28 Days Later

Achievement(s) unlocked

The plan is to update this space on the first Tuesday of every month, but I’m putting this up a week early because a) I didn’t post until the end of January and b) February was VERY full.

In February, I took almost as many plane trips (8) as I did March 2020-January 2023 (10). Midway through, give or take, I found myself in a hotel room in Barcelona, trying to write a letter to my 14-year-old self. There’s a lovely app that allows you to send letters to your future self; I recommend it highly. But that feature was not available to 14-year-old me (duh), so I decided to reverse the process.

Who, I asked young me, not rhetorically, did you want to be when you grew up? I remembered a few things about my expectations. I was going to have three kids, two girls and a boy. (Wrong.) The boy was going to be named Colin, after the character in The Secret Garden. (Moot.) I was going to wear this incredible Mary Tyler Moore-esque white pants suit with my hair in a ponytail, but with two little side curls that were created by Scotch-taping tendrils to one’s face overnight (let’s move on). I would be a writer, probably a journalist, but it would be very much a side gig, secondary to motherhood. (Way too complicated for a parenthetical.)

So I shouted (wrote) across the years: HEY 14-YEAR-OLD ME YOU ARE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS BUT YOU ARE KIND OF A SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST AND YOU ARE IN BARCELONA AT A CRIME FESTIVAL AFTER TWO DAYS IN PARIS, WHICH YOU KEPT JOKING WERE “RESEARCH,” EXCEPT THEY ABSOLUTELY WERE RESEARCH AND YOU SOMETIMES WEAR YOUR HAIR IN A PONYTAIL ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S DIRTY ALTHOUGH NEVER WITH SIDE CURLS AND YOU DON’T HAVE THREE KIDS, BUT YOU DO HAVE ONE WHO IS ABSOLUTELY AMAZING ALBEIT NOT NAMED COLIN AND DO YOU REMEMBER THAT YOU THOUGHT COLIN WAS PRONOUNCED COLON THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEARN TO READ WITH PHONICS.

Something like that. More or less.

I never get tired of quoting two lines of dialogue from Broadcast News: “What do you do when real life exceeds your dreams?” “Keep it to yourself.” And yet I don’t, I can’t, I won’t. In dreams begin responsibilities, and I feel my responsibility is to be consciously, visibly, vocally grateful for the good luck I’ve had, especially professionally. (See, went to Paris to research a book, above.)

My life looks nothing like I expected and I couldn’t be happier.

Well, I could be happier, I guess. I don’t have everything, but as the comedian Stephen Wright used to say, You can’t have everything. Where would you put it? There’s nothing I do have that I would trade for the things I don’t have. If this is all that there is, to paraphrase the song usually associated with Peggy Lee, I’ll keep dancing.

I did a lot of dancing in February, in fact.

Because for all the wonderful professional things that happened to me in February — and I had some VERY BIG NEWS, which, alas, cannot be divulged yet — nothing could equal the joy I felt riding in Krewe du Vieux as the queen of Mama Roux. This was the big news I alluded to in an earlier newsletter. Being queen of a subkrewe is no small thing. KdV is a bawdy parade and this year’s theme, KdV Beats Off, led to a lot of predictable puns. Mama Roux decided to celebrate self-love with our own self-serve gas station, surrounded by old-school attendants. (“So, NOT self serve,” observed my witty stepson.) I have been marching with Mama Roux since 2010 and it never occurred to me that I could be worthy of being its queen. Temperatures were in the ‘50s during the parade, but I had so much adrenalin surging through my system that I didn’t need my faux fur stole. I danced, I waved my vibrator-scepter, I high-fived people along the parade route.

Yeah, 14-year-old me couldn’t have predicted that, either. But then, 14-year-old me never bothered to imagine life beyond the age of 40, in part because it aligned with the millennium, which seemed apocalyptic to me. Yet it is in the last 23 years that all the best stuff has happened.

Can’t wait to see what the next 23 bring.

Read/Reading: Beware the Woman, Megan Abbott; Vintage Contemporaries, Dan Kois; On Turpentine Lane, Elinor Lipman; Flight, Lynn Steger Strong.

Rereading: Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk. I Have a Few Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai

Me, Me, Me: Here’s the pre-order link for Prom Mom. And just in case you think my life is 24/7 glamor, when my travels finally ended, I came home, ran the dishwasher — and awakened to a scary, scorched mess in the machine. The repairman says I’m lucky to be alive, but I already knew that.