I really did move!

Finally!

And my new home is lesliefmiller.blogspot.com, so please make a note of it. I will not be back, and I may even make the blog private.

And please check out my new website, lesliefmiller.com.

See you next door! Bring some beer. (Ale is preferred.) And a guitar. And some cake.

standing still

I posted before that I was moving, but I still haven't found a home. Eventually, though, I'll settle down, be less nomadic, less flighty.

In just a few months (short months, because time passes quickly when you're older), my first book will be out, and I suppose I should have a "professional" site by then, rather than this old blog. I probably will say fewer cuss words, wear less comfortable shoes.

Maybe before I go, I will conjure a few more posts—about lifeguards and their abuse of authority or learning to play the guitar along with my daughter.

Thanks for listening.

moving

After suffering months of neglect, and prior months of abuse, A Doggy's Life has trotted off to greener backyards.

I've not quite given up on blogging. I spend a great deal of time over at Flickr, where I say far more than should be said and prove it with pictures. I'm also toying with the idea of starting anew over at SquareSpace.

Eventually, perhaps by the end of the summer, I will have a more professional personal site, where I can blog and respond to all the hate mail generated by my book.

See you soon!

I never do this.

But it's worthy.

The New Word is Scrivener

I was talking with a friend not more than three days ago, when he or she (menopause, sheesh) said (and this I remember verbatim), "One day soon, we'll download something that says Mac OS users, only."

The day has come.

Read about Verginia Heffernan's frustration (which is ours) with Microsoft Word here, at the New York Times. (Sorry if you have to log in, but it's good writing worth reading.)

Download Scrivener for a free thirty-day trial here.

The Beginning

How many of our philosophical thoughts begin, "the thing that separates man from the animals is..."? Probably too many, yet here comes another one. And because of the date of this posting, you can probably guess the thing that makes us different from animals.

Dogs don't sit with their heads in a bottomless trough on the last night of the year, resolving with the other dogs to end this kind of behavior after midnight.

The New Year's Resolution is a tradition engaged in by nearly everyone. And while hundreds of thousands of us attempt to find dietary and fitness resolves by morning (until usually no later than March 3), many of us decide that we will awaken as better people. We make plans to argue less, to learn how to dance or play guitar, to pick up a new language, to take a course.

My goals have always been the same and include much of the above: learn an instrument (this year, it's drums, as I figure I can bang out my stress), stop yelling, stop eating from the bottomless trough of life. And write—more and better. But it's rare for us on the night before to examine the reasons we have our heads in that trough in the first place. Doesn't that set us up for failure? Shouldn't we know what is it we lack, besides self-control? Our desire for instant fulfillment wages constant war with the too-distant results of our abstinence.

For years, I belonged to a weight-loss forum. The members, myself included, posted every other day about succumbing to pizza and cheesecake. The next day, they were "back on track" but the following day were derailed yet again. We've all been there. And while support groups are wonderful, public postings do more than keep us accountable once they've become a habit. We end up feeling more of a failure for every slip, and it becomes impossible to right ourselves.


And what of all that anger that makes me snap like a mistreated dog? Where does it come from? Who hath wrongéd me? I had an uneventful childhood with the normal kind of dysfunctional arguing family. Yelling is a habit, sure, but that's not all it is. I realize now that the days I yell and snap are my pain days. I do feel like a mistreated dog. These past few mornings, I've awakened in the night feeling as though someone has bashed my hands with a hammer. They are asleep for hours upon hours. And I wake up unable to hold the tea kettle or pitcher of water.

It seems the more out of shape I get, the worse the pain becomes. I can relate these two things, yet I'm somehow in denial about this cause-and-effect relationship.

But this morning, with the prospect of typing of 100 pages rising on the horizon like a morning sun on a clear day, I must heed it.

Happy New Year to all of my friends. I hope that you make your resolutions with love and leniency toward yourselves and others. And I hope you reach your goals.

produce waste

Three seasons of the year, I find music at the Farmers' Market. Our Saturday market at Waverly is close by, and it is a symphony of colors, aromas, textures, flavors—sweet and savory, soft and crunchy. Maybe you think an apple crisp and fresh shelled peas and just-caught catfish don't commingle nicely, but they fit together like pieces in a puzzle; they complement like beer and cake.

I love the Korean ladies shouting above the tomatoes and the people with their well-mannered dogs. (My life's mission is to touch every dog I meet when I am not with my own mongrels.) I love the hand-printed SCRIMPS onesies and the fresh red clover and sunflower bouquets.

But the Farmers' Market was not on my list this year. Instead, I joined a local produce group. It's a great group, but the price was hefty—around $200, even when we split it with our next-door neighbor—and the haul was weighty. I doubt I would ever do it again.*

The early weeks were like a blind date. You make do with what you have for the night, knowing you don't have to kiss; it'll be over soon. And so it was with Swiss chard and Kale and collard greens. I found recipes on line for the best ways to cook the stalks of leafy greens that invaded my home like aliens, demanding more and more space each day, as if they reproduced like tribbles. Oh, sure, they're all red-veined and colorful at first, but then they become furry creatures that expand beyond your ability to store them.

After about the third week, signs that other colors grew from dirt appeared in the form of yellow squash. Then the tomatoes came. And then came the eggplant, the half a cantaloupe, half a yellow watermelon, a dozen green peppers, fingerling potatoes, a dozen tomatoes, butternut squash, 15,000 tiny purple peppers, 50,000 mushy tomatoes, and a single bulb of garlic. And the arugula and arugula and arugula. And the chard. The chard that never stopped. And the beets that went on and on.

Tuesdays were delivery and pickup days. I began to suffer a Tuesday aversion and then, eventually, Tuesday denial. My neighbor worked full time, yet she was always showing up at my door after a hard day of work with market bags full of—yikes—things that looked like more chard. I stir-fried it. I sautéed it. I salted and garlicked it. It still tasted like chard.

We couldn't use the tomatoes and peppers fast enough. I struggled to make enough sauce and salsa and Costa Rican beans and rice. I couldn't keep up. The organic, exotic produce of the ilk I ogled at the Farmers' Market was causing me stress.

As the tomatoes sat rotting in the fruit bowl, as the plastic bags of greens grew exponentially on the refrigerator shelf, their wilted and torn, brown-edged leaves wagging their fingers in my face each time I opened the door for something other than a demanding vegetable, I remembered an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond (which I remember mostly because of Marie's ubiquitous chocolate cake, the one that serves different duties as celebration and apology and bribe each week) in which Marie complained to Raymond about her gift membership to the Fruit of the Month Club. I thought it bizarre then that anyone would complain about a bag of grapefruits or some cantaloupe each month. But now I realize her predicament.

Sure, you get some grapefruit and cantaloupe and fruits people actually sit down and enjoy with daughters and fathers. But you also get kumquats and kiwis, fruits that demand something more than a peeling and a slicing.

Produce is such a high-maintenance house guest!

Each Tuesday at 5:30, I would hear a knock at the door, and the knot in my stomach would tighten. Oh, no. It's produce day, I would say, moaning the words as if Eyeore had said them. Oh, no. More chard and beets and eggplant to grow rubbery above the produce box, where we kept the staples of our lives: the Brussels sprouts and green beans, the real broccoli (with green florets), the five-pound bag of carrots, the Vidalia onion, the cauliflower—giant store-shrink-wrapped heads of it.

And so I began to call it Last Straw Farm.

In August, I developed a medical problem that forced me to eliminate vegetables from my diet. It was the excuse I needed to end my relationship with fruit and vegetables, putting the onus on the rest of my family for consumption of said wilting things. But even my waste-not-want-not husband couldn't be bothered, his audible sighing stressing us out each time he opened the fridge. He felt responsible. He tried.

But when he wasn't looking, I stuffed the screaming greens and howling tomatoes down the garbage disposal, and I got rid of them.

In mid-November, when I thought we'd officially ended our relationship with the local produce farm, a final knock came. I was not in the kitchen at the time; my husband answered the door. I could hear the swishing of canvas totes and the rustle of plastic bags for transferring. I heard Marty groan and close the door. My stomach dropped. And then I did what I had to do. I plucked out the lone butternut squash for dinner that night, and I tossed the rest—entire bags of chard and arugula and romaine and chard and chard and arugula and tiny spinach leaves covered with sand and anything else I imagined was in those bags.

My husband couldn't even pretend to protest.



*Our local produce group has gotten way better, with more choices. Now we pick up our goods from the farmers' market, so now what's not included can be had elsewhere.

crystal power

I do not believe in magnet therapy or crystals or any of that new age hocus-pocus.

But I do believe in my girlfriend, Christine, who is not just a massage therapist; she is a healer. When Christine was a student, I got some free massages, and I could see that she was making this stuff her own. I did not buy the crystal stuff. She would hold one on a long string above my stomach to "do a read" on me. Sometimes it went back and forth; sometimes it moved in circles. Whether it was counter-clockwise or clockwise mattered, too. All kinds of energy was at work in that room, so who could say for sure which energy manipulated it? Was there a slight breeze from the window frame of the old house? Did Chris have a shaky hand? Was our breath blowing it? And what of all the ghosts?

The other day, I went in for a "treatment" (that's what you call them when you are passing out from all pain and the oxygen flooding your brain, and you are in a panic, and both of you are crying). For laughs, I decided to move the crystal that hangs several feet above me from a ceiling rafter. That is, I decided to move the crystal with my mind. She and I stared at it. It was so still that it felt as though nothing were living in the room. But I exerted a lot of mental pressure, and we eventually deluded ourselves into seeing it swing ever so gently.

While I don't believe in their healing power or their ability to grant wishes, I do believe they can aid in our attentiveness. For instance, when you are trying to move a crystal with your mind, your presence in the moment can make you see microscopic movements. (And it can give you a wicked headache.)



My husband's sister-in-law passed a crystal down to my daughter, Serena, a few years ago. It was a particularly lucky crystal, Gina said, and she instructed Serena to write down all of her goals for the year, fold up the piece of paper, and place it in a vessel with the crystal. In order for this magic to work, Serena would have to take the crystal out every so often and meditate with it, then replace it in the vessel.

Of course, it's the power of meditation, not the magic in a crystal, that aids in accomplishing goals. Meditation helps to improve focus and awareness (you can even raise your hand temperature and stave off migraines with meditation).

Still, every little bit helps, right?

Shortly after the crystal arrived in the house, I took it. I wrote down my goals for 2006 (they are still in the beautiful hand-made jar with the leaf lid), and I stuck the crystal inside. Once or twice, I meditated with the thing. And at the end of the year, I achieved a few of my goals. (The career goals received the most attention.)

In August, when I graduated from Goucher's MFA program and was looking for an agent and an editor and publisher, I looked to the crystal again. It was about that time that Serena approached me to ask, "Mom, where's the crystal Aunt Gina gave me?"

I told her that it was in a special place and that I really, really, really needed it right now. I would give it back soon. She asked me twice more that week, and I promised I'd return it to her soon.

While I was waiting for Simon & Schuster or Random House or Hyperion to be my true love, I was scrubbing the house from top to bottom. I was crazed by the time I got to Serena's room. (I spent about two hours removing stickers from her dresser and mirror.) A few days after I accepted an offer, I was putting something away in my daughter's room, and I found the crystal.

When Serena came home from school, I approached her with the crystal. "Serena, where did you get this?"

"In that little jar with the leaf lid."

"I told you I'd give it back as soon as I was done with it!"

"Mom," she said, "I found it months ago!"



You can't prove a negative: that there's no God, that people don't have souls, that there's no magic in a crystal. But it would be a shame to rely on an amulet. If what I'd accomplished had come with the aid of a hand-me-down crystal, how would I be able to get anything else done without first securing the object in the jar?

Or maybe the crystal was answering my daughter's prayers, too.

murder by numbers

murder by numbers

I heard the commotion and came as quickly as I could. It was mostly dark, but for a few hot pink stripes in the navy. And then the lowest visible spot of sky set the trees on fire, and crows, hundreds of them—no, thousands—were screaming and tearing holes in the sky, taking off with the treetops, leaving them bare as desert bones, nothing but a silhouette against this daily miracle of morning.

gone knitting

I found a great pattern today for a headscarf that my sister-in-law was wearing yesterday. So I'm making my required NaBloPoMo post (the things we do for prizes), and I'm off to finish row 15.