Spelling for a Cure

There’s a woman in town who has cancer. Since she’s your basic writer/musician/storyteller, and since she lives in the good old USA where if you don’t work for a big corporation you’re hosed, she has no health insurance. And now she has cancer. So what did the good citizens of Livingston do?

Had a spelling bee.

A spelling bee that put the local writers on the spot. So at seven o’clock last night, there they were: Elwood Reid, Tim Cahill, Thomas Goltz, Diane Smith, Alston Chase, Jim Liska, and a bunch of other people who I don’t know yet because I haven’t been in town very long (which I’m assuming is also why I wasn’t also put in the spelling hot seat). “Kristie the Wordsmith” and local singer and bartender Mike Devine (who looks like he could be in ZZ Topp) were the judges, and our very own Scott McMillion was the MC. They used the official spelling bee rules, and so one by one, all these writers got up and took their shot at words like “tetrahedron” and “lieutenant” and “calliope”. It was great fun, with much bad behavior and drinking and some very fine spelling. There was a calcutta, and silent auction and dancing afterwards and Deb Corbett, who the benefit was for, was well enough to sing with the band … and she’s good. So we all threw our tens and twenties at the problem, knowing it probably isn’t enough, and knowing that it isn’t going to solve the larger problem of living in a heartless nation that is perfectly willing to let people die from diseases we know how to treat because it’s more important to have a for profit health care system, a system in which a few get rich at the expense of people who are sick, because of course profit is more important than not letting people die, so some people volunteered to spell, and the rest of us came, and threw our little tens and twenties at the problem because really, what else can we do?

Now, although I’m glad I didn’t have to spell in public, I must admit a tiny part of me was … not jealous exactly, but feeling that my tiny career was perhaps a bit more tiny than I’d like it to be. Not that the phone call I got a couple of weeks ago from my editor’s assistant informing me, in the nicest way possible, that my book is going out of print and how many copies of the paperback would I like to buy, had anything to do with this. Nor did seeing Elwood up there, who is about my age, and who has published three novels, and a book of short stories and who writes screenplays and magazine articles, have anything to do with this creeping sense that perhaps I’m, well, slacking. And then this morning, in the SF Chronicle, there’s Jane Smiley saying that for this book she limited herself to one page a day, seven days a week, instead of her usual two or three pages (seven days a week).

And so I pulled up my writing log this morning (yes, I keep a log. It’s the only way to stay honest about these things), and gee, look at that, I haven’t worked on my book since … I’m ashamed to say … April 22, which is over two weeks ago. No wonder I don’t have three novels out. Shit. Time to get back to work. I’m determined to have a draft of the whole thing by the end of the year, and although blogging, and gardening, and obsessing over paint colors for the inside of my house (and dreaming of how beautiful my dark-pink-and-bright-white office is going to be) and going to dinner parties with potential suitors, and going to spelling bees, and training the dogs, and working my pesky-but-lucrative day job are all worthwhile activities, my real job here is to write this book. Whether anyone wants to read it is another story, but it’s my job to write it. So, if I’m not blogging as often, think good thoughts for me, send good wishes that I’m here in my little front room producing actual scenes and pages and characters who are alive and living through interesting dilemmas.

Small Town Life Here’s what I love about living in a small town. My block has about six houses on each side of the street. Ed is my neighbor across the street. He’s an older gent, and he was in flooring for his working life. When I first moved in, Ed brought me a trivet he’d made from leftover flooring samples … it’s perfect to go under my rice cooker. Well, Ed owns a snow blower, and it snowed last night, about a foot and a half. Now Mike lives on my side of the block, two houses down from me. He’s my hippie housepainter neighbor, and the first person I met here. When the weather is nice, Mike sits on his front porch in the morning drinking coffee, noodling around on his guitar and saying hello to people. For the first week or so that I was here, Mike and the guy at the hardware store were just about the only people I spoke to all day long.

Here’s how the neighborhood works when there’s snow. Ed snowblows the sidewalk on his side of the street, and then hands the snowblower off to Mike, who does our side of the street. While Mike was snowblowing over here, I looked out the window and there was Ed, shoveling the steps for his next door neighbor, Minnie. Well, actually it looked like he was expending as much energy convincing Minnie, who broke her hip last year, not to shovel her own steps as he was in getting this little chore done for her. We worry about Minnie, she’s gettiing quite frail, but there she was in her little pink parka and a stocking cap, with her shovel in one hand, ready to take on her front steps. And there was Ed, who is no spring chicken himself, chatting her up to keep her safely on her own top step while he cleared the snow to the street for her. It’s a nice way to wake up in the morning, watching Ed and Mike taking care of our little block. .