Haven’t written lately, life keeps getting in the way – at the moment I’m sitting in a cold dark store while an electrician works next door with the power off as I wait for FedEx to deliver a shipment. Luckily I brought my notebook since I’ve been waiting for five hours now.  So far, I’ve done both the New York Times and Boston Globe Sunday crossword puzzles and today’s LA Times Suduko. Too bad I forgot the tedious Elizabeth of York biography I’ve been trudging through, but it'd probably make me sleepy. So I’m stuck with my workshop assignment. The past few weeks our facilitator has been sick and we’ve been writing on our own, although last week instead of a prompt we read from our various projects and ended up having a conversation about our processes. We all do it differently, and the conversation led to this week’s prompt.

I’m a pen to paper kind of girl because of my painting background; I’m all about mark making. I’m also big on layers and will write something repeatedly until I feel like I’m done before I type a draft that will get revised until I’m satisfied. If it’s for this blog, I’ll copy and paste it to the site and then fiddle with it so it sits nicely between the margins. On the other hand, the novel I am currently, and hopefully, in the final edit of, has been rewritten multiple times. Originally it was told by the main character and done by hand in the grid paper notebooks I’m partial to. Then, and this is the process, I went back through that version and rewrote each page on the one facing it, the back of the previous page, and made whatever changes I felt necessary. Then I transcribed it into a fresh new notebook. Often this involved literal cutting and pasting, or more accurately, taping, whole sections in other locations until I had a version without anything scribbled on it. Then and only then did I type it into the computer starting with the opening of the story straight to the end. Once it was done and spell checked, I sent it to a friend for proofing. But before I got it back from her, I decided the three other characters should also speak, which meant writing the story over in each of their identifiable voice, and in their own individual notebooks, with a complex outline to keep the timeline moving naturally. We’re talking stacks of grid paper notebooks, several rolls of tape, and an entire box of the micro-ball pens I like. This all got typed up too, and revised of course, until eventually I was ready to have people look at it. Which was also about the time I joined the workshop and started reading it out loud to the group. 

And yes, revising it even some more based on the feedback that I found helpful. Sometimes this feedback was about the structure, but usually it had to do with distractions or flow. Both of the people who’ve finished this version have said not to make any big changes because they like it the way it is. Because, really, the book is finished, I just need to tweak the typos and get better at presenting it to the public. Nit picky, just like the way I paint, but I don’t understand going with a first draft. I want perfection; and since it’s me, I’ll copy this again before I type it.

The assignment at this week’s writer’s workshop was to compose a letter to a contemporary of the same age and gender with a similar background who lives in Afghanistan. This was for a possible book the group might put together, Greetings From Provincetown, that sort of thing, but alas, after some Internet research that only confirmed what I already knew, I simply would not exist in Afghanistan. I am older than the life expectancy for women there, it’s sixty-one, although the average age of death for them is closer to fifty given the high childbirth mortality rate and the undisclosed number of honor killings.

I never had children, but I did get divorced and earned a college degree. I’m also an artist and obviously a writer, and have supported myself for over forty years. None of which would bode well for me in Kabul, but what most certainly would have done me in was my sexual behavior as a younger woman. I’d surely have been stoned in my promiscuous twenties, or perhaps later for shaming my family or community by being the victim of a felony assault that involved both a knife and a gun. And if I survived into my forties, my brush with cancer at forty-three could have killed me since I wouldn’t have received treatment or seen a doctor in the first place.

More likely, I’d have been forced into marriage at twelve and promptly beaten to a pulp or thrown myself off a cliff. Instead I was lucky enough to grow up a white girl American with the privileges and luxury problems attached to that status. I may not make as much money as my male counterparts, but I can vote and choose to live alone or how to dress regardless of what other people may feel about my choices. 

So. No Afghani contemporary to correspond with; no letter written, addressed or sent. But not an exercise in futility either, it was more one of gratitude, because I am grateful for my health, my opportunities and my life. Which was probably, wink wink, the point of the assignment to begin with.

This Tuesday’s prompt at the writing workshop was a little embroidered felt yurt ornament and a small ceramic box shaped like a lighthouse that might have held kitchen matches. There were some interesting responses from the group, poems, a bit of fiction, a limerick, but I was too caught up in my taxes, don’t ask, to work on it until now. My first thought was about the Tibetans I had met while living in New York. They're the most beautiful and generous people, both physically and spiritually, I’ve ever known. There was one in particular who had lived in a yurt with his yak herding family until he came to America to make money to support them. He arrived not speaking a word of English and immediately had to learn to navigate the subways to get from the room he shared in Queens with another Tibetan to his job as a janitor at the store where I worked in Manhattan. Imagine. Not only did he have to deal with the noise and dirt and turbulence but abrasive New Yorkers as well. He'd just smile and nod and push his broom, he was the essence of gratitude.

I also thought of writing about the Tiny House movement because I'm fascinated by it having lived in a few tiny abodes myself. The Arkansas shack I mentioned a while back, and my first apartment in Soho that was 14x14 feet with the ceiling and walls all painted park bench green and felt like a forest cave. The cabin I had my first summer here was small too, it was half the size of my current living room but very cute.

But it was the ceramic lighthouse box that caught my attention. It was probably made in China, I didn’t look for a label, and no doubt had been bought in a tourist trap only to end up being sold again at a flea market or yard sale from a collection of knickknacks that decorated a kitchen shelf. Someone, or several someones, had taken the time to design and make it, then someone or several someones had bothered to buy it. And there it sat, along with an embroidered yurt ornament, on the table upstairs in the library where our writing workshop meets in front of the big windows with the view of a real lighthouse out in the harbor.

We have three lighthouses in Provincetown. The one you see from the library is called Long Point, another at the west end of the harbor is known as Wood End, and the third at Race Point is on the ocean side beach off Herring Cove. All of them are picturesque and show up all the time in paintings and photographs of Cape Cod. They’re our Statue of Liberty, beacons, symbolic; although my favorite is the lighthouse is in Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because you can walk right up to it on the beach. I did it on a frigid gloomy February afternoon almost ten years ago. I’d gone there for a job interview and was so sure I had the gig I had put a deposit on a funny attic apartment, but it was not meant to be. I was heart-broken when it didn’t happen, but I've got over a hundred pictures I took that day, and the knowledge, at least now, that if it had happened I most likely wouldn’t have found my way here – how sad would that be?

Continuing the heritage vein, my mother's parents, he the Ulster Presbyterian Christian Scientist convert and St Lawrence Seaway steward, she the Isle of Man Anglican, were strictly lace curtain. He was the grandfather who died when I was a baby during the time my mother and I lived with her parents while my father was away fighting in the Korean War. I have a clear memory of their house with its dark floral patterned wallpaper and the Jack Russell I was terrified of. There was the stone birdbath in the front yard and Canadian geese that ravaged the back garden. We were in a car accident, maybe in the parking lot after visiting my grandfather at the hospital, nothing major, no serious injuries, just another car ramming into ours from behind. I saw it coming through the rear window as I leaned over my mother's shoulder while she held me in her lap in the front seat; I tried to warn them, but I was too young to speak. Here comes the bump; all shook up. Uncle Paul must have been driving because my grandmother was in the back. He wasn't actually blood related; he'd been my grandfather's best friend on the boats and spent all his winters at their house even after my grandfather died because he had helped them pay for it. I loved his tattoos; my favorite was a hula girl on his forearm who wiggled when he clenched his fist. When I got my own tattoo in 1980, I was thinking of Uncle Paul. The night he died, he woke me up by sitting on the side of my bed and saying goodbye. He blew one last kiss in the doorway as the ambulance pulled up outside because, in fact, he was already dead. My first psychic experience, my communing with the ghost of Uncle Paul, I talked about it over and over, this was before my father came back from Korea so I wasn't even two yet. I doubt it bothered my Isle of Man grandmother, but my mother would say later she was afraid I’d inherited the Manx talent for such strange things, and I had. Especially as an adolescent, there was the incident where I woke up one night and saw the child of our neighbor swinging in the old rubber tire her father had hung from a tree only to find out in the morning she’d died, again, at about the same time. A few years earlier, when my family was leaving the States to live on an army base in Germany, I remember being very upset saying goodbye to my paternal grandmother because I was convinced I’d never see her again. All the adults laughed at me, but in a few months she was dead as well. I saw things, it was simply information, and usually my mother was in some way involved, if only as a conduit since she said she didn't believe in ESP. Once I stood with her and watched two deliverymen bring a sofa up our stairs and I knew they were going to fall. So when they both slid back down the steps with the sofa between them, breaking one of their arms, I already knew it would happen and said so. One of them said something about me being a little witch. And perhaps I was, although this questionable skill would more or less stop when my mother passed while I was in college, but that’s another story.

Always in a hurry, I was born on the way to the delivery room and then walked at eight months. This was confirmed by my mother's memory of me toddling around at her father's funeral although I can't remember it. Or him either, he was an Ulster Presbyterian from Belfast who became a Christian Scientist once he moved to America. His wife, my grandmother, was Isle of Man Anglican; in other words, they were strictly tee-totaling lace curtain, and one can only imagine how upset they were when my mother got mixed up with my Mick father. I have friends who have either a single black or Jewish grandparent and say that one quarter of their heritage makes them who they are. This was how my father's father's Catholicism affected the family. Not so much about the church, but politics and patriarchal rage.

Legend has it my paternal grandfather stowed away on a boat leaving Cork while the Black and Tans were looking to hang him for blowing things up. He supposedly jumped ship in Nova Scotia, swam ashore and then wandered around Ontario until he met my grandmother who was there on vacation. She was Irish too but came to the States as an infant with her mother after her sailor father drowned in a fishing accident. Her mother got remarried to a Michigan farmer who adopted her two orphan daughters and raised them as strict Methodists. I believe that my Methodist grandmother made my Catholic grandfather take the Pledge not to drink before she married him. Either way, he was a very angry man who had no tolerance for children. I learned quite young to gauge his mood by how much English he was speaking. The thicker his brogue the angrier he was, and Gaelic meant all small children should get out of the house. He stabbed me with a fork once for having my elbow on the dinner table.  My brother and I didn't eat with my parents since our father had an aversion to small children too, so our table manners were not the best.

But I loved my grandfather; I still get a thrill when I hear an Irish accent. Besides being Sinn Fein, his siblings were horse thieves and prostitutes. Not a lot of job skills there, so there was not a lot of money to be had either, especially during the Depression when my grandfather is said to have been running booze across the frozen Great Lakes gangster style, although he was working as a mailman by the time I knew him. Which is probably why a whole other family from across town showed up at his funeral and introduced themselves to my father and his sisters saying they were his children and grandchildren too. I met one of them once, those long lost half cousins, in New York, in a bar, who insisted I looked like his sister and that we were related. I ignored him, we’d both been drinking and I didn’t trust him, but he had too much information for it not to be true.

Ah, the luck of the Irish, I wore green on Tuesday – did you?

I read the dinosaur blog post at an open mic reading in the library last night. They liked it; there were satisfying murmurs and several bouts of laughter as well as a nice round of applause when I was done. I started off by saying I’d joined a workshop and had been doing readings for my novel but I now find myself more involved with memoir work. In fact, because of the time limit at most of the open mic sessions I’ve been to recently, usually I read from the blog. My Zippy the Roller-skating Chimpanzee post and the one about John Lennon were so well received that I read them together at the presentation the workshop did for Valentine’s Day. I’ve read the first chapter of the novel twice now, each time led to revisions, but the feedback I'm getting from both the other writers in the group and the audiences is that the memoir work is much better than my fiction. 

I’m enough, my history is enough, but what to do about this novel? When I first joined the workshop last fall and began blogging again, I was in love with my characters. I’ve been living with them since before I left New York, they’re my friends, I know them. I was dedicated to their stories and bringing them to life, but I wasn’t ready yet, I didn’t have the extra cash to copyright it before sending it to agents much less out into the ether. I am ready now; I have enough money, a webpage, a blog, and an acceptable following under my pen name on Facebook and Twitter. I intend go forward with the copyright registration, and once that’s in place, I’ll start contacting agents with my query and elevator speech synopsis, and the first chapter if appropriate. But it’s the memoir work that has my attention. Hopefully I can do both; the job of selling a finished product I love but have let go of, and this new, more truthful peeling back process. It’s actually not new; I wrote a memoir at forty-five and another about a specific event when I was sixty. Neither went anywhere, but they are excellent source material for what I’m doing now, and in each case, basically all that is required is minor editing and stylistic revisions so they have the same voice. 

I turned sixty-five last weekend, we had giant chunks of ice wash ashore in the harbor yesterday, perhaps now is as good a time as any to combine those two memoirs into one cohesive piece; if not for you, the public, then at least for me.

When I was five or six, my mother gave me a Golden Book about dinosaurs for Christmas. I clearly remember disappearing into those pages while sitting in a patch of sunlight on the rug in front of the tree beside the fireplace. When I got sober at thirty-eight and the eggshell around my addiction and sorry choices collapsed, dinosaurs once again called out to me. In the beginning it was just toys, a Godzilla lighter gushing flames from his mouth, a pair of glow in the dark stegosaurus. But it was while walking through the dinosaur rooms at the Natural History Museum and reconciling with my wounded inner child that I became an adult; by the time I'd seen the whole exhibit, I felt safe and grown up. Afterwards, I went to the souvenir shop and found the same Golden Book I had read by the tree that Christmas. We, my invisible inner child self and I, bought the book, then walked through Central Park and promptly went into Bergdorf's for a bottle of Chanel #5. It was 1990, and suddenly dinosaurs were everywhere, all my friends were giving them to me. I went into the hospital during that time and when I left ten days later, I needed a shopping bag for all the dinosaurs I’d acquired. I must have been a funny sight, a predatory blonde with an IV and two catheter bags in bed with an army of little monsters to protect her.

In college, I saw FANTASIA in London with my mother. Each seat in the theater had an ashtray on the armrest. A joint was being passed down our row, the English stranger to my right handed it to me. I took a hit, and then without thinking, offered it to my mother. She took a long drag and passed it back to me. There are dinosaurs in FANTASIA, fabulous ones in fact, and nymphs and fairies to tell the story of my demons and redemption for me. I think this may go back to another incarnation, my Irish tinker roots perhaps. I feel the pull of a caravan wagon, I also feel the tug of a tepee and following the buffalo; I was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, which is where Geronimo died when he was imprisoned there with his tribe, so maybe I picked up one of their souls. But I feel those pioneers venturing west too; if not the wife or child of an Apache.

Humor me, how many pairs of feet have I walked on? A buxom wench slopping grog and servicing drunks against a wall behind the stables who died in childbirth or drowned in a bog unnoticed only to return and die again of famine or political violence. Then it might have been on to the States as a Shaker or Quaker or a missionary nun; another hard life of service. I could have been on the Trail of Tears, or a white woman on a wagon train who ended up as a little scrap of blonde scalp on some Indian's belt; which would justify my coming back Native American. Those Wild West saloon girls call my name, too; I was there. I can smell it, the sweat and smoke and dust, the sum of my parts. A warrior whore now wrinkled and old in her shapeless black clothes suits me nicely.