Anticipation

The sentence slides up and off the page at me. Well-balanced, nice use of metaphor, good insight into the character. Always a nice surprise.

It is lunchtime and I sit in my car between errands at the Auto Club and the post office. I am reading the submission of a member of my writing group for our next meeting.

I am filled with the desire to go home, rather than back to work -- to roll up my sleeves and bury myself in my own words for the afternoon -- NOT to sit at my desk at work and sort through financial documents for a client. I have a burning, pressing itch to spend the rest of the day writing, when my energy is good and I'm not distracted by fatigue or hunger, when I still have enough of me to give to myself -- to get to write out the scene that's been rolling around in my mind before it is forever gone.

Is that a touch of congestion in my sinuses? Can I possibly justify calling in sick?

I look up at the sun beaming down through my windshield, feel the fresh spring breeze and know that I feel great. No edge of malaise anywhere.

Grr.

Will I still have the passion, the energy, the urgency to sit at the computer when I get home at 8 tonight? I can promise myself, I can hope, but I know it's unlikely. I will prefer to sit and talk to my husband, maybe have a glass of wine and play with the cats while I watch an episode of "Lie to Me."

I work hard to remind myself that that's OK too.

Spring Classics

I spent most of the weekend watching the Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico bike races. It was almost too much.

I felt weird doing this when there is so much destruction in Japan. But after a few minutes, watching video of the tsunami and of computer-animated fission felt unbearably voyeuristic.

So I retreated to Versus and Universal Sports.

I don't know why I like professional cycling so much. I know the history of doping and its continuing threads into today's peloton. I like Lance Armstrong for his anti-cancer awareness raising but got tired of watching his comebacks and now I'm not even following him on Twitter.

I have no desire to ever ride 100 miles in a day, I don't look for opportunities to "eat" gels and bars instead of real food, and the idea of one of those week-long charity rides down the coast of California, carrying only as much as I can fit in a shoebox, leaves me cold.

But I can name upwards of fifty professional cyclists, I can give you a rough outline of most of the big races in the cycling season, and it is one of my dreams to go see the Paris-Roubaix race in person and be covered in the dust of those centuries-old cobblestones.

I like the day-to-day, week-to-week drama of the sport. Who is recovering well from a broken clavicle? Who is able to ignore the nasty comments made by another sprinter? Which GC contender is accused of not following one of the dozens of unwritten rules of conduct (like not speeding up when someone pulls to the side of the road to urinate)?

I also like watching the French, Italian and Spanish countryside roll by on my television screen. I feel like I've been on a slow tour through thousands of miles of Europe. From this, I know I want to go to Bruges and Brittany and Perugia. I know that the Paris suburbs are not very attractive (I probably knew that already) and I know that most of Spain looks just like Southern California so maybe I should just stick to cities when I go there.

So - Tirreno-Adriatico finished today and Milan-San Remo is Saturday. And then the Tour of Flanders is April 3, followed by Paris-Roubaix the next week. And then, in May, the Tour of California, taking place nearly in my backyard. I'm already planning where to go see it in person.

Soul Sister

Last year I helped clean out the house of my oldest living blood relative, my father's sister. My aunt moved to an assisted living facility and my job was to go through her house and try to cull important papers. My husband and I spent three dusty days going through old tax returns, computer manuals from the early 1980's, and copies of old angry letters to William F. Buckley.

But then I discovered the treasure -- my grandmother's household account book from 1927.

I was only eight when my grandmother died. I have fond memories of her but I never really knew her. But I did get to hear her first-hand description of what it was like to cross the north Atlantic in 1914 with two small children and what it was like to go through Ellis Island.

She was born in Northern Ireland in the 1870's and came to New York in 1914. Her husband died in 1927, leaving her with four children to raise. So when I realized that the notebook I found dated from the year her husband died the little hairs on my arms stood up straight.

The first page is written in pencil and is a recitation of the costs of a construction job for "Mr. Cooney" from May 5 - June 4. From other things I know, this was my grandfather's last construction job before he died. Apparently it cost $1,075 to put plumbing in a new house on Staten Island in 1927. Pages later I learn how much a funeral cost at that time. And a few pages later: "magpies stripping cherries from Mr. J's backyard cherry trees. Neighborhood perturbed."

I guess life went on.

I found a few other similar volumes, covering odd bits of years until her death.

I NOW know how much my father earned from one of his first gigs as a musician in 1929 ($4). I know when my uncle enrolled at Columbia (Sept. 27, 1934).

So I guess I'm not the only one in my family who has felt an inexplicable need to record what is going on around me.

The book now sits on my desk and whenever I feel stuck, I open to a page and try to decipher her handwriting. And I feel a burning need to fill in all of the empty pages, even if just in my own mind.

The Ritual is the Cab

I have always admired Twyla Tharp. The day I saw Mikhail Baryshnikov in "Push Comes to Shove" when I was a teenager was a key day in my emotional and creative life. I admired how she was an insider and an outsider in the classical dance world and how she employed a new vocabulary of dance within the strict, strict rules of ballet.

One of my favorite books is her "The Creative Habit -- Learn It And Use It For Life." I've read tons of books about the writing process but this book sticks with me because she approaches the subject of how to create something, day after day, project after project, from a different art. She doesn't tell me to write a thousand words a day and go to writing conferences.

Early in the book she talks about rituals. She explains their power. She talks about how important it is for her to start her day by going to the gym. But she doesn't identify that as the key ritual for her -- the ritual is when she gets herself down to the sidewalk and tells a cab driver where she wants to go. "The moment I tell the driver where to go I have completed the ritual."

I've been thinking about what the equivalent is for me. It's not sitting at my desk to write, because that doesn't happen everyday. It's not getting to the gym or to yoga, because that doesn't happen everyday either. But what do I do to help assure that those things happen more often than not? When I put it that way, the answer is easy.

I get up at 5:30 every morning and make tea (in a pot using loose leaf tea from India). I light a candle and sit and read for a little while. Right now, I have pictures of my grandmother with her family as a little girl and as a young married woman on my desk, because images from her life are rolling around in my mind for writing subjects.

By the time I finish the tea and read a chapter or two, I'm ready for what's next. Some days that means I just go fix my lunch (which means I will get to eat home-made food at lunch at work instead of processed purchased food), some days it means I go put on exercise clothes, and some days I go make another cup of tea (herbal this time to keep the caffeine under control) to keep the real day at bay a little bit longer.

Research! I'm so happy

Today is the first Saturday in weeks I've had to myself. I usually get a lot of writing done on Saturdays (or at least pretend I will) and try to go to yoga (or at least pretend I will).

I started my day drinking tea in the dining room and reading. I'm reading "Cutting for Stone," which has taken a while to worm its way into my heart but now it's good and truly wormed and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. As I was settling in to a good, long session with the book, the name of a song from the 1920's floated through my mind. It had nothing to do with what I was reading about - a hospital in Ethiopia.

OK, I thought. I will listen to that song when I go take a shower. And then a surge of energy pushed through me. I felt my pulse go up. No, no, no. It's the name of the novel I've been thinking about for the last week or so. Yes! That's it! Perfect!

I almost jumped out of the chair.

My mind started pinballing around, with a rush of images and ideas I almost couldn't keep track of. Paper. I needed paper. Before I forgot any of this.

And the first thing I did was start to list all of things I was going to have to learn more about to do this right:

-- 1920's jazz -- Bix Biederbecke, Paul Whiteman, Louis Armstrong, George Gershwin
-- women's fashion from that time -- Chanel etc. -- and how women's high end clothing was sold in New York
-- what was going on with the Irish Republican Brotherhood and other Irish political things at that time?
-- the Cotton Club, Broadway shows of the 1920's, Tin Pan Alley
-- the early history of World War I -- late 1914 specifically
-- banking and saving practices in the mid-1920's

Wow. This is going to be fun.

The Rabbit Hole

I'm just emerging from a few weeks of working on a case that demanded a lot of attention and a few weekends in a row in the office. It's been a long time since I spent an entire three-day weekend in the office. I brought in a bunch of yellow freesias, packed berries to have for lunch everyday and listened to the new Radiohead CD as loud as I wanted to but that couldn't really disguise that I was in my office for all of President's Day.

So despite my good intentions to do some writing, to get some pieces straightened up to submit for summer conferences, to get in the habit of posting here at least twice a week -- nothing happened on those fronts.

But still I carried my writing notebook in my black bag to and from my office everyday. Usually my writing notebook is a slim Moleskine or Apica notebook that can easily slip into any bag. But right now my writing notebook is a bit thicker, with a prominent spiral binding. The notebook was a gift from a writing retreat I went to two years ago. It's not the most convenient thing to carry but the quality of the paper is so wonderful I put up with the bulkiness -- it's a creamy off-white and very FPF (that's "fountain pen friendly" for those of you who are not drawn to such things).

And even though I know at the start of each day that it's highly unlikely I will have an idea or thought that I want to record, let alone find some time for dedicated free writing or anything like that, it's like a talisman. It just seems like bad luck to leave it at home.

At the end of the workday, as I switch off my computer and gather my electronic gadgets from my desk, I feel the weight of the notebook as I put my bag on my shoulder. I like it. I get a little lift of promise -- maybe tonight will be the night (as tonight was) where I can summon the energy after dinner to go to my writing desk rather than to the couch, when I can find peace and satisfaction in my own words rather than the words of others. Carrying my notebook with me everywhere makes me feel like a card-carrying member of something. And maybe I just need to be happy with that somedays.