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No Red-Letter Day

7/30/2012

I'm getting letters.

Asking where the letters are.

Uh oh.

Let's just say I'm a bit behind with my correspondence. Not good for someone who bills herself as a letter writer. (See that bit of puffery on the right-hand side of this page, just above the Nancy postage stamp?)

I have a satchel full of excuses. I even have a little beaded coin purse in which a couple of legitimate reasons are clinking together, making merry in the dark. But when I look in my stamp drawer and see the meticulously cared-for bonsai, the folksy bouquet, a swampy landscape and those 10 poets' omniscient faces, I'm reminded of the real faces peering into empty postboxes, expecting to find a letter that not only isn't there, but isn't even on its way to being there.

The check's in the mail, the old joke goes. To those of you who've sent out the needle (you know who you are) and to those of you who wish you had, let me say this: The letter's in the mail. And that's no joke.

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That Ol' Shuck and Dive

7/23/2012

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We have a code in our household: DIVE!

DIVE! is used in the grocery store, the theater lobby, on the street corner. It's used when one of us (okay, okay, most often me) sees someone we hadn't planned to see. DIVE! is meant not so much as a command as an explanation for my sudden bolt down the cereal aisle, the quick hunker behind the Spiderman display, the mad dash into cross traffic . . . whoops! THUNK!

I'm a bit of a shy creature. Shy, and missing the spontaneity gene that makes a surprise encounter an exercise in jolly good fun. The blood drains out of my skull; my tongue gets thick in my mouth. A simple Hi, How are you? however genuinely it might be felt, blubs out in a spittled wad of burble burble. Trust me: It's not pretty.

So there I was on Saturday, strolling across the Costco lot when . . . my name called out from one of the parked cars, the sun striking with the momentary blindness of windshield light, and me with no place to bolt, hunker, dash or dive. Fortunately for me, the universe is merely random in the doling-out of its genetic cruelties, and by some equal stroke of universal mercy, I've been embedded with a modest string of deportment code.

Which is to say, I pulled up my big-girl underpants, sucked in a deep breath and turned to greet whoever that woman was who had called out to me there.

It was Annie. Annie the tech from the veterinary office. Annie from the veterinary office 8 years ago, where we'd taken Travis, our beloved but tired and very sick dog for his last months of treatment. Annie, who had a 6th sense for knowing when we were there, always turned up with a big hug for Trav. Annie, who on Travis's last day, brought him a piece of doughnut from the clinic breakroom, so he might take with him the taste of something sweet. Annie, who asked permission to stand with us when Trav's doctor set the needle in.

It's been eight years, perhaps thousands of dogs later, and she still remembers Travis. Remembers, even, the lesser detail of my own name. What a gift, what an enormous surprise of a gift, to see Annie again after all this time.

How grateful I've been all weekend, how grateful I am that Annie doesn't possess that DIVE! gene. Maybe it's time I take mine out, give it a good, hard look in the sun's bright light.

READ A POEM I WROTE ABOUT TRAVIS

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Notes from the Bio-Sphere

7/16/2012

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I write poems.

I submit poems to literary journals.

Sometimes my poems are accepted by a literary journal, which responds with a very nice note and—ACK!—a request for a biographical note.

We all have things we love to do, even though there may be elements of the doing that we don't love. I love writing first lines. I love the buffing and glossing, the rock-polishing of a new poem. I love packing my little gems in their electronic pouches and sending them off to market. And hoo-boy, I'll admit it: I love acceptance letters.

What I do not love is the subsequent, inevitable request for the biographical note. Send us a few words about yourself, the editor might write. Our readers report that our Bios page is one of the things they love most about our magazine. Eeep! All that labor of buffing and polishing, and the readers want to know about the quarry?

I have a stock version, a version that would make a Mad Lib fan very happy. It goes something like this: [name] is the author of [title]. Her [plural noun] have appeared in many [another plural noun], including [title] and [another title]. She lives in the State of [noun]. Filled in, this might read something like Nancy Carol Moody is the author of Please Please Please Don't Make Me. Her rough drafts have appeared in many trash cans, including The Kitchen Trash Can and The Hall Closet Trash Can. She lives in the State of Dishabille.

Despite the contradictory evidence of my self-promotional website and a couple of self-indulgent blogs, I'm not much for showing my cap, much less feathering it. (No, really. Truly. Really really truly.) But in the interest of satisfying those wonderful editors who pull my work out of the slush and place it in their journals for their readers—my readers—to discover, I offer a tip of my cap, this new, upgraded version of my bio note. Trust me on this—I've dug deep:

NANCY CAROL MOODY was born on one of the stormiest nights of the decade,
the hospital running in the dim of generator power. It is entirely possible
that in all the chaos the name tag was switched on Moody's bassinet
and that she is actually the child of fantastically rich, though not necessarily famous, parents.
Her family included 11 invented siblings and Anita, a much-loathed imaginary friend.
Moody's childhood was marked by several traumatic incidents, including having mispronounced
the word "jealous" in the second grade (much to the mocking delight of her classmates)
as well as the unfortunate spillage of a contraband box of Red Hots
during third-grade arithmetic class. On more than one occasion she stole paper
from the teachers' storage cubbies at Our Lady of Guadalupe School.
Moody has a B.A. in Psychology, which explains nothing. And everything.
She has trouble distinguishing east from west, though right and left are rarely a problem.
The round mole on her shoulder has been removed, but left her with
a lifetime of anxiety in the presence of polka dots.
She also suffers from intermittent phantosmia, olfactory hallucinations
which cause her to smell cigarette smoke when it isn't there,
and she likes to believe the twitch in her nose is a consequence of her plastic surgery, though others tend to roll their eyes when she suggests this may be the case.
She prefers that strangers ask before they touch her hair.
Moody loves the combined smell of popcorn and new rubber in the waiting room
of Les Schwab Tires, the sound of a squealing fan belt, the heft
of a Swiss Army knife, and salt on her ice cream.
The children's book, Love You Forever, will forever and ever make her cry.

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Thanks for What Memories?

7/9/2012

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If I could only find the card

Ernest Borgnine died yesterday. This is mostly what I remember of him:

PT-73 and the endless reruns of McHale's Navy on the old green-box television in our family den;
That my mother couldn't stand him, who knows why. My mother had her opinions. Not to mention a particular expression she would use whenever EB's name was mentioned;
The huge disappointment of his being Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade one of the New Year's mornings I stood on the sidewalks of Pasadena to watch those amazing flower-covered floats, the silver-bedecked horses, the glitzy celebrities waving their tight little circles as they passed by. Ernest Borgnine, really? I stood out in the cold for him?

Except for this: Ernest Borgnine never was the Grand Marshal of the Rose Parade. Another of my memory's cats sacrificed this day on the altar of curiosity when I headed over to The Googles to tag a particular year to my Borgnine memory (60s? 70s?). 1n 1965 Arnold Palmer wore the sash. Ditto Billy Graham, 1971. Lawrence Welk, a one an' a 1972. But no EB (insert a particular expression here).

It's not hard to imagine how any one of the others I've listed might have led to letdown in this girl's eager heart. Still, Ernest Borgnine failing me at the Rose Parade seems like such an unlikely and specific stand-in for disappointment that it makes me a little itchy, not knowing what that's all about. I could squander away my day, of course, and do some more googling. Or set it aside and accept the tangled-coat-hanger mess of my memory. Or I could just fill the gap by making up another story altogether. Isn't that, really, what a writer's supposed to do?

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The Eyes Have It

7/2/2012

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Keep an eye
on things for me,
will you?

I'm on hiatus this week
but
will be
back at it
next
Monday!

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No Red-Letter Day

That Ol' Shuck and Dive

Notes from the Bio-Sphere

Thanks for What Memories?

The Eyes Have It

Nancy Carol Moody

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