everywhere,” Dan said, still looking down at the plates.
“Maybe not quite yet,” she considered. “But soon. Very, very soon.” The thought exhilarated her, thrilled her, yet also filled her with a quiet apprehension. She said in a pitch that was decidedly tauter and higher than usual. “Would you like a house tour? Want to see the rest of the Haven of Love?”
Sierra was in her usual spot on the couch in the sun room, except facing the other direction, her back to Madeline as she came in and leaned against the door frame. Also as usual, Sierra was dressed head to toe in clothes that belonged to her big sister – right down to the borrowed socks — with the exception of the fleece Madeline had lent to her, and which Sierra wore day and night, inside and out. She was on the phone, though it was difficult to tell at first, as she was saying absolutely nothing. It was only the slight crook of her head which implied that her ubiquitous cell phone was buried somewhere under her hair, tucked against her ear – that, and the fact that she didn’t turn around when Madeline came partway into the room, didn’t jump at the barest possibility of a warm, live body to talk with. She spent an astonishing amount of time “talking” on the phone, saying absolutely nothing. Hours, sometimes. Hours in which she would walk all around the house, open and close the fridge, go in and out of the bathroom, play with the dog, the silence broken by an occasional giggle, or a comment of notable brevity, such as “What?” “No way,” “Are you shitting me?” – four words was pretty much the max.
Madeline caught a glimpse of the impossibly neon blue gum in the corner of Sierra’s mouth, which promptly fell onto her boob when she eventually turned her head towards Madeline, rolling her eyes as if being on the phone was really an enormous ordeal. She reached down without thought to grab the blue wad, pop it back into her mouth, and chew the heck out of it to soften it back up. This happened a lot, too.
Jesus, Madeline thought. Fifteen. She really is fifteen.
What the hell was I doing when I was her age? Madeline’s mind leapt to a photo of herself and her father that a visiting camera-crazy aunt had snapped when she was fifteen. It was very early in the morning, and her father was about to give her a rare ride to school. She had an armful of books, and though she looked sleepy, a supremely chipper smile. Ha, she thought, every single time she ran across that picture. It seemed that between her aunt and her mother, about a million copies had been made of that picture, because everyone thought both she and her father looked so good. More to the point, it was probably the one and only photograph that included both of them, as it was most likely the one and only time she had stood that close to her father for a period that extended a number of years in both directions of that particular morning. Plus, her other dirty little secret was: she wasn’t just sleepy; she had been stoned out of her mind the night before.
OK, but besides that smoking pot thing, Madeline pondered, what the hell else was I doing?
Well, babysitting. She did a lot of babysitting in those days, largely to support her music habits of album-amassing and concert-going. A flipbook of the various families she regularly babysat for ran through her mind. The Roys. The Kelloggs. Families she could no longer remember names of either them or their children, but whose homes – their furniture, wall art, record collections, the various Things they had positioned in places of honor because of status, or nostalgia, or duty – these remained locked in her memory as if it were yesterday.
When she thought of these families as a whole, they all seemed impossibly earnest, clean-cut, each and every one of the men a future Scout Leader, and the women, they would be battling one another for PTA president, a freshly baked batch of cookies/brownies/banana bread forever on the spotless kitchen counter. And religious. Each and every one of these families was devoutly religious. Weird, she thought. How in the world did that happen?
Once the kiddies were asleep in their beds, she would peruse the snack options, put on some tunes, and settle in for an evening of making some money to sit there and do homework. She always expected that the parents would return home with flushed cheeks, giggling and leaning against one another in a blush of fun at having a Night! Out! and perhaps one too many cocktails. But this never happened.Never! The mommies and daddies would arrive home looking every bit as polished and coifed as when they had left, and even more surprising, seeming genuinely eager to talk with her. How was school going? Was she still studying piano? What was she reading in her spare time? Their interest amazed her in a way that made her feel inexplicably sad — all wide eyes and toothy smiles.
There was that one couple, though. What the heck were their names? Rick? Was that it?
Kathy? They had that one baby boy who was generally asleep by the time she arrived. Even when he was still awake, the kid did absolutely nothing. Just kind of hung out. Then went to sleep.
One look at Kathy and Rick and you couldn’t help but picture them as that glorious high school couple – the Captain of the football team and the head cheerleader – You knew that Rick would have been captain based not on any real degree of skill, or even leadership ability, but because he oozed an easygoing, blond smoothness and a manner that gently projected, “Damn! It is really good to be me!” Kathy could be defined by a word Madeline hardly ever thought of, let alone used in a positive way: cute. She had porcelain skin with a dusting of freckles across her nose, and red hair that grazed her shoulders in a perennially perfect flip. Sometimes she wore her black-framed, cat’s-eye glasses, other times not. She had married The Catch, and was devoting herself to the role of wife, mother, homemaker. She would keep herself trim, keep a spotless, if modest home, try out new recipes from Ladies Home Journal on a regular basis, make a boxed cake mix every week, and always wear an apron so she’d look her best when she sat down for dinner with Rick.
She was also the only one who would arrive home from her date night with her husband with her hair out of place here and there, her smile a little goofy, fumbling with the money, all of which Madeline found immensely adorable.
Rick would always be the one to drive her the distance of fifteen or twenty houses from their home to her own, which struck her as quaint but ridiculous in what she viewed as the world’s safest and most preternaturally bland suburb in existence. She disliked Rick for reasons she couldn’t put her finger on at first. His perpetual too-deep tan, his mirrored aviator shades, his profound and unflappable belief that every guy he met would yearn to be his best friend and every woman would sigh internally in his presence, unable to shake the image of his blond hair brushing against their faces, his sun-kissed hands gripping their hips.
Madeline had grown used to the parents’ fascination with her; but Rick possessed a clear, confident expectation that she would, of course, be fascinated with him. He fiddled with the radio dial and changed the station to something he thought she would love. She glanced over at him. He had turned his body part way to face her and let his knees fall open. He might have looked friendly and relaxed and nothing more, but she knew better.
You fucking piece of shit, she thought to herself.
He was waiting. Expecting that Madeline would be overcome with desire and would make a move. And if she did not, he was contemplating making the first move himself.
You fucking piece of shit. Madeline thought of Kathy at home, drowsily checking on the baby, removing her clothes, crawling under the covers in a boozy glow that told her that life was truly good. Rick’s hair was just beginning to thin, his overly-tanned skin withering with the advancing years. Shit, the guy didn’t have a clue how desperate he was, how much of a joke. But he would break his wife’s heart nonetheless. He was one step away from trying to fuck everything in sight, while Kathy continued to hum in the kitchen and bake him cakes.
Thinking about this, about all of this, filled her with an intense rage, a full forty years later.
She looked again at Sierra, right as Sierra’s gum dropped out her mouth yet again.
Shit, thought Madeline. Every single day of my life has been a cake walk, a total fucking cake walk, compared to this kid.
Yeah, this is something else that goes along with the territory of writing fiction – at least if one writes in the non-chronological, non-linear way in which I approach the craft.
Sometimes it happens that yesterday’s EPIPHANY is today’s…meh.
This used to happen quite regularly when I did much of my writing in various coffee houses around town. When on a caffeine-fueled roll, I would crank out some stuff with a Very High Degree of Enthusiasm!! I would sip my java and reread the day’s work, thinking “This stuff is GREAT! I’ve done it. I’ve said something.” There is no more satisfied feeling than taking that last gulp of coffee, packing up your gear, and heading out the door feeling that you have lived your life well that day.
Alas. It happens all too often that, once that happy Caffeine Achiever feeling has begun to wane, I read over those same words and find myself thinking, “Huh?! This is what struck me as so (fill in the _________: poetic, profound, truthful, flowing, ingenious, inventive, just plain nifty!)
Sometimes an epiphany lands squarely in the middle, meaning, the idea seems like it may work really, really well; and then again, maybe not. Meh.
I’m not sure about this one. The “epiphany” concerned a change in the narrator, moving from third person to first person part way through the book – beginning with the narrator speaking as a third-person observer, and shifting to narrating in the first person, but as one of the other main characters.
The set-up would look something like this:
“Mr…Merle…there is something else.”
“What’s that, Miss Shirley…er, Shirley?”
“When I said that you were getting it all wrong…I didn’t mean the facts…exactly.”
“What else could you mean? You said that I was too far away down here. Too much removed from the goings-on.”
“I did say that. You’re right. But I meant it in a different way.”
“Like what? What other way is there?”
“I meant to say that the way you are telling the story is too far removed. You’re telling it like you are far away, as if you are watching everything from a great distance, as if you have no particular feeling about the events.”
“That’s the way stories get told. They just get…told.”
“Due respect, Mr… Due respect, Merle, I think it would be a better story if you got inside of it. Inside.”
It happened exactly the way it’s supposed to. It was our second, or maybe our third, day on the island. I woke up early each morning, just as I am accustomed to doing at home. We had no clock, no way to tell the time. Often I woke when it was still dark, or perhaps there was the barest hint of dawn in the distant sky.
Sometimes I would fall back into a profound sleep, but more often I would drift in that most magical place that teeters just at the edge of both awake and not. When our thoughts are loose, and hints of dreams spread out across our minds. Sound would be the first thing that entered my awareness. First the palm branches outside our room’s two walls of windows – suddenly their gentle, incessant flapping would enter; and right after, the waves of the sea coming one after the next.
I would become aware of his body, the parts that touched mine – the cross of limbs, or the barest graze of fingers against my back. Or he would be fully on the other side of the oceanic bed, arms close against his sides as he lay on his stomach, his long frame stretched diagonally. I listened until I could hear his breathing, mixed in with the palms and the waves, before I would allow myself to drift again.
It was in this state, wandering in and out of a cavernous haze of utter contented relaxation that it happened. An epiphany.
I have been working on my third novel, Pushing the River, for around ten months now. I have had the experience of an entire book – my first novel — pouring from me, a finished first draft in five months. I have also had the experience of a second book that took years to write. And a couple more years to re-re-re-rewrite. I try to ride the waves of bountiful yield and the soul-killing periods of drought as best I can.
And once in a while: magic. An idea comes, a true lightning bolt – in this case, a solution for something that I was not even fully aware was a problem. An entirely different approach to the narrative structure. In other words: inspiration. The moments we cannot force. We just try to trust that they can, and that they will, happen.
My Lady lets the book drop into her lap. She closes her eyes, and lets herself drink up the quiet, the solitude, for a few seconds more. She takes her time climbing the stairs, listening to the sound of each footfall and its brushhh brushhh brushhh on the wooden steps.
When she turns the creaky old knob that then bangs against the kitchen counter, she hears only the hum of the refrigerator. A few quick steps through the kitchen, she finds Sierra and her mother Billie sitting on the sofa in the back room of the house, mountains of clothes piled on and around them. It looks like the room – which is everyone’s favorite — little but made mostly of windows – has exploded with clothing, spewed them out like a heedless volcano.
“Oh, hi, Maddie,” Billie says. “We weren’t sure exactly where you were.”
“Downstairs. I was downstairs.”
“We’re trying to figure out what to take. I’m going to take Sierra home for a few days.”
“Oh?…”
“Yeah, she wants to come back home.”
“So..what are you doing? Exactly?”
“We’re trying to figure out what to take. You know. For the baby and for Sierra.”
“How long have you both been…here? Doing this?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What would you say, honey? An hour or so? Maybe two?”
Madeline looks at Sierra, who says, “It’s hard. It’s hard to figure out what to take!”
“We thought it would be a good time to go through everything and organize it. You know. Take inventory. Organize,” Billie adds.
“Well, if you’re only going for a couple of days…maybe you don’t need to worry about it so much.”
“I’ll just feel better when it’s all done. Sierra knows how much I like to organize everything, don’t you, baby?”
Sierra nods, and looks over at Madeline with a face that is as unreadable to her as hieroglyphics.
“Plus my birthday’s coming up. I want to make sure everybody has something super special to wear.”
“Oh, right! I knew your birthday was getting close. What are you doing to celebrate?”
“Going to Ho-Chunk. I am so excited. I’ve been trying to go every year on my birthday since I started back in 1987. I skipped 1992 to 1996, no it was 1995, and I missed 2004 and 2006, but every other year I’ve gone. Some of my friends surprised me by taking up a collection to give me some money. Cousin Lou chipped in $20, and then my friend Donna really surprised me by giving $40, and when Nick heard he even chipped in $10. That was on Tuesday. The 5th.”
“I’m sorry. What’s Ho-Chunk? I don’t know what that is.”
“Are you kidding? Are you kidding? It’s a casino! Up in Wisconsin!”
“A casino?”
“Of course! I play the penny slots. It’s my favorite thing to do.”
“I don’t know what a penny slot is, either.”
“Madeline, you do surprise me sometimes. That’s like saying you’ve never seen the stars.”
Sierra picks articles of clothing from one basket, looks at them briefly, and puts them in a different pile in a different basket, or on the arm of the sofa, or on the floor, or anywhere at all.
“No, baby,” says her mother. “Don’t put that shirt there. That’s a whole different color group.”
It was the third time that mice had taken up residence here in the house. On top of all the humans and their cats and dogs and friends that crowded into this here house, them little brown field mice found their way in again, too.
That first dog was a natural-born mouser. By the time My Lady and the Husband even figured out they had a mouse problem at all, the dog was hard at work. Inside. Outside. Didn’t matter where he was, he would make a sudden-like snap of his head, and before you knowed it he’d be licking his lips, the infernal rodent already swallowed up whole without so much as a trace.
That dog had been a squirrel-chaser from way back, but you always kinda wondered if he had any real seriousness about catching one, or if he was in it for the pure fun of the chase. Well, the day came — after many years of chasing he up and caught one, and that settled that. It was like the taste of blood had lent newfound meaning to his life, and from then on the big, gentle beast was forever on the lookout to up and kill any creature in his path that was not either a human or another dog neither.
My Lady might have worried about him swallowing all kind of mice, bones and claws and tails and all, cept for that time when he swallered up an entire roasting chicken they had left up on the kitchen counter to cool off for their family picnic. When they come in later there was not so much as a spot of grease or lick of skin or any sign a-tall that the bird had ever existed. The Husband had even surrounded the cooked-up bird with a sort-of barricade of forks and glasses and other kitchen things, every one of which stood right in its original place – a hedge of utensils surrounding nothing. Well, they called up the animal doctor, and he asked them to remind him how much the dog weighed. When they told him, he chuckled to hisself and said, you don’t need to worry a bit, cause that big boy won’t have any trouble with the likes of an 8-pound roasting chicken. The whole thing became one of those stories that families like to tell over and over at get-togethers; but anyhow my Lady knew that no little teeny mouse would cause a digestive disturbance to the noble dog, or even a whole passel of them.
They counted eighteen mice that the dog chomped down that one summer, and that was just the ones they was around to catch him at.
The second time them mice moved in, they was already on their second dog and the Husband was already the X. But while the first dog had the Killer Instinct, the second dog was one of them kind that never met a single other creature that she didn’t want to befriend and love up, so when the new batch of mice migrated into the house, she’d go right on up to them and poke at them with her nose, and dance little dance-steps around them, and do any crazy thing she could think of to get them to play with her.
My Lady didn’t feel right about killing the same little creatures that the Boy and the Little One had as pets all them years, so she did her best to ignore the whole rodent situation for a good long time. But once she and the Little One kept spotting them scuffling and skittering across the floors late at night, and all kinds of little holes were getting chewed in the bags lined up in the pantry, she decided she couldn’t ignore the dang things any longer.
She started out with the old-fashioned kind of mouse killer trap that’s been in existence as long as I have, the wooden things with the spring hinge where you put some kind of food that mice love to lure them in and then POW that hinge snaps down hard and kills ’em right fast. Well, it took about 2 or 3 mornings of my Lady checking them traps, only to find the bait clean gone and the trap unsprung – kind of like the whole chicken incident with that first dog – when sure enough she done sprung the trap on her own fingers in the checking process, and even though I heared movie upon movie with all kinds of language I could never even dream of, I ain’t never heard nothing like what come out of her mouth, and next thing you know the whole dang package of traps she bought was tossed in the garbage.
As I said, it has been nearly a year now since this current laptop began its death throes — when the screen would go blank, throwing up a solid blue nothingness while making that sickly little blipping noise. It happened randomly and regularly for a good chunk of time. With all due diligence, I emailed every single copy of every single thing I had ever written to myself, as back-up. I read computer magazines, and user reviews, and chats, and everything I could get my hands on to begin the agonizing process of determining just which package of circuits and casings and keyboard positions and all that technical stuff that goes into a laptop computer was just right for me. I went to stores and asked friends and accosted unsuspecting coffeehouse patrons, all in an effort to make the best possible determination about that most ephemeral and ethereal of traits – good writing juju.
“It just seems to me a perfect unwonder,” J.D. Salinger wrote, “that writing’s almost never terrific fun. If it’s not the hardest of the arts–I think it is–it’s surely the most unnatural, and therefore the most wearying. So unreliable, so uncertain. Our instrument is a blank piece of paper–no strings, no frets, no keys, no reed, mouthpiece, nothing to do with the body whatever–God, the unnaturalness of it. Always waiting for birth, every time we sit down to work.”
Birth! EVERY TIME WE SIT DOWN TO WORK!! Holy cow!!!
Clearly, the only thing to do was to keep my laptop until its very last electronic gasp.
My laptop computer is dying. Actually, it has been dying over the course of a really long time. This is an experience I have not had elsewhere in my life, this matter where something is dying, and this looming demise is known, and the whole business unfolds over an unpredictable, ebbing and flowing, torturously long period. In my family of origin, it is customary to drop dead with no foreshadowing whatsoever; so much so that we joke that both of my grandmothers “lingered,” one having lived nearly 36 hours following her heart attack, and the other drawing out her life’s breath for a full seventy-two hours following her stroke.
The first two laptops that I wrote on were given to me by good friends. I mentioned to my buddy Nina that I was thinking of buying one, as it would be really great to be able to write at one of the many, many places/activities I was forever hauling my kids around to, many of which were far enough away that it made no sense to do anything but sit there on my ass for the two, or three, hours while the child in question did their thing. Irish dancing. Swimming. Youth Orchestra. To name but a few.
Nina offered up her daughter’s old IBM ThinkPad, and my life was forever changed. I loved it immediately. Devotedly.
Irish Dancing was a club that neither I nor my daughter ever belonged to — which was our acknowledged desire going into it. She had been to RiverDance and been enthralled enough with the whole hopping/jumping/drumming/fluting/tapping spectacle that she thought it would be a delicious hoot to give it a whirl. And so I ended up once a week sitting in a giant, overheated kitchen/meeting room of a community center filled with, well, Irish parents and their innumerable children for whom this whole endeavor was a Calling and a Way of Life. The wigs! The costumes! The SHOES!! Turns out there is no limit whatsoever on how much fervent, devoted conversational attention these topics can carry. It was a loud crowded sweaty scene; and though I could tell that this miraculous life-changing mini-computer seemed to be spewing out some indecipherable sound at totally random intervals, I couldn’t glean it and had no idea exactly what it was.
It wasn’t until waiting in the solemn library-grade quiet of the Youth Orchestra, with a roomful of Clasical Music Parents sipping lattes and reading WSJ, NYT or managing their porlfolios, that the sound was discernible – yep, there were the Beastie Boys yelling out in all their glory,
The first sign of my computer’s failing was nearly a year ago. The screen would suddenly go blank, throwing up a solid blue nothingness while making a sickly little blipping noise. My tech-savvy son said, “Yup. Hewlett-Packard’s are known for that. It’s gonna die.” Great. A new computer. Right when I had decided to format my two completed novels for e-publication. And far more importantly, right when I had begun a new, third novel.
Anyone who writes will tell you that its success depends on a hair’s breath of “talent” (let’s say less than 1%), an abundance of grueling, persistent hard work (90%), and that the remaining >10% is a mystical amalgamation of caffeine, alcohol, the alignment of the stars, witchcraft, amulets, rituals, and the elusive ephemera called inspiration. Most of us would argue that following our rituals extremely closely is the way in which we open the door for inspiration to find its way in. And if it doesn’t; well, at least we are fully and happily caffeinated, sitting in our favorite spot, wearing our lucky slippers.
My point being that I am deeply, and profoundly, attached to my laptop computer.
And I am absolutely convinced that I will be unable to write a single word, let alone a decent sentence, let alone a multi-hundred page novel on some interloping, new, unfamiliar piece of machinery that I have NO BOND WITH. Never mind that this particular HP laptop is actually my fourth laptop and the fifth computer on which I have written. Never mind that the first draft of my first novel was written almost entirely on a desktop computer in a dark basement in the pre-dawn hours. Never mind that, as my son and daughter feel compelled to point out to me on a regular basis, I don’t really need a laptop at all, since I never move the thing from its place on the table in my sun room. Well, of course I never move it! How else would I be able to sit in my lucky chair to write!!
This is NOT an area where we can blindly believe that the past will prove predictive of the future; in other words, the historical fact that I have adjusted to numerous different computers with relatively little difficulty CANNOT BE COUNTED UPON to foretell that it would be the same in some hypothetical, untested future with some hypothetical, untested electronic device that may simply have terribly bad juju.
My mother had on her fur coat. They must have been going to the symphony, or maybe the opera, back in the days when they had season tickets to both, before my father put his foot down and announced that he refused to go any more and thereby broke my mother’s heart. They came into the living room to say good-bye to my brother and me, all gussied up and remaining at a distance.
We had a babysitter. Kathy Bates (nope, not that one, though having the always-a-hoot actress as a babysitter would certainly have been swell). At 10 and 8, Kathy was not all that much older than my brother and I were; but we were very much little kids, and she had crossed that treacherous threshold into Early Adolescence. Kathy looked, most unfortunately, exactly like her father. At the age of nearly 13, she was well on her way to her final height of 6 feet tall.
She was athletic and strong and awkward and rangy all at once. Her hair always seemed to be horribly greasy, and it was evident that she curled it, teased it, sprayed it and in every way possible fought with it to achieve what little détente she could. She had clearly outgrown her pants and not yet grown into her blouse. Because we were watching TV, Kathy had to reluctantly don her glasses – the narrow, black-framed, pointy-tipped specs of the time that everyone spent years making fun of before shocking number of hipsters across the country took up their cause once again.
I was, in every way, fascinated by her.
She must have gotten special permission from my parents, as our TV watching was Regulated. No more than one hour per night, and only approved shows. We were permitted to watch all the PBS we wanted; which needless to say meant that we watched absolutely none at all, ever, period.
Kathy was kneeling on the floor, her PFFlyer-clad feet tucked underneath her as she sat no more than three or four feet from our little old black-and-white TV. Her eyes were already glued to the screen as my parents said their goodbyes.
It was Sunday, February 9, 1964, and the Beatles were about to make an appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. My brother and I had no idea what to make of the awed, rapt solemnity with which Kathy Bates seemed to be approaching this event; but we understood the fact of it, if not the reasoning, and so knelt on the floor beside her.
The minute Ed Sullivan says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, The Beatles!” the girls in the audience break into cheers and screams and yells. Kathy Bates’ hands fly up to either side of her face, cradling her cheeks. She moaned in ecstatic agony for a second before crying out.
Kathy looked over at my brother and me as if suddenly remembering we were there. Our mouths were probably hanging open. I spent the rest of “All My Loving” pretending to watch –I thought Paul was the cutest thing ever. John scared me. Ringo had a great goofy crazy smile. And George? Well, at the age of 8, George who? – but secretly studying every single move that Kathy made.
It was one of those pivotal moments in life, when a brand new door opens and you get a white-light-blinding glimpse of a world that is so much bigger, and scarier, and more complicated, and more magnificent, than you ever imagined before. Thank you, Kathy Bates, for fanning a flame of curiosity and wonder.
Readers, may your 2014 be filled with such moments.
