Behold thy mother: when you’re grieving on Mother’s Day

A few years ago, I was mourning the loss of my marriage on Mother’s Day.  This year, I find myself mourning a much greater loss:   the loss of mothers.

Not my own, thankfully.  My own mother is still with me, young and healthy and, barring catastrophe, likely to be here for many more second Sundays of May.

But she lost her mother six weeks ago, and when she did,  I lost my “second mother” — my beloved Gram.

As passings go, it was a good one, not perfect, but about as good as it gets when you nearly make it to the century mark.  This time last year, I wrote in the book that she was “apparently immortal” as she was still happily living alone and driving her old gray sedan hither and yon, terrifying onlookers every day.

No one – not even God – wanted to be the one to take the car keys away, and so instead the angels chauffeured her to Heaven.  Or more, likely, she drove them.  She’d been driving for more than 70 years, and never had an accident or ticket.

It was a wonderful life.

It’s hard to grieve a wonderful life, when so many around me didn’t get to live theirs to the fullest.

Diane and her beautiful mother.

My closest friend, Diane, lost her young mother to cancer a few months ago, and walking past the Mother’s Day cards at the pharmacy is a dagger.

Also in Ohio, the husband and four children of Jennifer Phillips Graham, the best friend I never met, are enduring their first motherless Mother’s Day this weekend.

“Jen 1” – she got the honor because she was a  smidgeon older than me —  was ripped from her family by pancreatic cancer last fall, just months after her diagnosis. The speed of it was brutal and shocking.   In the middle of her futile treatment, on my birthday, Jennifer sent me four quarts of whisky-pecan ice cream, packed with dry ice, with a note:  “Enjoy your life. Every minute.” 

I do, and I try, Jen 1, but I am sad for you and your children this weekend, and I’m sad for my mom, and for Diane, and my friend Debra-Lynn, who wrote this beautifully moving essay about how you will always miss your mother on Mother’s Day, no matter how many years she’s been gone.

Because I have a tendency to wallow, my sadness also extends to mothers who no longer have their children, which to me seems the greatest grief of all.  I will never pass a Mother’s Day without thinking of Madonna Badger, the Connecticut woman who lost her daughters and parents a few years ago in a house fire.

I even feel sad for the damned moose whose calf was eaten by wolves. (And, just for the record, would you people at the Huffington Post please quit posting video that has NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH MY LIFE but still tears my heart to shreds?)

But I find that God – or the universe, or Love, or whatever euphemism you want to call the holy thing that animates us – always provides the solution before the problem arrives.  For me, for this problem, it seems the anguished comfort that the dying Jesus gave his mother at the cross.

“Mother, behold thy son.”

And to John:  “Behold thy mother.”

A sacred transference.

My own mother did this automatically, reflexively.   She sent me a Mother’s Day card and gift this week, a lovely surprise.  When I called to thank her, she said that since she didn’t have her own mother to honor, she was adopting me for Mother’s Day.

Beholding her mother, in her daughter.

It won’t take away her grief, but it takes away a little of her aloneness, and mine, and her caring honors the mother that she misses. For everyone missing a mother this Mother’s Day, it can be a healing gesture.

Behold thy mother. She may be gone. But she’s everywhere.  That’s the nature of mothers.  Of love.

How a gingerbread cookie made me a scofflaw

Since Charleston, S.C. is my spiritual home, I still read The Post and Courier regularly and last month was fascinated to learn that the Isle of Palms City Council was trying to fine a man a thousand dollars a day for using his car as a billboard.

This reminded me of a Boston author I’d read about a few years ago who used his family minivan to advertise his novel.   Mark Peter Hughes’s cross-country trip promoting Lemonade Mouth had given me the idea to buy a couple of magnets for the side of my Jeep to try to do the same thing, on a much smaller scale.

The Hughes family with their beloved “Penelope.” (Those kids are just too precious!)

The Isle of Palms issue made me wonder if Hughes and I were violating any local sign ordinances, so I thought I’d look into it for a Globe column.  I found no issues at the local level, but was astonished to learn from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation that any  kind of sign on a personal car transforms it into a commercial vehicle, as far as the law is concerned.

Here’s the story.

And here’s an excerpt from an email I received from a Boston-area pastor:

Every Lent, I make about 150 gallons of lobster bisque for luncheons on Fridays at the church. So I was driving over the Tobin Bridge, and stopped to pay the toll.  As the toll taker was handing me my change, he said, “Is this a commercial vehicle?”  I replied, “No.  Why would you think this is a commercial vehicle?”  “Because you have a flier in your window,” he said with a little bit of an attitude. “And the state considers that a commercial vehicle.” 

I was flabbergasted. I explained to him that it was a church luncheon, and he let it go somewhat reluctantly. When I got to my destination, I took the flier down.

Magnets for sale, cheap!

Lessons learned:

First, no more magnets for me.  Definitely not going through toll booths.

Second, I gotta find a new church.

Lobster bisque?  All we’ve been getting at Friday-night Stations of the Cross is cheese pizza and ziti!

A book tour from the comfort of your barn

When my publisher approached me about doing a virtual book tour, I didn’t say “huh?” like I would have a year ago.

That’s because I’d recently read this article in The New York Times about how virtual tours are replacing physical ones in the brave new publishing world.

(Well, yes, the article is from 2007, and you are astute to note it.  But at any given time, I can be seen reading a month-old newspaper or a decade-old magazine. When you have four kids, you get to things when you get to things, okay?)

Stephen King still get a book tour, yes. If he wants one. (Image via htmlgiant.com.)

Anyway, the traditional book tour – in which a publisher finances a cross-country trip for an author to do readings and signings by day and loll about the hotel bar by night – that’s over.

The biggest names in publishing still tour, but to fewer cities these days.     And if you’re an author and your name isn’t Anne Lamott or David Sedaris, you may instead have a virtual tour, a spin through the most popular blogs in your genre. Ironically, authors are likely to reach more people this way than through the old, expensive model of travel.

So how does a virtual book tour work?  A publicist sets it up, just like a physical book tour, only instead of contacting book stores, he or she reaches out to popular blogs. Once the schedule is set, the author “visits” the blog on the assigned day, to offer commentary or interact with readers.

Some blogs may review the book, or run an excerpt; others offer a giveaway, or publish an author Q&A, or any combination of the above.  Except for physical proximity, in many ways, it’s like an old-school book tour, minus the potential for soul-slaying indignities. (See Adam Mansbach’s ”Hell is My Own Book Tour” in Salon here.)

(Image via zazzle.com)

Most importantly for those of us prone to sloth, everyone gets to participate in the comfort of our own living rooms, or barn, as my case may be.   So, virtual book tours are a good thing for all involved.

On Monday, please come along as we launch the four-week virtual tour of  Honey, Do You Need a Ride? Confessions of a Fat Runner, coordinated by Emily Hedges of Hedges Virtual Book Tours.

Some of the best writing I’ve read this year originated on blogs, and I’m looking forward to visiting with the creators and readers of some of the most dynamic blogs on the web.  We start off tomorrow at Five Minutes for Books, which is a wonderful site for anyone who wants to read more, but usually finds herself, say, six years behind schedule.

Edited by Jennifer Donovan, the site offers reviews of new books, and a virtual Five-Minute Book Club that disects the classics.   I’ll have a guest post up tomorrow on “Books that Can Make You a Runner.”   See you there!

Review, Blindspot

If you have an eye, you have a blind spot: the place where nerves enter the eyeball and render anything viewed in that space a void. Google “blind-spot test” and you’ll find an array of mildly addictive timewasters to demon­strate that old saw of magic, “now you see it, now you don’t.” 

Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald give such a test at the beginning of their new book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People. Then they spend 200 pages positing that the blind spots that matter most are the ones in our brains, not our eyes.

This is hard­ly groundbreaking stuff for anyone familiar with the Implicit Association Test, a scientif­ic means by which to gauge racial and gender bias. Banaji and Greenwald created the test in the 1990s, along with their colleague Bri­an Nosek (who inexplicably is exempt from the book tour), and so they know the sub­ject matter better than anyone. This book is an exceedingly long Wikipedia entry, spiced with lots of cool tests to see how racist/sexist/ classist the reader is. We could just go to Har­vard University’s “Project Implicit” website, take the tests and pon­der the implications, saving $26.96 in the process.

That said, this book could be far worse. When academics try to talk about race and prejudice, they usually set temples ablaze when they’re not putting people to sleep. (The Bell Curve, anyone?) Here, the authors make plain and accessi­ble the conclusions of more than a decade of research on hidden biases, summa­rized beautifully by Emily Dickinson in the opening quote, “The sailor cannot see the North — but knows the Needle can.”

The gist is this: Biology dictates that human beings have innate preferences for peo­ple similar to them. While the open practice of preferential treatment — i.e., discrimina­tion — is discouraged and often illegal, at its innocent root, the practice is value-neutral. It enabled our ancestors to survive. Strangers, dangerous; homogeneity, safe. This worked out beautifully in theory and practice for a couple of million years; not so much today.

Today, we work very hard to ignore and hide most prejudices that we harbor, whether they be toward people of other ethnic groups, hair color, body type, religion, social class, or propensity to drive a Smart Car or a Hummer. In fact, we work so hard at this that we’ve taken to lying so others won’t think ill of us. “Blue lies,” the authors say, are lies we tell when we want to convey a truth about ourselves, even if the “truth” happens to be false.

Example: Someone asks a woman what radio station she prefers and she responds “public radio” even if she mostly listens to hip-hop. We believe, and want other people to believe, that we’re the kind of person who listens to pub­lic radio, whether or not we actually do; therefore, to our minds, the lie is justified, even weirdly accurate.

That’s the kind of info-nugget the authors serve up repeatedly to ensure that if we don’t ded­icate our lives to erasing unfair biases after reading the book, at least we’ll be wildly entertaining dinner-party guests.

But Banaji and Greenwald truly want us to eradicate our “mindbugs,” defined as “ingrained habits of thoughts that lead to errors in how we perceive, remember, reason and make decisions.” The brain’s amazing capacity to complete an incomplete picture is useful but disturbing in its implications. The mind constantly searches for ways to link information, to anchor it in our brain, and in its rush to do so, it often leaps over the truth. This results in what Stephen Colbert calls “truthiness” — things we wish were true because it benefits us, or confirms our pre-existing mindset.

The cost is to both others and ourselves, as when a woman doesn’t study math because she dimly remembers that Larry Summers and Barbie said math class is hard, and her Implicit Analysis Test reveals a bias unfa­vorable to women. Don’t look for an easy fix here, though.

“We do not yet know how to go about eliminating or out-smarting self-directed mindbugs,” the authors write. There may be some benefit from exposure to posi­tive role models, just as people respond more favorably to African-American faces after exposure to a highly respected black man like Nelson Mandela.

“A quarter-century of national media expo­sure to Oprah Winfrey, followed by Barack Obama’s election as president of the United State, may have occupied enough American media space to be contributing to alterations of African Americans’ stereotypes of their own race,” Banaji and Greewald write. “That said, there is no reason to doubt that the mind­bugs we direct toward ourselves are every bit as durable as those we direct toward others.”

At just 167 pages in the main body of the book, followed by appendices and notes, Blindspot demands a modest invest­ment of time for a year’s worth of Psychology Today.  It’s a self-help book for a nation almost, but not fully recovered, from a 300-year infestation of mindbugs. 

Originally published in The Hippo, 4-11-13.

One week ago

Laura, forever “the pants lady” in our family,  stops for a hug at mile one of the Boston Marathon, one week ago.

More like forever ago.

My daughter adds a condolence as we pay our respects Saturday on Boylston Street.

Boston this week, awash in compassion, sympathy and love.

Don’t just observe a moment of silence today:  show Boston you care, here and here.

Ten things a Southern girl never thought she’d say

*but has uttered, without shame or irony, after living seven years in New England.

10.   Kids!   You can wear shorts today!  It’s gonna be 50 degrees!

9.      It’s not a milkshake, it’s a frappe.

8.      Of course you’re going to school.  It’s only a minor blizzard.

7.      Shhhh!   Don’t ever say “y’all” in public.

6.      Push that carriage back to the store, please.

5.       I’ll have the lobster roll.

4.       It’s wicked nice out today.

3.      You call that a beach?

2.     Happy Memorial Day!

And the No. 1. thing this Southerner Emeritus never thought she would say:

Look, everybody!   Grass!

 

Review: Mastermind, How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

Here’s a mystery:   On second reference to Arthur Conan Doyle, is Conan Doyle correct, or is it just Doyle?  I’ve spied it both ways in journals of repute.

The author-physician’s given name is Arthur Ignatious Conan Doyle –  Ignatious, presumably his saint’s name; Doyle, his parents’ surname; Conan, the surname of his godfather.  So it would seem that Doyle alone would be proper.

But, then I came across this, a questionnaire the author himself filled out .. and he signs it …. A. Conan Doyle.

Good enough for me.   Here’s my review of Maria Konnikova’s excellent book on how we all can think like his most famous character.

   SHERLOCK HOLMES IS more than a hundred years old, but the curmudgeonly sleuth has been reincarnated more times than Madonna. Most recently, Gregory House of television’s House, M.D., is said to have been based on him, appropriate since Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was a Scottish physician. And both Robert Downey Jr. and Benedict Cumberbatch, in their recent portrayals, have contributed a brooding sexiness that guarantees his continued appeal. The newest incarnation is on Elementary on CBS, featuring Johnny Lee Miller as Sherlock in present-day New York. 

Brilliant, then, is Maria Konnikova’s decision to capitalize on the detective’s popularity, freshly fueled by the BBC drama Sherlock and Cumberbatch, its star. (If you haven’t heard of the actor, you will: There are 41,000 devoted “Cumberbitches” on Twitter.)

There’s no indication that Konnikova is one; she’s a Harvard graduate studying for a doctorate in psychology at Columbia University, no slouch in the brain department herself. In Mastermind, she proposes to make us all think a little more clearly, to operate more like Holmes, less like his amiable sidekick, Dr. John Watson. Even those possessed of average IQs can change our habits of thinking to produce dramatic advances in brainpower, Konnikova posits. “Your brain can be one quick study if it wants to be,” she promises.

Konnikova grew up listening to tales of Holmes’ fantastic capabilities, read by her father at bedtime. There were plenty of stories from which to choose: Conan Doyle introduced the fictional detective in 1887 and featured him in four novels and 56 short stories. That Konnikova knows the body of work is clear; Mastermind quotes liberally from the stories and books, as well as the TV show. She uses the interaction between the detective and his assistant to define two systems of thinking: Holmesian and Watsonian.

“Think of the Watson system as our naïve selves, operating by the lazy thought habits — the ones that come most naturally, the so-called path of least resistance — that we’ve spent our whole lives acquiring. And think of the Holmes system as our aspirational selves, the selves that we’ll be once we’re done learning how to apply his method of thinking to our everyday lives — and in doing so break the habits of our Watson system once and for all.”

To lead us poor Watsons out of the land of fuzzy, rote thinking, Konnikova first explains how we think and remember — or don’t remember, as the case may be. We only truly know what we can remember, of course, and the key to Holmes-like awareness is filing information in our “brain attic” so that it can be summoned readily. Our brains file and discard much information automatically, without conscious effort. But we can make our attics more organized and accessible by deliberately making associations to previous memories, and most importantly, by cultivating motivation to remember. Motivation and interest are keys to the attic. Yes, this seems intuitive, and much of this material is, but Konnikova makes it seem pressing and fresh.

The enemies of clear thinking include instinct, emotion and multi-tasking, the latter of which actively impairs the focus that Holmesian thinking requires. Attention is both limited and finite, Konnikova says, and when we pay attention to everything, we pay attention to nothing. Our eyes receive 10 billion bits of information per second, edit them, and pass on to the brain 11 million snippets of data. “Of that, we are able to consciously process only about 40,” Konnikova writes. And how we process that information is influenced by disparate things like moods and weather.

For the uninitiated, Benedict Cumberbatch is on the left; Martin Freeman is his Watson. (Image via Tumblr.)

The essence of the Holmes system is the development of good habits that overcome our natural mental inertia, the wandering state that lets us go 10 minutes, or an hour, or 10, on autopilot, without true awareness. We may see inattentiveness as a personal failing, but it’s actually a natural state, our brain’s default position. This logy place even has a name: the Default Mode Network, and evolutionarily, it plays a role. It allows us a break from energy-sucking hyper-awareness, yet allows the mind to monitor our surroundings for any approaching threats that need us to snap back rapidly to full attention. (Fun fact: When our brains are at peak awareness, working at full throttle, our pupils dilate just like they do when we stare at someone to whom we’re attracted. So, maybe the person gazing at you with full pupils loves you passionately, or maybe they’re feverishly doing equations in their left brain.)

Like a wandering mind, Mastermind at times repeats itself, and, as noted, many of its recommendations are intuitive. Anyone unfamilar with Sherlock Holmes might want to make his acquaintance before picking up this book; without knowledge of the detective and his gifts, Mastermind might be a study in perplexity. But longtime readers of Conan Doyle will enjoy it and possibly emerge a little brainier, and the Cumberbitches will be positively enraptured.

Originally published in The Hippo, 3-7-13.

Seeds of resurrection

Sure, there’s two feet of snow of the ground, but Good Friday looms, and we’re not going to let a little snow – okay, a lot of snow – get in the way of the traditional day of planting.

Today, Jase and I dug out the garden. True, it looks more like a donkey grave than a garden, and Foggy seems a little nervous. Also, shoveling the garden consumed energy that should have gone to shoveling the rest of the paddock, but there’s only 23 hours in this day, and my frosty soul needed to see the garden, or at least the icy outline of it.

I welcome the start of the gardening season, because it’s the only time I can get away with calling myself a gardener. Truth: I’m not so much a gardener, as a professional plant killer. You need a perfect good tomato plant eradicated, call me. My mother is a Master Gardener in South Carolina, and had, I kid you not, FRESH TOMATOES when we visited at Christmas. She could grow red, juicy tomatoes in cement.

All I can grow is kale.

Not even donkeys eat kale.

But it’s March, allegedly. I have my seeds, and my vitamin-infused soil, and my dreams.

This year.

This is the year I’m going to feed my family all summer from our little garden, never mind that it’s 24 square feet. The soil is finally going to finally have the proper ratio of donkey dung, Miracle-Gro and native dirt; the sun will beam, the seeds will sprout, and the slugs will go South for the summer.

“Spring” forward?

Well, at least we don’t have to worry about the donkeys getting out anytime soon.

Meanwhile, you don’t have to have a barn, or farm animals, to think of Daylight Savings as your favorite holiday.  For too many weeks, New England goes dark at 5 p.m.    Very glad to have that behind us until November!

 

A Gilderoy moment, please forgive

I sometimes say that Confessions isn’t so much a book as an extended magazine article, but I’ve fooled some people into thinking that it’s a book, so sometimes I get invited to book signings, like the one at the Bellingham Barnes & Noble this past Tuesday night.

There were eight authors there, and I was seated between two other writers who are also moms of four. (What are the odds?)  So as thrilled as we were to have people turn out on a cold, damp night to buy our books, we would have had a grand ol’ time just sitting around sharing the momentary lapses in sanity that resulted in us having more kids than sense.

If you haven’t met these terrific authors, let me introduce you.   Here is Juliette Fay, author of Deep Down True (which I’m already deep into, even though I should be reading my review book!) Shelter Me, and her latest, The Shortest Way Home.

And here I am with Rachel McClellan, who ought to be a supermodel, but instead writes these amazing young-adult novels like Fractured Soul and Fractured Light.  I would be jealous of her upcoming memoir, brilliantly titled Confessions of a Cereal Mom, but she’s too nice.  Can’t wait for that one.

Then, at the great risk of becoming a female Gilderoy Lockhart, here I am again with the lovely and talented Kaye Michelle, whose novel Return of the Heroine is a modern-day story about Joan of Arc.  Kaye also runs a yoga studio in Franklin, MA., where I will be taking my creaky old joints soon for some therapy.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to spend time with all the authors, but maybe there will be a next time.  Thanks to Mary Cliff, community-relations manager at Barnes & Noble, for inviting me and for supporting local writers. And for letting my daughter put Confessions up on the display Nooks:

Most exciting of all (for me, anyway): Congratulations to longtime My Pet Democrats subscriber Marianna who won the raffle for the Nook!