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.

I haven’t written in a couple weeks because all I can think about is the weather.  Unprecedented they say, and I’m struggling to stay warm like everybody else on the East Coast. But I surrender, I’m going to write about the snow even though I’m absolutely sick of it. I’m sick of looking at snow, sick of complaining about snow, and yet, after last night’s snow, there is more in tomorrow’s forecast.

It’s been all about wool and layers and a down-filled coat and my fur-line boots with the non-skid bottoms and insulated gloves. And lip balm, lots and lots of lip balm. March is only a week away; but I can’t wait for this winter to be over. At least I have neighbors who will drive me to the grocery store or home from the library or clinic if I ask. I have ventured out on the rare occasion when the sun was shining; I found the one route with the least amount of ice, although it does mean walking in the middle of the road. But thankfully, this isn't Boston; and I’m not dependent on the T to get around. The store where I work in Ptown is usually closed during the winter unless I feel like opening on the weekends. I did, for Valentine’s Day, and we had some business, but it cost me a fortune to get shoveled out and I think I’ll wait until the latest three foot drift in front of the door melts before I do it again.

In the meantime, I realized last week my behavior has been very similar to how I acted immediately after 9/11. Yes, yes, it’s just snow, no planes are crashing into buildings half a mile away, no horrible smell, no living behind barricades, but paralyzing nonetheless. I’ve been trapped in the house alone not knowing if the power was going to stay on and washing clothes by hand in the tub because carrying a basket of laundry anywhere was more or less impossible. Oh, and I’ve probably gained five pounds, which happened after 9/11 too, since all I’ve done is eat and read – Lila by Marilynne Robinson, it ends with a blizzard, Alan Cumming’s Not My Father’s Son, heart-breaking as well as heart-warming, and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, which was perfect for lying on the sofa for days on end. And I’m not alone. I finally went to the writer's workshop which has been cancelled the last few weeks, and not one of us in it has been writing. You'd think we would, having nothing else to do, but all of us were shut down and incapable of anything close to contemplation.

So, snow. Not life threatening unless you caught in the frigid cold, but beyond our control and utterly, completely, unquestionably boring. 

I don’t like it.

Last week, after I wrote about the blizzard, and John Lennon of course, I mentioned how the snow would probably be gone in a few days. This has not been the case, in fact it has snowed several times since plus one day of freezing rain on top of the plowed up remains of Juno that then froze into solid mounds of ice. There is snow in the forecast everyday for the following week except tomorrow, although tomorrow it will be wicked cold. It even snowed today, it was just a dusting, but slippery enough if you happened to be out being blown around by the wind.

Ah, that wind again. There’s an old joke about not bothering to have a hairdo on the Cape, and more than once I’ve had a snugly pulled-on stocking cap blow off. It makes me wonder about Melville’s whalers and other sailors braving the hazards of the open seas. Imagine. Hollywood doesn’t do them justice, it’s a miracle any of them came back home alive. One of my Irish great-grandfathers was a fisherman who drowned because he got tangled up in the rope of an anchor that had been tossed overboard. This was my father’s mother’s father but there were sailors in my mother’s family as well. Her father was a steward on the Saint Lawrence Seaway who was gone much of the year, and her three brothers were in the Navy during World War II. So it seems living close to the ocean is in my blood. But spare me boats, I’m a firm believer in not going places I can’t get to on foot.

This week, between the weather and minor surgery on Friday, I’ve been more or less house bound and have spent most of my time on the sofa reading Eleanor Catton’s brilliant novel "The Luminaries". Confusing, yes, tricky and with a complicated structure, yes, and I must confess I went online to clarify a few questions, which, as it turned out, were the same questions as everybody else’s about the supernatural aspects of the book. Almost a ghost story, it also has harrowing seafaring voyages, I could hardly put it down. 

But back in the real world, I made a trip to the grocery store after posting on Facebook that I needed a ride since the roads were not walkable and within five minutes three complete strangers had volunteered. That wouldn't have happened in New York, neighborly strangers, it's what I love about Provincetown.