Heather's Diary Entries Diary Navigation: Choose A Diary Entry -------------------- Latest Entry: 2/20/04 -------------------- 1/7/04 10/22/03 9/6/03 8/15/03 8/7/03 -------------------- Heather's Introduction

September 6, 2003

Summer’s End

I’m trying to think of way to make this, I don’t know, less “What Did You Do Over Summer Break”, but I’m coming up short. I have a deep, dark fear of those kinds of essays. You know, the ones well-meaning teachers assigned on the first day back from summer vacation? Fifth grade year, Mrs. Delmar assigned that very subject to our class, with 3 pages due by Friday. I, at the worldly age of nine, was bored with such trivial topics and wanted to branch out, so to speak. So, instead of writing about going to the arcade, or the water slides, or visiting my grandparents, I wrote an almost entirely fictional account of how I was kidnapped by hostile aliens and taken to their home planet to serve among their human slave population. Actually, the only thing that wasn’t fictional was that my character had two brothers, but I named them Hercules and Caligula instead of the obviously boring Charlie and David. Of course, Good triumphed over Evil, I freed myself and all the other human slaves, destroyed the evil aliens’ base and escaped in a rocket headed toward Earth. And all in 32 double-sided, handwritten pages. I remember the spacing specifically because I had, during my summer vacation in reality, read that literary magazines only accepted submissions that were double-spaced. Because, you know, this was the big-time. Fifth grade and no pushing at the water fountain, no more print-lettering on assignments, and double-spacing because that was what being an adult was all about.

If I had been Mrs. Delmar, I’d have packed me off to the school counselor, post haste, and I still think she had to have considered that option. Hello? I named my brothers Hercules and Caligula, for god’s sakes. Merciful woman she was, she instead had me tested for the gifted and talented program (also known as the clever and annoying program), and the rest is, shall we say, history.

I still hate those damn essays.

But I’ve got no way out. I wanted to write about my summer and all the Spanish Chloe didn’t learn, and so this is the gig. I even sat around last night trying to think of quirky-hip titles, and the best I came up with was “I Know What I Did This Summer” and the one gracing the top of this mess. Who knew that a once gifted and talented fifth-grader would end up in such a terrible state?

For anyone who followed my diary over at the Special Kids Today site, you’ll recall that I had a long list of things to accomplish by the time September rolled around. There were the usual suspects. Cleaning the house was one of them, as was reading several books I’d set aside for when I wasn’t in school. But I also planned to make jam, teach Chloe Spanish (or, at least some Spanish), get several fiction stories finished and ready to submit, take my GRE exams, and research school districts in all the areas where I’m applying to graduate school.

Side note: What the hell was I thinking?

I started off well enough. I bought a Spanish book for Chloe, and taped up little notes all over the house with both the English and Spanish spellings of various and sundry items. For example, on Chloe’s closet there was a small, pink note that read, “closet” and right underneath that, “el amario”. I put up 32 of these pastel notes, papering Chloe and Giselle’s room the most because, as I reasoned, she spends a lot of time playing in there.

Did I mention that Chloe doesn’t really read?

I had realized that, of course. I mean, she can read some words, and has a rudimentary grasp on phonics. I had reasoned to myself that she would see the notes, ask what they were, and that through repetition; she’d learn the words. And, I thought to myself like a good little super-mom, she’ll be learning how to read too! I am brilliant, I thought. BRILLIANT!

The sad truth? “Los zapatos” stuck three feet above her head on a shoe organizer is never going to be noticed. Ne-ver. And, after the first week or so, the notes within grabbing distance of Giselle and Ivan were torn and scattered like so much confetti through the hallway, leaving me shaking my fist in the air like one of those villains on Scooby-Doo. “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for you meddling kids!”

Cleaning the house wasn’t so bad, and can be rung up as a success. I went through all the kitchen cupboards, the laundry area and the computer desk. I cleaned out the closets and gave away a carload of junk. We steamed-cleaned the carpets, which made them look more like an infant Picasso lived here instead of, say, a toddler Pollack. The only rub is that I had finished all of the cleaning by late June. It’s September now, and the house really needs another round. And, as much as I hate doing it, I’ll probably be scrubbing out my cupboards and refrigerator this time next week.

Finishing my reading list can be chalked up as a win, too. I read the third, fourth and fifth Harry Potter books, Nickel and Dimed, parts of both Wealth and Democracy and A People’s History of the US, and finished it off with Straight Man, Empire Falls (both by Richard Russo) and Atonement (by Ian McEwan). I had wanted to get through some of the books on the required-reading for PhD candidates list, but only started 100 Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. That book, while beautiful, is a very dense read, and I put it aside after spending a week in the first three hundred pages. I’m going to try it again in the winter, when there is nothing to do but read, and I’ve got more patience for taking notes while reading. Right now I’m reading Jane Eyre, in large part because a beloved professor browbeat me because I hadn’t.

Jam making was, actually, a success. Or at least a partial success. Chloe and I picked raspberries and marionberries two different times over the summer at a cool U-Pick farm near our home. Everything was $.99/lb. and, all told, we picked about 8lbs of raspberries and 6 of marionberries, the latter which I turned into 8 smallish jars of tasty jam. It’s actually hard making jam, and it was made doubly so by the hot weather we were having and the fact we have no cooling system. Let me warn you, in case you’re thinking of making jam or jelly soon, that the heated form of said substance is like sugared napalm. I spilled a drop on my thumb and hopped around the kitchen yelping until Chloe said I looked like an angry squirrel. Such rude comments from the product of one’s own womb can, I find, cut through any pain, and it was at that point that I was able to come to my senses enough to submerge my thumb in water. So, be forewarned, that stuff burns skin like mad.

The raspberry jam and I had a difficult relationship. I felt it best to part ways, and we, the raspberry jam and I, are no longer on speaking terms. After scorching the bottom of my best large kettle, I’ve decided that the jam in question was a crass houseguest, who was intent on ruining my previously perfect jam-record. I am still planning on making apple butter and pumpkin butter in the fall.

As a family we went blueberry picking and had a blast. We went to Blueberry Hill, on Sauvie Island, just outside of Portland one July weekend. The farm is incredibly family-friendly and welcomes kids with a passel of wonderful Labradors and small buckets and signs that encourage everyone to eat berries as they pick. Adults get big tubs for harvesting, and everyone heads for the rows and rows of blueberries to start picking. About half of the farm is enclosed by a fence, which makes it easier to go with little kids. You don’t have to worry about them running off between the bushes and darting out in front of a passing car. This makes one of the few places where we can enjoy the outdoors without worrying about Ivan running into traffic or getting lost.

The Saturday we went was particularly hot and muggy, and I had wondered on the drive out if it was going to dampen our excursion. But there is something about long, even rows and soft dirt paths. There is a passage in The Great Gatsby where a woman describes an evening gown Gatsby bought for her as “gas blue”. I’m convinced that if Fitzgerald had ever set eyes on the long bluish-green aisles, the way the breeze would catch the leaves and rustle a dark, blue-green shimmer over the entire field, the passage would have been written differently.

When we got ready to pick the berries, I took Jelly, and John took Chloe and Ivan. It was amazing to watch Jelly walk down the aisles with her little toes wriggling in the warm earth. She would stop and inspect a cluster of blueberries, and then stoop to investigate a spider in its web. She was enthralled with picking the berries, one by one, and hearing them plunk in her pail. We spent a lot of time talking about the dirt and the leaves and the bugs we found while I filled our tub. About halfway through, Jelly discovered that blueberries could be eaten, and spent the rest of the time either sitting next to my tub, or wandering over a row to play in the dirt. All of the kids were a mess when we left with – count ‘em – 10lbs of blueberries, but they were happy.

The rest of my to-do list was not so easily accomplished. Researching school districts was, predictably, tough during the summer months, though I made some headway. I have gotten names and information from all the school districts in question, and will start making more phone calls next week, when teachers and administrators are back in their offices. It does appear that all of the school district’s I’m researching have administrators whose sole job it is to run their autism programs, a fact that fuels my faith in finding a good place for Ivan when I start my MFA program.

I also didn’t get much fiction writing done, and I haven’t taken my GREs, either, though the latter is not from a lack of trying. I qualified for a fee-waiver for my GREs, and went through all the appropriate steps to get one, but was thwarted by the evil Financial Aid office clerks, who lost my paper work not once, but twice. I only received the waiver last week, and will likely not be able to take the exam until mid-October.

As for the writing, well, it’s hard to explain. Most people think of writing as just that: sitting down and typing away at a computer or typewriter. Truth is, writing is more about pondering than it is about fingers hitting keys or a hardcover novel in a bookstore. For me, writing takes time doing what appears to be nothing while I wrap my head around what it is I want to do. I need time for my mind to take an idea and play with it before I can sit down and begin to think about sentences and paragraphs, characters and themes, or plot outlines and dramatic tension. Like all art, writing is primarily the internal experience of the artist, and only shadows of that experience are ever made external.

Side note: This is how you start talking when you take too many literary criticism courses.

I started some promising pieces this summer, but they haven’t developed like I would have liked them to. It’s quite possible that I gave myself too many things to do and didn’t allow myself enough down time to get into the writing-frame-of-mind. It’s also possible that I am a lazy cretin and just couldn’t find the time or space to write because I didn’t want to. Even on my best days, writing is hard. On the worst days, it’s agonizing. A summer filled with kids and shredded pastel-colored Spanish nouns and berry picking is an easy pick over languishing with a new piece.

The good news is that I have the rest of September free before classes start up again. Both Ivan and Chloe are in school, and I should have more time to write. I have to. My graduate applications are due in four months and I’ve got to have a presentable portfolio to send those little beavers on the applications board.

The only other thing I have to report on is regarding my friends. Or, more accurately, my fellow-English and Writing major friends all of whom, it seems, took off for some fabulous foreign place in June explicitly to drive me crazy. All summer long I’ve fielded annoying e-mails from these miscreants, and have had to read about every café in Paris, every coliseum in Rome and every hot guy in Barcelona. These are all my single, childless college friends who do not understand that coming home to an email describing, in vivid detail, how they met some guy named Rene in a Parisian café and followed him home to his flat for a rendezvous, after just having spent 40 minutes at Target finding the right sized diapers and trying to negotiate with a toddler for the Icee cup, does not strengthen the bonds of friendship.

It only gets worse. One friend, Tyler, emailed me weekly from his hotel in Chile, where he was off on a six-week surfing trip. Tyler is a sweet kid, but he has two giant faults. One, he thinks that everyone will naturally want to read his meticulously detailed accounts of each and every wave he rides and, two, he tucks tidbits of important, personal information into each of his vignettes. Like, “I took the wave as it rose up beneath me, and I remembered that this was how I felt when my mom died.” That would have been a horrible moment, asking about how his mom was over some department wingding, and giving away the fact I’d never read all of his long-winded surfing descriptions. All of his emails were filled with these small scraps of personal history and so I had to wade through lingo I didn’t understand, the literally hundreds of descriptions of waves and sand and undertows, just to find out that he tortured two frogs when he was five, and still feels guilty about it.

Tyler’s not the only friend abroad who’s sent me email. Joel emailed me from Paris with the note, “I got each of the kids something. I also found this really cool miniature guillotine! It really works! Do you think Ivan would like it?” This proved to me that while Joel would make a great editor, maybe he should reconsider procreating. Kelly, who was in Italy, wrote a beautiful email about rediscovering her spirituality while wandering the ancient streets of the city, and how she spent the entire day visiting the churches and cathedrals, and how she felt at long last connected to God. She then ended the email with, “Tomorrow, though, I go SHOPPING! I can hardly wait! I think I can squeeze five pairs of shoes and three handbags into my luggage without a problem!” Kelly, obviously, is going for the Mother Theresa in Prada look.

The worst had to be Trini, who wrote about spending a day in the Louvre, and then added, as a postscript, that she spent all night dancing in some exclusive Parisian club, with someone she swore was Matt Damon. Whoever said, “life is in the details” missed the boat. Life is in the postscripts. Throwing a description of a few hundred half-naked Parisians grinding ‘til dawn and Will Hunting into a postscript is a gutsy, gutsy move. Life is in the postscripts, I’m telling you. Say it. Maybe it will catch on.

Heather

PS – I’m still writing up my vacation in California entry, and I’ll hopefully have it completed soon (see – life really is in the postscripts).