An unending supply of dirt

Actual dirt.

Not gossip or scandal or anything like that.

I’m talking about dirt. Erosion. Because I have been noticing for some time now that the yard is trying to take back the driveway. Little by little, the lawn has crept over the edge.

We’ll set aside the fact that I have plenty of bare spots on the lawn itself—where, you know, if the grass wanted to move somewhere, there would be little, if any, resistance. Or, wait. Let’s not. Set it aside, I mean. What possesses the grass to try to grow over and through the concrete driveway instead of turning around and nestling into the nice soft dirt?! I think the grass might be in cahoots with my Wizard of Oz trees. I don’t want to sound paranoid, but, seriously, what possible benign reason could there be for trying to grow on concrete?

Anyway, I’ve been noticing this encroachment, and yesterday, I decided I would have to do something about it. I started out using my weed whacker as an edger—a task at which it is surprisingly effective. However, there came a point on the driveway where I was going to have to trim back about a foot (a foot!) of dirt and grass.

Enter the grubbing hoe. The grubbing hoe is a very nice implement. I like it. Using it, I found the edge of the driveway again. And I dislodged most of the dirt and grass that had crept over it.

But I live in Florida, and the dirt is mostly sand, and pretty much as fast as you remove the side of a hill, the hill slides down.

An unending supply of dirt.

Next stop. The home improvement store.

I guess it’s time to get some of that plastic edging until one of two things happens. Either the remaining grass will put out tendrils and roots to anchor the sand, or we will have the time, energy, funds, and artistic sense to come up with something better. Meanwhile, I’m going to end that unending supply of dirt!

What becomes a legend most?

Sharing their stories!

Everybody loves behind-the-scenes info. Don’t they? I know I do. I love to hear how writers and actors and producers got started, what they remember most about their work experiences, what advice they have for others aspiring to similar achievements. It’s fascinating.

Of course, it’s best if it’s someone whose work you know, but an opportunity to hear from someone you’ve never happened to encounter is a gift, too. It can open your eyes to treasures you might not otherwise find.

Agnes de Mille came to speak at my college once. I’d heard of her. I knew she was, famously, the choreographer for the original Oklahoma. What I didn’t know and was delighted to discover was that she was a terrifically entertaining speaker and a wonderful writer. I went and found her books, learned a great deal and enjoyed them thoroughly.

Harold Clurman, John Houseman, Vincent Price—all became doors into new information once I had the opportunity to hear them talk.

So imagine my glee when I stumbled upon a website created by the Television Academy Foundation which hosts over 700 oral history interviews conducted in-depth with the legends of television.

EmmyTvLegends.org

There are over 3000 hours of interviews with actors, writers, directors, newscasters, tv executives, technical gurus and more. And they are not drive-by, promote-the-project-of-the-moment interviews. They are hours-long, thoughtful discussions. What I always thought talk shows should be and almost never are. (Dick Cavett’s show being a notable exception.)

It’s all fascinating. Sometimes funny, sometimes inspiring, sometimes eye-opening. The interviewers are good. They ask excellent questions, and they stay out of the way. Interesting facts come to light, and personalities are revealed.

You can spend a lot of time there. So, be warned. But spending your time in the company of some of our most creative people? Is there any better way?

I love New York

Long may it live.

Today, I’m thankful that I have heard from most of my NY/NJ friends.

Hurricane Sandy—as far as I can judge from a distance—was about the worst thing that’s happened there in a long, long time. It’s true that it lacked the shock value, the loss-of-invulnerability fear factor of 9/11, but the damage was more widespread.

However, people have been speaking up here and there, and they all seem to be all right. Most of the New Yorkers even have power. Some of the Long Islanders and all of the Jersey folks are in the dark, but they have roofs over their head and working cell phones.

I suppose the biggest problem is water—inside and out. Flood waters are health hazards on many levels—and high rises depend on pumps so even if the water mains are intact, there’s no running water in the building. So, that’s a concern.

There are millions, if not billions, of dollars worth of damage. And a fair number of homeless people just now.

But most of the people are okay.

And that is certainly something for which to be thankful while we sympathize with those who have lost their lives, their living spaces, and, temporarily we hope, their livelihoods.

As always, the Red Cross is on the scene.

If anybody wants to help out, you can donate $10 by texting REDCROSS to 90999 on your cell phone. Quick and easy. The $10 just gets added to your cell phone bill for you to pay next time around. As in most disasters, they really need money more than canned goods or blankets or whatever.

I’m sure that New York and New Jersey will survive this, as they survive most things—with panache. But, golly! What a mess!

I’m also sure large thanks are due to New York’s finest and to their Jersey equivalents and to FEMA and the National Guard and to all the federal, state and local officials who worked so hard to coordinate with each other.

I love New York. Thanks for hanging on and hanging in.

Now what happens?

I’m seriously wondering.

Happy Halloween, everybody!

Welcome to the horror show this Wondering Wednesday has become. Because I am seriously wondering this, and it is a serious thing to be wondering about.

What’s gonna happen to our election in the wake of Hurricane Sandy?

Many, many states have early voting. 32 plus the District of Columbia. Reports, so far, are that 15% of voters have already voted with an additional 18% estimated to vote prior to election day. That’s a lot more than have ever used early voting previously, but it’s not everybody.

A majority of states—all but 2—are supposed to have in-person voting on Nov. 6th. (The 2 are Washington and Oregon. They vote entirely by mail. Who knew? Other than, I guess, people who live in Washington and Oregon.)

And a majority of states should have no problem with their in-person voting on Nov 6th.

But there are a few states that have been hit hard by Hurricane Sandy. Major damage to infrastructure and transportation. As I write this, there are twenty to twenty-five thousand people trapped in Hoboken surrounded by flood waters and downed electrical lines. The mayor has asked for the National Guard to supply some equipment that might make rescues possible in places where the city’s payloaders are too big to fit through narrow streets.

It doesn’t sound like they can find tens of thousands of their citizens let alone provide polling places for them by next Tuesday.

New York City and parts of Long Island are without power with some restorations projected to take 7 to 10 days. The polls had massive voting machines when I lived in NYC—and I seem to remember hefty power cables snaking around the church basements and high school cafeterias. (I also remember a very heavy and loud clunk when you pulled the lever, though, so maybe it was all more mechanical than electrical?)

You used to sign in to vote in massive bound books which had a copy of your signature from your previous occasion of voting. Were all those books on high ground?

So what happens? If the records are soggy? If the subways can’t get voters where they need to be? If there’s no power for the machines? If the voters are missing in Hoboken?

Is there anything in our Constitution that covers this?

We can’t disenfranchise enormous swaths of the electorate. Or can we?

And who gets to answer this question?

I think we should all be wondering.

Double trouble

Two for the price of one.

Today, I’m going to share with you two tips, from my frequent encounters with productivity gurus, that seem to be mutually exclusive. (Like those old adages that contradict each other. Great minds think alike. Fools minds run in the same channel, etc.)

These are To Do list tips. Productivity proposals.

Here’s the first tip:

Often, we are advised to do some of the simplest things on our task lists first. The theory is that it gives you a sense of progress. It’s encouraging. Crossing things off makes you want to cross more things off. You feel like you are actually accomplishing something.

For that very reason, one of my friends sometimes retroactively lists tasks she has completed just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. In this case, they aren’t necessarily simple tasks, but they’re already done! This is a variation I particularly like because you run no risk of the uncrossed item becoming an incomplete burden.

Remember, this works best if you actualize your list—by which I mean that you have to actually write it down. Or type it up. It’s got to exist in a somewhat tangible form—even if the form is the one-step-removed version on your monitor. It can’t just be in your head, or you can’t cross anything off. (It’s much less satisfying to just let something fade away out of your memory. Big red check marks. Big black lines. That’s the ticket.)

So, that’s one way to go. Do the easy stuff first. Build momentum. See results.

The second tip is the exact opposite:

Do the hard thing, the thing you’ve been avoiding, the thing that’s hanging over your head like that old sword of Damocles, that’s a lead weight in the pit of your stomach. Just get it over with—because the energy that comes from being released from that pressure will sweep you through the next several items on the list in no time flat.

Chances are, in fact, that the thing you’ve been avoiding is a thing that will make a much bigger difference than five or six of the easy things. That’s just one of those unfortunate realities of life. Most things worth doing are hard. Most difficult things, when accomplished, move us farther forward than the easy things. (Broccoli is better for us than potato chips, too—and isn’t that unfair?)

Tackle the hard stuff. Just do it. Get ‘er done, as they say.

Which of these methods is the best?

It kind of depends—on how much sleep you had the night before, on how easy the easy stuff is and how hard the hard stuff is, on a lot of things. I tend toward the first way—doing the easy stuff—because I’m lazy. And it works in a lot of ways a lot of the time. But I’ve also, on occasion, leap-frogged forward by forcing myself to deal with big, complicated, difficult tasks.

The most important advice, I guess, is—whether you go the easy route or take the harder path—do something. Keep moving forward.

In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.
—Theodore Roosevelt

Silver linings

And very black clouds.

There’s a hurricane out there. It may even have made landfall by the time you read this—although they say it’s moving very slowly—so maybe not.

There are going to be a lot of miracles this week connected to Sandy. There could easily be a lot of not so nice things happening as well. I’ve heard about some of them already. A playwright friend whose reading, long prepared and anticipated, had to be canceled and may have difficulty rescheduling. Another friend who gets a much needed extension on a project because a class can’t meet when subways are shutting down and mandatory evacuations are proceeding.

It’s easy, under circumstances like these, to take it personally. People have a tendency to do what I call omenizing. (Sometimes I make up my own words I’m a writer. I’m allowed.) I’ve even done a bit of omenizing myself.

This really good thing happened! Fate is on my side and everything will be perfect.

This really bad thing happened! The universe is out to get me.

Oddly enough, I thought this was going to be a post about the irony and the luck involved in moving from New York to Florida and finding that the two biggest hurricanes of recent years are hitting the City instead of the oft-troubled and occasionally inaptly named Sunshine State. And I thought I’d be segueing into a hope that there would be even bigger miracles—that the storm would turn out into the ocean, missing my fellow Americans and all the ships at sea.

But, as I write this, a little quote comes to mind that I first read in one of Robert Fulghum’s books, and I think this is the larger idea.

Sometimes it rains on the just. I believe that.
Sometimes it rains on the unjust. I believe that, too.
But I also believe that sometimes it just rains.
Neither God nor Justice or belief has anything to do with it.
—Anonymous

I think the fact that humans have the capacity to evolve to the point where we do not have to attribute these things to superstitious beliefs is, maybe, the biggest miracle.

And we can still hope that no one is hurt in the coming days.

Hope hard.

Hope never hurts.

There is no good reason. . .

. . .to eat funnel cake.

Except, of course, that you think it is going to taste good.

Trust me.

It will not.

This is the result of the law of the universe which states that almost nothing you enjoyed as a child is as good as you remember it.

Now, when I say that funnel cake will not taste good, that is an exaggeration, of course. It’s fried dough and powdered sugar. How bad can it be?

It’s just that it will not live up to the anticipation. It’s fried dough. And powdered sugar. Hot, greasy, sticky, too big, too sweet, and most likely, too expensive. If you’re anything like me, you will end up being sorry you bought it.

Not that this will stop you from eating it at the time or buying it in the future. It’s very hard to resist childhood treats when you are on an outing. And you will almost certainly be on an outing when funnel cake crosses your path. It is most commonly found at carnivals and fairs and flea markets and harvest festivals. You can make your own. But will you? I think not.

There are other fried dough foods—zeppolis, beignets, sopapillas—and, I venture to say, the experience is probably pretty similar. You buy them because you remember liking them as a kid. You scarf down this heavy dough, managing to thoroughly dust yourself with powdered sugar in the process, and you finish up with a strange craving for insulin.

It is disappointing.

Odds are. . .I’ll be doing it again the next time I see a funnel cake stand. As Samuel Johnson once said, in regard to something entirely different, it is ‘the triumph of hope over experience.’

300 miles

Out at sea.

Hurricane Sandy is 300 miles off the coast of Florida, and the wind has been blowing hard all day. The sky is gray and gloomy.

300 miles away.

Now, that’s influence.

Some big storm.

I’m hoping it blows itself out and doesn’t hurt anybody.

It caused me to check into something, though, and I’ve discovered that one of the things I remember never happened.

I used to tell people that my fifth birthday party had to be cancelled because of a hurricane. “And I think it was named Elaine,” I tell them.

I thought it was.

However, thanks to Google, I now know that Hurricane Elaine didn’t happen when I was five. There have been quite a few storms named Elaine. It’s just that none of them happened when I was five.

I’m absolutely sure my birthday party was canceled that year because of a hurricane. Research shows which one, too, but I’m not going to tell you. (Cyber-security. I may have lost my punchline, but I don’t need to give up my birthdate to random readers.)

There’s some Sandy somewhere, though, who is going to have a birthday party canceled this week. Let’s hope that’s the worst that happens. She—or he—will have a good story to tell, at some point.

It’s just not my story.

Google should come with spoiler alerts.

I guess I’ve had that writer’s impulse to make a story better for a lot longer than I knew. Can’t use that one anymore, though.

Oh, well.

What we lose in irony, we make up in veracity.

The truth will set you free.

And, sometimes, it will spoil a good story.

If you thought Spenser was tough—

Meet Jack Reacher.

I found these books. I love it when I find a good writer who has written a whole series of books. (Of course, my favorite writer ever is Harper Lee, and she only wrote one book—but she only needed to write one.) It doesn’t happen often at this point, because I read a lot. It often seems like I’ve already read all my favorites—and sometimes more than once.

Just recently, however, I came upon Lee Child and his Reacher series. You wouldn’t have thought I’d like them. I tend to prefer the genteel English murder mystery to machismo and militarism. Violence doesn’t appeal to me.

But I had these books.

So, I checked them out.

I’m big on first lines. In my experience, a good first line is a good first step. It usually means the writer knows how to put words together. She knows how to get your attention. Chances are she will be able to keep it. (It doesn’t always work. The very best first line I ever read came in a book I could not finish. Just couldn’t get to the end of it. And I finish almost every book I start. That one was very disappointing.)

There are great first lines, and there are first lines that are just okay. I’m thinking the first line of the first Reacher novel was sort of in between. Averagely good. Which is to say, above average. Enough to set up that question in your mind: Why? And what’s going to happen next?

So, I kept reading. All the way through the next 15 novels.

The plots are surprisingly complex—with new twists. Not the same old action-adventure stuff at all.

The writing is good. There’s a voice there, a command of language, some psychological insight.

I know, for sure, that I would not like Jack Reacher if I met him in person—but I’d sure want him around if I were in danger. He meets violence with violence, and I’m not sure I approve of that in the real world (some would say it’s arguable that I don’t actually live in the real world)—but since he never attacks first, and the bad guys are like really bad, it works for me in the books.

He’s larger than life, of course, with a number of nearly super-human characteristics and an unlikely ability to figure out what the bad guys are going to do by just putting himself in their place. I mean, it’s not really believable that a person can stand outside the Four Seasons in New York, look at the surrounding blocks and decide that the quarry must be in the third brownstone on the left out of all the millions of places to hide in the city. But I can suspend my disbelief that far.

I like competent characters. Reacher is that, for sure. Those first 15 books were a good find.

Now I’ve got to go find the last two.

A breeze and some sunshine

And humidity under 80%.

I had such a nice day yesterday. Didn’t get much done, but that was part of what made it nice.

First of all, I overslept—which could, of course, be a disaster if there’s somewhere you have to be, but I did not have to be anywhere. For me, it was a surprising blessing.

We moved here because of noise. One of the things I particularly hated about the noise was I never got to wake up on my own time. I had quit my job, and I thought I was entitled to revert to my natural rhythms. Left to myself, I want to stay up until about 1 or 1:30 and get up around 8 or 8:30. I had the staying up part down, but big crashes and stomps above my head were never going to let me sleep in.

So, we moved. At which point, I found myself going to bed at around 9 or 10, exhausted from all the new things required of me by the new house—by owning a house at all. And I was waking up by 6, if not at 3 or 4.

In an odd, inverted way, it reminded me of this little stanza by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Grown-up

Was it for this I uttered prayers,
And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs,
That now, domestic as a plate,
I should retire at half-past eight?

All of that is kind of beside the point, however, which is that I overslept today for the first time in years.

That put me a little bit behind, but I got my workout in. I used my new nut catcher to round up some sweet gum balls, and I used some Round-up to—I hope—discourage the sweet gum seedling that is trying to grow up in the middle of my labyrinth.

And then, I did nothing.

I just decided to put aside the multiplicity of imperatives that are usually buzzing around my head and only do things I enjoy and that I wanted to do.

I read a book.

Then, I realized that the weather was gorgeous, and I took my book out on the dock. The sun was shining. The breeze was blowing. The humidity had dropped to around 70%—which is low for here.

I realized that almost all of the days I like to revisit in my memory have been days like this. A Girl Scout camping trip to Cape Henlopen. An afternoon in a hillside cemetery in Nevada. A Connecticut meadow. A cookout in Indian River involving a 50’s style motel, a swimming pool, and The Music Man on TV.

Nothing much happening.

Just sunshine and a balmy breeze.

The days when you have all the time in the world, and you hope time never comes to an end.

Elaine Smith Writes

Anything She Wants