Twin fair

This picture is why I love writing memoir. 

The truth is always quirkier and stranger than fiction.

When we were kids, me and my twin sister entered a twin fair contest at the Pomona fair. It might have happened more than once. It was not by choice. 

You had to be twins, you had to dress alike and you had to have a talent. All twin contestants were judged on how much they looked alike as twins. And we were pretty similar. As far as talent, we did not the play piano. So I think we were pretending for the camera. 

As an aside, I did play the clarinet for one school year then gave it up. I'd always wanted to play drums or guitar, like Leather Tuscadero on Happy Days, not blow into a reed instrument.

I don't remember the details of that twin fair day, one forever memorialized in a newspaper clipping my mom still has. I'm the twin on the right who's closest to the frame. 

There's a mesmerizing glint in my eye. I'm sure I was planning my revenge in my head against my mom for making us show up in those head caps. 

As a kid, I was always telling myself stories in my head. Now you know why. For surely, it was to escape the doom and outright creepiness of my Inland Empire world. 

Then again, maybe I've just always been a ham. Side of pineapple please. And a coffee, a cig and a lighter to burn this picture up. 

Or maybe, just maybe, I love it all. The picture, the way we look like demented prairie girls pretending to play a (toy?) organ. 

It's truth. It's weird. It's life. 

Slouching toward grief

It is after midnight, and the beginning hours of Christmas Eve. The sky is crying. Rain is pouring down. 

It's a deluge. It makes sense. Joan Didion died yesterday. Her work was, and is, a huge inspiration for my essay writing. 

It was my wedding anniversary yesterday. My husband Adrian and I spent it with our moms. Adrian made a smoked pork roast. After I ate, I thought of my dad who always loved him a roast. When my dad passed so many years ago, I must have read Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" at least three or four times. It was my touchstone and helped me to process and grieve. 

The first story in my YA memoir novel is about the day my dad died, the day I had to let him go. It took me years to write that story. It went through so many versions. Some surreal. Fragmented. Poetic. The final version is more scene based. 

One day, probably many years in the future, I'll write an essay about grief. About how it manifests. How it changes. How we mutate from it. And I'll have Didion to thank.

When I think back to the writers who inspired me the most, Didion is up there with James Joyce and Sandra Cisneros. Didion taught me how to write an essay just by reading her prose. Didion taught me how to break rules and how to get a point of view across. That thing called voice was something she had in droves. 

Didion was a voice for the ages. Her writing was her. She was her writing. 

So thank you Joan Didion. May you Rest In Peace dear scribe, with a typewriter by your side. 

Happiness is a warm cup of coffee

It's Christmas time. I've decorated. Finally. Threw my back out wrapping presents. Medicated with a cold beer, my first in weeks. 

Coffee is my go to now. I love it. I've realized that alcohol has to be limited for me to the occasional indulgence or not at all. I might fall off the cliff otherwise. 

Truth is, I'm happier without it. Healthier. Clear headed. Even last night, after singing a few songs, I wanted the buzz to wear off so I drank a Diet Coke and a water and went to bed. 

I woke up at 2 am. Fully awake. I didn't fall back asleep until 4 am. 

I got up again at 6 am. I relished my cup of coffee listening to John Lennon croon. "Love is old, love is new..."

Talked to my twin. My mom called me. I fed the dogs and sanitized the counters. Thought to myself, I'll have another. Cup of coffee that is. Half and half, two sugar cubes. 

Whole lotta lumps. 

Merry Christmas friends.

Miracle Street

Growing up in Ontario, California, Christmas was an occasion to celebrate. 

My dad loved Christmas and would decorate the house with multi-colored bulbs. He would put Christmas movies on all week. Santa Clause Conquers the Martians, Rudolph and A Christmas Carol, of course, but Miracle on 34th Street was always my favorite. The black and white version with Natalie Wood as Susan, the little girl who doesn't believe.

There was always something magical in the way my dad celebrated Christmas. With homemade Pillsbury donuts covered in sugar. And eggnog which us girls refused to drink. Candy canes and fudge. Christmas music on the stereo. Dad clearly believed in Christmas and the power of intention. He even somehow, someway, opened a bar, a tavern called "The Big O", that he always dreamed of owning. It was all his while it lasted.

In Miracle on 34th Street, there is also something magical when Susan hears Kris Kringle speak Dutch to a little girl. Susan starts to believe and when Kris refuses to disavow Christmas to Susan's mom, she almost fires him. She changes her mind when Mister Macy praises the "new" Santa.

Kris tells her, "Christmas isn't just a day, it's a frame of mind." Kris also believes in the magic of "imagination". 

Most adults refuse to believe in magic. Kids believe. Kids know that they can be anything and anyone if only they believe. 

It took me fifty years to believe in the magic. I don't have kids, couldn't have kids, so I have to find and rekindle the magic in myself. 

And now, at fifty, I finally believe. I believe I can be anything and do anything. If only I believe. So I do.

Rain

There is rain falling outside. I can hear it splashing against the house. It has been raining for hours. It is hard rain. Fast rain. I light my meditation candle. 

Rain has always made me want to stay home. To cuddle under a blanket and drink coffee all day. 

Rain makes me think of how, as a kid, it rained much more than it does now. I remember walking to school with an umbrella in elementary school. The rain sloshing my feet. Jumping in puddles. 

Rain makes me remember our house growing up. The one with the pool that the bank took out from under us. I remember swimming in the pool when it rained. My parents yelling at us later that we could have been hit by lightening. 

Rain makes me think of grief. Of funerals. 

Rain makes me melancholy and it makes me shiver. Kinda like life at times.

Today

Today is the first day of the rest of my life. I'm gonna be present and enjoy it. 

I usually have a "to do" list an arm long. I'm efficient. Task orientated. On track. Responsive. My job as a deputy public defender demands it. 

But I'm throwing that away today. I'm gonna live, be and do. 

Yesterday, I got home from work and fell asleep at 6 o'clock! I just fell into bed exhausted. My day starts early you see. I was up at 5 am doing a final edit on my book. 

So by the time I got to work at what some still consider "early", I was wide awake and ready. I was so busy I didn't even take a break. I worked through lunch eating my cheese and crackers box at my desk. 

Suffice to say, when I got home last night, I was beat.

No more. Every day is precious. I'm gonna take a breath. Many breaths. Every day. There is no hurry and no need to stress and "rush" through life. 

Your work will get done. It will. You are a doer but you are not a robot. Just live. Every day. Live with the wonder of life in your eyes, as if today is your first day here. Make it matter. 

Let me repeat that: Make it matter. 

Visualization

It's 6:30 am. I'm writing this after doing my early AM social media posts for my new book which is available for preorder. My book/novel/memoir, "Tales of an Inland Empire Girl" took over a decade to write, almost 15 years in fact.

I remember visualizing it in a class at a summer writing workshop called VONA many moons ago in the Bay Area. It was after my dad had passed, in my first or second VONA. 

The writing teacher had us make miniature books, almost like tiny dollhouse recreations. We put a picture on the front and the title of our book and wrote some words inside.

More than a decade later, my book has the same picture of me and my sisters that I visualized so many years ago. The title changed many times (I think back then the working title was "Stories from a dysfunctional IE childhood") but the substance has always remained the same. 

I always knew I wanted to write a memoir/novel (what should I call it? A rose by any other name...) about my childhood in the Inland Empire. 

I wanted it to be full of love of family, and filled with adventures along with some comedy and tragedy. And I wanted to capture my father's character. 

Also, I wanted it to be a collection of short stories. I wanted it to also be about "place" and memorialize the Inland Empire the way James Joyce did with Dublin. Why not aim high?

I wanted it to be in YA/child voice, in present tense mostly and scene driven, and dialogue heavy with echoes from all my favorite writers growing up, especially Judy Blume and SE Hinton. It is all that. It is what I imagined and more. It went through so many iterations. 

I never imagined it would take this long, but that's the way it goes. The point is, it's here. Finally. 

And I'm over the moon my friends. Over the moon. Dreams come true, they do. If you wish hard enough and visualize and do the work. Promise.

Dramarama

When I was 20, I took a writing class at Chaffey College, and a teacher told me my fiction writing was too romantic and melodramatic. 

His comment destroyed me. I didn't write another piece for years. 

At 50, looking back, I wish I knew then, what I know now. 

Everyone's voice has value. If you're dramatic, be dramatic, it's who I was and who I am. I grew up reading Harlequins.

As a kid, I would always imagine writing sequels to my favorite books. I imagined myself into stories. As a young adult, I wrote poems full of angst.

That younger voice is what I try to recapture now. Of course, I temper the drama with comedy and tragedy. But that romantic and dramatic side is still in me. It's what makes me who I am. 

My husband will sometimes say I'm a ham or a drama queen, and I am. But I'm also a writer and it was merging my writing and my performance side that really helped me elevate my readings and feel comfortable on stage and doing a video podcast and public speaking.

So my end thought is this, be you. Do you. I am romantic. And dramatic. Always. That's where the magic is friends.