Little Orphan Laurie

No matter how old you are when it happens, when your parents are both gone you are an orphan. You have lost the two people whom you have known your entire life. The relationship between parent and child is very intimate. After all they have dealt with you through every thing -- poop, vomit, blood, tears, illnesses, accidents, dreams, failures, Christmases, birthdays -- far more than anyone else in your life. When they are gone there is a huge hole that they used to fill.

A week ago I passed the anniversary of my mother's passing. It was just two years ago and I still mourn her loss. This year it was punctuated by the loss of Lauren Bacall, Robin Williams, and the father of a friend. All the old feelings came back and I was laid low with a deep depression.

You don't "get over" the passing of a parent. The grief lessens with time and you learn to deal with the loss. You find things to help fill the hole. But it never totally goes away. I think that is why people have  created such elaborate death rituals over the centuries. It is not just to send off the one lost from the tribe, it is more of an acknowledgement of the enormous change that is happening in ourselves with adjusting to their loss.

I was talking with my friend and next door neighbor who helped me through my loss and I voiced that I was still realizing that in the last few years I was holding myself together and doing for Mom. Now I need to rediscover all of that energy that has had no place to go, turn it around, and use that energy for myself and the future I want to create for myself.

I made one last promise to my mother -- that I would finish my book and get it published. That is not just her dream, it is mine. In spare moments here and there I have been rewriting and editing. Now I need to take all of that time and energy I used in caring for her and put it in to finishing my book. When I tell people about it they want to buy it and read it so it may very well be the avenue to the future I want to build for me.

Mission identified and accepted.

The Bygone-Era Bear -- Writing Down Memories

Many people write memoirs. This is not to same as writing an autobiography though. An autobiography is an all-encompassing and generally time progressed account of one's life. A memoir can be short or long and recount a single event or thought or a series of connected events. I started thinking of this topic when I was looking at an old friend a couple of days ago.

I have known him for most of my life and he has been my most constant supporter for all of those years. He is a wonderful listener, great at mopping up tears, and he is never stingy on the hugs. I am, of course, talking about my toy bear. His name is Pooh (but not Winnie-the). He is named in honor of that very famous bear of very little brain.

Yes, I still have my bear. He still hangs out on my bed, although he has been relegated to the foot of the bed rather than the head. He is the head of a whole group of bears that have entered my life in years since. There is the bear I was given after surgery years ago to help me cough. And the bear I received on a job for a job well done. Bears that were gifts from friends. They are his posse and keep him company while I am busy being an adult.

He is old. Very old. Most of his tongue has worn away, part of his plastic nose is missing, there is a splotch of blue paint on the back of his head. Dear Pooh has been through numerous surgeries as I have mended the areas were his fur has worn out. He definitively has that Velveteen Rabbit thing going on. There is a little patch of fabric under his tail that is as new as the day he came out of that ugly Christmas box that was yellow with red figures on it.

My pairing with him was brought about by my godparents (the first set, I had two pair) after my first bear had died tragically in a vomiting incident. That was back in the days when stuffed animals were not washable. It had been a horrible few months during which I had tried to transfer this relationship to other stuffed animals to no avail. When this Pooh arrived (basically he is really Pooh Too) it was love at first sight and we have been together ever since.

Perhaps part of the reason that I was so drawn to thinking of Pooh so hard in the past couple of days is because my godmother passed away recently after a lengthy battle with Parkinson's Disease. I haven't seen her or her husband in many years, but through the best toy I have ever owned they were always a part of my life.

Why do I still hang on to this piece of the past? Because he has been such an important part of my life. I was an only child and he was the closest thing I had to a sibling. It embarrassed my grandparents to know end when I would drag him along to go out to dinner and then insisted the he also have a booster seat to sit in. My mother allowed it because she knew how bored I would be during dinner with four adults.

Pooh was the only emotional support I had during my parent's divorce and nasty custody battle. He was there for me when my mother went back to work and I spent long hours alone. He was always there for everything. Now that my parents have both passed away and I never married or had children, he is still a strong constant in my life. I may no longer need to hold on to him to sleep, or talk my problems over with him, but he is a bit of reliability and stability in my life. Just seeing him spending his retirement years at the foot of my bed gives me a feeling of emotional security.

Pooh has always supported my dreams, both realistic and foolish. He kept me company through my early writing attempts and never tried to talk me out of my dreams of being a writer. For a short time I tried to turn his life into a story -- in it he drove a VW Bug and lived in a house on a corner. While that tale never took off, he didn't take that personally. He has never told me to lose weight, or find a boyfriend, or wear more (or less) makeup. He always accepted me just the way I am. Writer's warts and all.

There. That was a tiny memoir. Now what are you remembering these days?

Lesbian Lessons

For years there have been millions of debates over gay rights and slowly people are starting to realize that gay people are just like the rest of us. . . well, hell they are the "rest of us." People are people. And weird things happen to people.

I am not gay. I have wonderful friends who are. I have no problem with anyone's "gayness." Well, gaydar" for me to pick up on the fact that she belonged with another woman years before she made history by coming out of the closet. For me it was a huge relief when she did.

okay, one problem. It is Ellen DeGeneres. Dear, sweet, funny Ellen. Oh, not with her now. Back when she first had her own sitcom and was playing it straight. Every time they had her character in a straight love situation it freaked me out. It just didn't feel right to me. I have just enough "

Earlier this week I had cataract surgery on my left eye. My friend Randi has been doing chauffeur duty. On the day after surgery we went to lunch before my day after eye check. We were sitting at our table at IHOP when another woman stopped to chat with us for a moment. Neither one of us will turn down a good chin wag with anyone, so we chatted.

After a few minutes of chatting I realized why the woman was talking with us. She was a lesbian and she thought we were a couple. Usually people mistake us for being mother and daughter. Randi is considerably older than I am. In this case she was also totally clueless. I was getting a chuckle on the inside. The woman was very nice and fun to chat with, regardless of the reason. Since she didn't address this directly, I didn't choose to correct her view. It didn't matter to me.

She veered into gay rights once just briefly, but since she assumed we were on the same team, she didn't need to preach to the choir. After she had gone on her way and Randi and I had taken off for the doctor's office I told her that we had just been mistaken for a lesbian couple.

"Oh, I don't care about that!" she said.

"I know, I just thought you'd be interested to know what was going on there. You know, the subtext," I responded.

We chuckled a little. It was interesting to get an idea of how some people see two women who don't wear makeup or high heels. It also gave me some sort of insight into a part of my father's life.

My father, though 100% Scandinavian, was very Semitic looking. He was mistaken for being Jewish on occasion. During World War II he was in the army and one of his fellow soldier went out of his way to make my dad's life miserable. It turned out that the soldier had assumed that my dad was a Jew. Once that misunderstanding was cleared up the guy thought dad was just fine. Something that really ticked dad off. Years later I was telling my Jewish chiropractor about the incident and took a picture of my dad in for him to see.

"Oh, my God! He looks like my uncles!" he exclaimed.

Being taken for someone you aren't at face value can swing both good and bad, harmless and harmful. It is based in stereotypes and erroneous thinking. In the wrong hands it can feed hate and fear. It can have devastating consequences. In the case of Eileen, I like to think that what she was mistakenly sensing as lesbian, was really a sense of kindred spirits.

If someone has assumed that I was a lesbian and treated me differently because of it, I have not had such an overt experience of discrimination. I fervently hope that this is because we are learning to accept people for who they are.

I don't wear makeup because even the hypo-allergenic stuff bothers my eyes. I no longer wear heels because I once actually broke a foot falling off of them and being overweight makes them uncomfortable. I am a feminist, like many women in my family over the past couple of centuries. I haven't dated in a while but am not totally opposed to doing so should a nice guy with a sense of humor, a good heart, and an open mind came along. None of this makes me a lesbian, but may make it appear so to someone else.


Looking back on the incident I have just one lingering feeling -- that Eileen would probably make a good friend.

Also, you never have heard, and never will hear, me say "that's so gay." Except for that one to make a point.

Orphans -- The Story of Us

The hard truth of life is that almost all of us will become orphans. I'm not talking about little children wandering the streets looking for someone to take them in. I'm talking about us -- all of us.

Except for those few who will die before one or both parent, the majority of us will end up as orphans.

Okay, that is kind of a strange thought for me to throw out there, but there it is. We all will end up alone. For those of us who have not had good relationships with our parents this may be no real big deal. If your parents were horrible and abusive this may even seem like good news.

For most of us this will be a gut-wrenching realization. No mommy, no daddy. It is not about who is going to take care of us now in the physical sense. It is a level of emotional support that is suddenly missing from our lives.

For the last couple of years of her life I had to do quite a bit to help Mom keep going. I would buy her groceries every week and would put most of them away. I would take her to doctor's appointments. Most of all I would listen. She was trying to write a book of her life during the Depression and so she was moved to tell me all sorts of stories that were cropping up because of that.

I can't really tell you what many of the stories were about because she was easily drawn off-topic into tangential areas. This happened often enough that I sometimes didn't bother to try to follow the story, but would let her ramble through the past. I usually did these conversations by phone so that I could take care of stuff on the computer, chop vegetables, or go through the mail.

We were best friends as well. She was also the biggest fan of my writing. So when she passed away it left a huge hole in my life. My father had passed 13 years previously so there was nowhere else to really turn. I am an orphan.

I do still have my step-mother, but, as Cinderella taught us, that is not always the best option. Though she is a kind-hearted woman, she is not the best at communicating that -- or many other things. She is rather judgmental and not afraid to voice those thoughts. Based on what my father would tell her about my mother, she could not stand my mother and would tell me as often as possible. For example, she once told me that my mother had never wanted me. I knew the truth behind the statement that she undoubtedly did not and ignored it. So this is not a place to find the support I am now missing.

When my mother passed away my step-mother first said that she wouldn't help me clean out her old apartment, but next thing I knew, there she was helping out. Perhaps her curiosity got the better of her, but I really appreciated her help (and that of her current husband). At one point she was trying to be supportive (in her way) and she started to congratulate me on no longer having my mother. It was coming out wrong and she stopped herself, but I knew where she was going. She wanted to acknowledge that the positive side of this situation was that I would no longer need to spend so much time taking care of my mother.

My step-siblings are a great source of support. They are better and communication than their mother, and have not placed judgment on my mother or my relationship with her. The possible exception to this is my step-sister who had had the opportunity to get to know my mother a little bit before my father and stepmother ever met. So she knows my mother was a good woman with a kind heart.

I also have some great friends who are a huge source of support. Wonderful as they are, there is just no one who can REALLY take the place of your parents in your life. Your parents have been around in one way or another all of your life. They taught you all the basics to get going in life -- you know, all that walking and talking business. You were a hero to them when you started using the potty on your own.

All of that history is exactly that now -- history. There are no future chapters to be written unless Mom or Dad start haunting the house. Now when I really want my mommy I can't even pick up the phone.

The time has really come when "You can't go home again."

Men, Men, Men, Men, Manly Men

Many years ago I created the "Heckuva Guy Awards." I would print out certificates and give them out to guys I knew who went above and beyond in being wonderful, caring human beings while not compromising an inch of their masculinity.

I didn't give out a whole lot of them. My list of truly manly men is fairly short because I am quite discriminating in my choice for the awards.

On Saturday I had to say goodbye to one of the men on this list. He was my "second" godfather. For some reason my parents couldn't decide for sure who to make my godparents, so I ended up with two sets. We lost contact with my "first" godparents after my parents divorced. My "second" godparents were amazing people who managed to stay friends with both sides.

Dewey was one of the sweetest and kindest men who ever walked the planet. He was the man who put the gentle into gentleman. The only time that I heard of him raising a hand to one of his children was when his eldest daughter was a toddler and she made a run at the street. The thought of her ending up as a spot on the road scared him so much that she earned a spanking for it. My mother used to tell this story to demonstrate how kind he was. The spanking of his daughter just about killed him.

When he was a young man he met a young woman named Sonja from Sweden who was in the United States for a short time. He dated her during her time in Colorado. It wasn't until she was on a train going to New York to catch a ship home to Sweden that he realized that he was in love with her and couldn't let her go. He hopped a plane to New York (this was the early 50s and not something one did lightly) and met her train at Grand Central Station. It was like a scene from some Hallmark movie, though Sonja said it wasn't quite as romantic as it sounds. It was a hot and dusty day and they found out that the state of New York had a three-day waiting period for a marriage license. They ended up taking a train back to Colorado and making a beeline for a Justice of the Peace.

They scraped and saved and bought a tiny cracker-box of a starter home right next door to my parents. When their first daughter was about to arrive in this world it was my mother who drove them to the hospital. The story goes that a skunk wandered into the path of the car and Sonja started moaning that the hospital would never let them in if they all smelled like skunk. Mom managed to miss the skunk and Gina came into the world without further incident.

When I came along over a year later Mom and Dad not only brought me home, they brought me to THEM, my other family. Gina was enamored of me and called me "Boo Boo," which is toddler speak for baby.

For many years our families traded Christmas Eves -- one year at our house and one year at theirs. Part way through the evening Dewey would disappear and like magic a Swedish Santa Claus would show up and hand out our gifts. Of course I always knew it was him. Though one year their son, Tom, showed me the mask and Sonja got mad at him for ruining Santa for me. No one really understood that I never believed that Santa was real. It was just that to me it was a wonderful time of year when even the adults were playing my favorite game of let's pretend. It was more about believing in miraculous possibilities for me.

Dewey was a very hard-working kind of guy. He worked at the Borden Dairy in Denver for many years. One Christmas Gina and I both got toy Elsie the Cows from there. Elsie would moo when you turned her over. I remember the times when he was working the night shift and we would try to play as quietly as possible so as not to disturb his sleep. He was the kind of man that made even us little kids want to be nice to him, even when you'd rather be running around screaming.

He always had a smile for a friend and a story to tell. He was a cowboy somewhere in his heart and away from work you would find him in boots and hat. He had, indeed, come from old Colorado pioneer stock.

He eventually went from the dairy to working for Itsy Bitsy Machines. For a few months I worked there as a temp and would occasionally run into him in the halls of an extremely large building. He always had time to stop and talk with me.

He passed his love of horses on to Gina and her daughter. He helped his granddaughter when buying a horse. He would get her to horse shows and help her curry the horse.

At the time of his passing he and Sonja had been married for more than 60 years. All three of his kids had good relationships with him. At his funeral his daughter Lisa said that she had learned the importance of silence from him. Everyone laughed because she had once been known for being a motor-mouth. It was a long education.

The world is a little poorer now that it has lost one heckuva guy. I wish I had gotten around to giving him one of the certificates. I hope he knew that was how I thought of him.

Live Long and Prosper -- Confessions of a Trekkie

I was a Trekkie as a kid. Not that I'm not one now because it is one of those things that you are for life, but when I was a kid I was more your rabid insane fan sort of Trekkie and now I am more your incidental, retired sort of Trekkie. I would rush home every day after school just to watch the reruns of the show ad nauseum. This was long before the days of video tapes and VCRs. I would try to audio tape episodes so that I could listen to them when the show was not on. Okay, that didn't work so well since even cassette tapes were still in their infancy.

Just to be clear here, I do now have the entire original series on DVD. Most of my collectibles have gone by the wayside, except for an original script autographed by Walter Koenig and IDIC necklace. Oh, and a stuffed tribble.

In high school my nickname was Spock. My best friend was Captain Kirk. I didn't know that her real name was Diane until I had known her for several weeks because we met in a Star Trek moment. That moment was also when we got our nicknames.

She was sitting with a mutual friend and saying "This is MY starship!" I walked up and said, "Logically, Captain, the ship belongs to Star Fleet." It was kismet.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Leonard Nimoy himself nearly died laughing once when I was introduced to him as Mr. Spock at a car show in Denver.)

Eventually we had two Captain Kirks as more kids from previous Trek groups joined us. The other Captain Kirk could have been the inspiration for the Big Bang Theory as he went on to be a university physics professor.

My interest in science fiction was hardly limited to Star Trek, but I was often frustrated by the lack of female characters in popular science fiction literature. As an aspiring writer this led me to try to write stories for and about women. The first short story I had published was a sci fi piece about a male astronaut dying alone in space after the destruction of his spacecraft. He is rescued at the last moment by a beautiful alien woman who removes him from his body. Her species had been watching over earthlings for many millennia and we had come to refer to them as angels.

But I digress.

Being a sci fi geek and a Trekkie helped me get through some very difficult years of my life. Back in those days these things were not as mainstream as they are today. We existed on the fringe of society and worried our parents. We endured many jokes of how we were doomed to live in our parents' basements for eternity without ever having sex. While I am sure that happened to someone somewhere along the line, it didn't happen in our group -- that I know of.

I would have happily married the second Captain Kirk in our group, but he turned out to be gay. I never married because I never found the right person. That, and I am unwilling to repeat the marriage mistakes my parents made.

I am still a geek and a nerd and it still makes me happy. It also makes me happy that both sci fi and I are both more mainstream now. Back then we never would have guessed that we would have not only Sy Fy as its own network, but also BBC America loaded with Dr. Who.

Life is good.  Live long and prosper everyone!

Kilts and Kin

Okay, men, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Women find a man in a kilt very sexy. I don't

know exactly why, but we do. It can't be the knees really, because shorts don't do it so much.

It could be that we hope for a windy day, but since you are all built with pretty much the same equipment, I don't think that this reasoning holds up either.

My favorite reasoning gets into Scotsmen and Irishmen being secure enough in their manhood to be able to wear a skirt, but I've had to rethink that when you consider that men have been wearing kilts far longer than women have been wearing short skirts.

Now I am wondering if it isn't some sort of cell memory handed down from our fore-mothers and the men they fell in love with centuries ago. That or past-life memories we harbor of men we loved in a previous existence. I don't know

What I do know is that I can go to the Scottish/Irish Highland Games in Estes Park, Colorado each September and sit and watch the caber toss for hours without realizing that I am actually watching SPORTS. Okay, men hurling telephone poles isn't exactly the sort of sport that saturates ESPN and there is definitely something overtly phallic about the event, but it is still sports. I rarely choose a single man to cheer for. I seem to just sit and enjoy the view (and I'm not talking about the mountains, which ARE fantastic).

My friend Randi would be sitting right beside me and noting the same thing, trying to hold back the drool and laughing at herself.

Randi doesn't know if she has any Celtic blood, but I know I do. I am descended of the Davidson clan in Scotland. For anyone who really knows me, it should come as no surprise that the Davidson lands are in Glen Ness, not far from Loch Ness. For anyone who is reading the Outlander book series by Diana Gabaldon, the Davidsons were/are neighbors of the Frasers and McKenzies. For anyone who isn't reading the series, I highly recommend it.

I do not possess a kilt in clan tartan. Instead I have a modest woolen scarf. The tartan strongly resembles the more popular Black Watch tartan. While wearing it at the Games I found that Davidsons and those from the Black Watch frequently mistake each other for clansmen, which can prove quite amusing. A Black Watch gentleman and I stopped short once and sized one another up. Then we exchanged clans, laughed, and moved on.

While I'm confessing my drooling attraction to men in kilts, I may as well make one other confession -- I LOVE bagpipe music. Yeah. I never claimed to be sane.

Gay Rights

Okay. I'm going out on a limb again. I will probably offend someone here, though I know that most of my friends are on the same page.

On May 1, 2013, the State of Colorado started allowing civil unions for gay couples. A dear friend of mine and his significant other of more than 15 years were among the first to make their relationship official. I am so happy for them both, except . . . I still think that they should be allowed to get married.

What is marriage, really, when it comes down to it? It is a civil union to make sure that the couple has legal rights on many issues, such as shared property and inheritance. It covers any progeny that the union may produce, etc., etc., etc.

While many people add God into the institution, it is really a covenant created by man, not God. Historically marriage has been used to create and cement political and economic alliances. It has been an institution for survival. Marrying for love is a fairly new concept and that, too, took a great deal of arguing to be accepted.

The musical "Fiddler on the Roof" was about this struggle set against the backdrop of the Russian Revolution. Tevye is a poor dairyman with daughters he must marry off. Even though it is the early 20th Century, the characters are still living in a culture where they believed that young people were incapable of deciding such important things for themselves. So Tevye sets out with the best intentions to make the best possible match for his eldest daughter, with no real consideration of her feelings. He made a choice to make sure she would be economically well-off. Never mind that the man was old enough to be her father.

She protests, begs her father to let her marry the poor tailor she loves. He relents and has to convince his wife that the original plan would have been a horrible mistake. Why did he relent so easily?

The musical did not tell the entire story. If you go back to the original short stories from which the musical was taken, Tevye had another daughter, older than Tzeitel. He had tried to arrange her marriage and he had been completely intractable about her personal feelings and he insisted that she would marry the man he and the matchmaker had chosen for her. So she drowned herself in the lake.

Not exactly the stuff of Broadway musicals, so they left that particular story out of the equation. However, it does explain a lot. Tevye was not a man without feelings and he couldn't face losing another daughter in such a horrific way. So his beliefs began to change.

Marriage is not a static state. It has been evolving for centuries. A wife is no longer considered chattel (the legal property of her husband). The right to marriage dissolution has become commonplace.  Interracial marriage is increasingly accepted and unquestioned. It is now thought of as an institution of love instead of a contractual arrangement.

Allowing same-sex couples to marry is the natural next step in this evolution.

Heterosexual couples have often made an even greater mockery of the institution of marriage than any gay couple anyway. Marrying for a few hours is the first to come to mind. Marrying and divorcing seven or eight times also doesn't help. Religious sects forcing young girls to marry old men is right up there. It goes on from there.

Where is God in all of this? God is love. If you don't believe me, check your Bible. These people love one another. God loves "them" as much as she does you. (Yeah, I went there too.) God doesn't make mistakes, least of all in the creation of sweet, beautiful people who may just happen to be a bit left of center to you.

The problem, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. I behold gay people to be people first and the gay part to be as incidental as the fact that I am not. Their sexuality is not a definition of who they are as individuals.

If we cannot accept this, then what happens to women's rights? Does this mean that we have to go back to the whole barefoot and pregnant thing? We have spent years learning to not judge women by their gender, that this is not the full measure of their identity.

Gay rights ARE human rights. It is the right to be who we are and as we were meant to be. Gay or straight. Right or wrong. Love or hate.

I choose love.

Embarrassing Moments

If there is one thing that binds us together, not just as humans, but across species it is the tendency to become embarrassed when we do something noticeably and incredibly wrong.

My cat regularly misjudges the height of the table and kitchen counters and ends up hanging from the edge by her paws looking around for a way to regain her dignity before dropping to the floor in embarrassment. If I am looking she will slink off to recover her self-esteem elsewhere. If she thinks I didn't see she will just try again and make it with no problem.

When she first came to live with me she was entranced by everything around her as she memorized her new home. One day I was sitting on the toilet as she walked across the edge of the sink. She was looking around so much that she walked straight off the edge of the sink. Man was it hard not to laugh at her as she ran off to sulk in the living room for awhile.

Of course I have had my own moments to feel like dying. When I was a kid I was sight seeing with my father in San Francisco. I was trying to take in all the sights and sounds of Fisherman's Wharf when I did a full-body smack into a parking meter. My father just about died laughing and said, "You know you are supposed to leave those where they are!" It took a sizable portion of shrimp from a street vendor to improve my spirits again.

A few years later, when I was in college, I was taking a tap dancing class. Let me make it perfectly clear that, though I enjoy dancing, I am terrible at it. As a final requirement for the course we all had to perform in the spring dance concert. The teacher had worked out a routine for all of us to dance in a chorus line to "That's Entertainment." I was certainly entertaining when, during one performance, I spaced a couple of bars of music and started dancing the wrong part. I did recover and get back with the team, but I was horrified. I asked one of my friends "Do you know what I did?" He looked at me and said, "Did I see what you did? Yes. Do I know what you were doing? NO!" All these years later I still cringe at the memory.

Then there was the time I locked my keys in the car. Okay, I didn't just lock them in the car. I REALLY locked them in the car. I was babysitting a little girl at the time and had taken her with me to the grocery store. We had gotten back to my house and taken the groceries inside. I shut the trunk of my car and discovered that I was stuck fast to the back of my car. Then end of my tunic had stuck fast in the trunk.

I hollered for Erin to find my keys. She came out of the house a couple of minutes later saying that she couldn't find them. In the meantime I HAD found the keys. They were inside the pocket of my tunic which was now locked inside the trunk of the car. What to do?

I had Erin grab my coat from inside the car (naturally the rest of the car was unlocked). As discreetly as I could I slipped out of the tunic and into my coat. I went inside to call a locksmith to come and release my keys from the trunk. I told him my tale and he still insisted on asking, "How will I know which car is yours?" Duh. "It's the car with the blouse hanging off the back."

Some of the funniest things I have ever seen involve animals. Like the poor man who was cleaning out the elephants' pen and has an embarrassing accident:

There was also the elephant who demonstrated that you don't have to be human (or live with humans) to be embarrassed:

Granted, humans are more easily embarrassed than other creatures. We seem to be the only ones with some level of modesty regarding farting. And we get terribly embarrassed about delivering a load of air biscuits at an inopportune moment. We've all done it. We will all do it again. I don't have a specific story for this one even though I know I've done it. Like most people I either excuse myself or, more often, pretend it never happened.

A few weeks ago I was ago I was at my favorite Mexican restaurant with my friend Randi. The place has the best refried beans in the world and I had ordered an extra portion. I made an off-hand comment that I was now likely to blow the cat right off the bed that night. Randi laughed so hard she almost choked to death on her chimichanga.

For writers embarrassing moments are, like so many other moments, the stuff of creativity. They are pure gold. To make characters real they need to have truly human moments and embarrassment is one of the ways our egos are humbled when we get too full of ourselves.

My first book is humor, so the embarrassing is a huge part of what happens to people. It is not just embarrassment, but the way you tell it that makes it funny. Making it funny takes the sting out of it. Making it insulting just makes it nasty. So it depends on your story and your character just which way you are going to go with it.


So, how human are you?

Nuts, Neighbors, and NaNoWriMo

You don't have to be crazy, but it certainly helps. Actually, I highly recommend it. Being nuts, even a little bit gives you a great resource of human experience to draw from. Belonging to several writing groups on Facebook has led me to the conclusion that writer's do tend to be nuts. That could help explain why writer's are so commonly alcoholics and drug addicts. The rest of the world is only now coming around to accepting nuts as normal.

In fact, it has become something to which one aspires in certain sectors. At least that is the way it appears when I look at some of the kids I grew up with. Like Jello Biafra, punk rocker and spoken word artist. He is definitely not your average, sane person. Nor did he ever aspire to be. Which is probably why I always liked him.

Then there is Jane Shepard. She is an amazing film maker and writer, and is best known for having written the Showtime movie "Freak City," for which she was nominated for an award. Jane and I first got to know each other in the ninth grade when we were both cast in the school play, Sunrise at Campobello. She was FDR's wife and I was his secretary (later rumored to have also been his mistress). Jane is wild, freaky, and fun -- in other words, nuts.

Rick Reilly, former Sports Illustrated columnist and currently with ESPN, is pretty certifiable as well. He is one of the funniest people I have ever met. Eliza Cross has written numerous books and articles. I actually befriended her in church camp before we ended up in high school together. By then she was on the cheerleader track while I was on the sci fi geek track so we didn't really see each other much. Adam Eisenberg was among my geek tribe and has since gone on to be a Seattle judge. His original goals had included being in the sci fi field, writing articles and scripts which he did for a short time in Los Angeles. That judge thing was apparently an aberration because he has gone on to write a book about police women. 

Then there are the writers in my neighborhood, in my neighborhood, in my neighborhood. Oh, there are writers in my neighborhood. They're the people that you meet as you're walking down the street -- they're the people the you meet each day. Please excuse the Sesame Street moment. It is part of an earworm compliments of Facebook.

But I digress.  My next door neighbor is also a writer. Of course she is someone that many would consider nuts. In my city she is fairy "normal" but that is merely contextual. Aside from writing she is a professional astrologer who also does shamanic work and is studying to be a homeopath. She has self-published several volumes and runs writing support group for women. She has led an incredible life, which has includes time spent raising two of her children while living on an old blue school bus back in "hippier" days.

Then there are my Nano friends -- they are the craziest of the lot. This probably stems from the fact that we all took on the NaNoWriMo challenge and most continue to do so. November is National Novel Writing Month and so we all attempt (and most succeed) in writing a 50,000 word novel in that month. It is a wild and intense experience that we share through several Facebook pages. With each other we let down our guard and all the craziness can come out. The newbies are the ones who usually put out the tentative posts that start "Does anyone else. . ." This usually leads to a brisk discussion of how many shades of crazy we all are.

There is even one thread, more than a year old, that has become dedicated to letting out the weird. We rarely discuss writing on it, but we will discuss food as though we were all starving to death. Then there are the inevitable comments about burping and farting. We complain about family, compare pets, and just get to know each other through mindless chit chat. It is all a great way to keep stirring up the mental compost and keep the ideas coming and our writing fresh.

So, do you need to be nuts to be a writer. No, of course not -- unless you want to be successful and have fun. And it beats the hell out of that alcoholic path.

L -- Laurie's Loves

There are things in my life that I truly love and am passionate about. Most people do. Those who say they don't are probably in denial. So here are some of the things I love in life:

My hometown of Boulder, Colorado, is a beautiful city nestled at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It is a place of great beauty and great diversity. Thoughts and ideas flow fairly freely here. It was once a Mecca for hippies as well as the intellectual elite. It has been home to the likes of Allan Ginsberg and Jello Biafra, and Rick Reilly among

others (I went to school with the latter two). I remember sitting on the playground in grade school, looking up at the Flatirons and wonder how I got so lucky as to have been born into this place.


My cat, Naomi, the current darling of my life. is a quirky and lovable little character. When she came to live with me seven years ago she was an unhappy soul. Whoever had owned her before had played with her too hard and teased her too much. On top of that she had been declawed, leaving her feeling even more vulnerable to such attentions. When I first brought her home she would attack me on a daily basis. Just setting my hand down too close to her would set her

off. You might think that without claws she couldn't do much damage, but she was able to bite of blood with great effect. Most people would give up on such an animal, but when I brought her home it was for good. I kept working with her, making sure that all of my approaches to her were consistent. I resisted any impulses to tease her, even very gently, because I knew she would not take it well. She is now a happy cat, rarely attacks unless I forget myself and touch her belly, likes being pet. We love each other like crazy.

My home and garden. I have a tiny mobile home with a large garden. I live in what is probably the lowest cost place in Boulder. It is tiny, but it is all mine. I love having no other roommate than the cat. I

have lived here for more than 30 years and have slowly built out a sizable garden. People often stop when they see me out there to tell them how much they like my garden. One of my neighbors insists that I am raising fairies here. I don't know about that, but I love having my own supply of strawberries and raspberries each summer, as well as whatever veggies I choose to raise. If I don't spend enough time out there I can count on Naomi to come to the door to beg me to come outside with her.

My car is so old that she is almost a classic but she is just wonderful. Her name is Zsazsa. I adopted her almost 14 years ago after her predecessor committed suicide by throwing itself on a Mustang. That car had no real personality and Zsazsa has tons of it.  I'm just glad that this Zsazsa never even tried to slap a police officer.

I love all the old friends I have been able to reconnect with because of Facebook. They are a wonderful group. Some of us even get together in person once in a while. A couple of these wonderful ladies even came and helped me clean out my mother's apartment last year after she passed away. I love that during that difficult time they helped me keep my laughter.


I love writing. By now people are really getting to know that about me. I decided to become a writer when I was about seven years old. One of my poems was published in the PTA newsletter back then. So I have been working toward that goal ever since. It has never been easy, but it has always been rewarding. I have written just about everything, from magazine fillers to newsletters, and print news articles to professional blogs. My first book is in the process of being edited for publication.

The hardest thing of all in my life has been learning to love myself. I come from a family that was more critical than loving and accepting. It has taken a long time to build up enough self-esteem to feel worthy of having accomplishments such as a home, garden, cat, car, and career. I spent a lot of years convinced I was a failure in ANYTHING, no matter how small, went wrong. Learning to really believe that shit happens and we just have to deal with it as best we can and turn it into fertilizer at the first opportunity. Several people in my life and on my last job were instrumental on helping me get here.


I also love those who come about to read my words. Thank you for your patronage. Without you I would still be a writer, but missing the joy that comes with being able to share what I love with others. Bless you all.