Confronting the Slipperiness of Time

Another fall rolls around with Domino

I've been working on a post for a while about the events of our summer. The main purposes of this blog are to stay on some sort of writing schedule (and this month's deadline is upon us in a matter of hours), and to document for myself basic family events and milestones. I will still finish my summer catch-up post, but not before the stroke of midnight this Halloween, so I offer up these thoughts in the meantime.

I am increasingly astonished as I get older how fast time slips away. This isn't surprising to anyone, certainly, but I'm thinking about it in terms of how some days seem over before they've even begun.

For instance, all I really want to do lately is work in my new shop space. We moved my violin making shop into the former teaching space in the back of the store, and it's wonderful. I have so much room and better access to everything I need, and when I'm in it, I don't want to leave. I started two instruments, and I'm at the point where I can begin shaping blocks. I'm excited to do that.

However, I have not had the chance to sit at my desk and do that for several days. It's frustrating. I find myself lying in bed in the morning, figuring out what's ahead, and being sad that getting to my desk is unlikely because all of my time already seems spoken for. Yesterday I had to factor in dog walks, a trip to the gym and a shower, deciding on some kind of lunch for later, repair work at my bench, errands to three different stores, and customer appointments that ran into the evening. I knew all of that was ahead before I got up, and felt like the day was gone before I got out from under the covers.

I love my life. If I were unaware of the state of the world, I would say everything is really good at the moment. I liked everything I did yesterday. I liked everything I did today.

The problem with projects that can be easily pushed back little by little, is they begin to feel like a mirage. I find myself looking up from my daily routine and responsibilities at a distant oasis I may never reach.

My writing projects are the biggest example of this problem. They are not necessary to pay the bills or to meet obligations to others. They are important to me, but are only on deadlines of my own imagining. The dog needing a walk can't be put off. Rehairing a bow for someone who needs it before their next rehearsal makes specific demands on my time. But my novels? The followup to my violin book? The only timelines for working on those are entirely made up.

As a result, a day easily slips by without doing that work. What's one day? I'm a busy person. Of course I didn't get to my edits today, because there are so many other things that have to come first. But then that quietly becomes every day.

Last summer I hired an editor to go through the next novel I would like to publish. This one I think has more commercial potential than the other things I've written, and I've decided to make a concerted effort toward traditional publication. If it doesn't happen, that's fine, but I just want to make the attempt so I don't regret in the future that I didn't take a real shot at a wider audience for my fiction. A writer friend recommended a lovely editor, she made suggestions, and under different circumstances I should have been able to do my rewrites in under a week because when I have clear direction, I am a fast writer. But the format of the editor's comments are awkward for me because I like to work from such things in a hard copy and all of this was digital, etc. etc. The upshot is, sorting out what I need to do is just painful enough that it keeps getting pushed back. One more day.

Then all of a sudden I look up and the days have piled into over a year. I have not touched this book in so long it's embarrassing, not to mention frustrating.

That's what happens in my violin building shop, too. Although I do have two people expecting instruments on some kind of promised timeline, so at some point panic will set in and I will start scheduling time at my desk again, rather than letting it all get used up in the front of the shop where the repairs never end.

But no one is waiting on my book except in only the most vague of terms. So any urgency about finishing it has to come from me.

Which is why I set up a writing retreat this coming week where I can be in a house in the woods with my dog and a fellow writer (who also has a project to finish), and we'll have a fire, snacks, and no internet. My plan is to buckle down and finish this book. And that apparently can't happen in my regular life where time is slippery and days follow days and writing ends up out of reach.

Who knows? I might be so productive I finish my novel edits early and can complete that other blog post. It could happen.
 

 

Self-Imposed Deadlines

Stress is a strange thing. Being frustrated, anxious, worried. . . They are all states of mind that sometimes we can control and sometimes we can't. The ways in which thoughts or simple awareness can manifest into physical reactions is fascinating to me.

I remember the first time I needed stitches. I was in my mid-20s, and while carving something with a dull tool managed to stab it into the side of my left thumb. The doctor at the clinic we went to tied four neat little stitches into my skin, and I couldn't believe how much the whole thing turned my stomach. I told the doctor how weird it was that if I didn't know what was happening and couldn't see it, it would all be fine because the pain wasn't that terrible. It wasn't good, but it wasn't the worst thing I could imagine by a long shot. However, if I looked at my skin being stitched through like fabric, that was nauseating and made me a little dizzy. Wasn't that strange? How could that be? As the doctor finished up his last little knot, he said, "Only in the Western world are people surprised by the connection between the mind and the body." I don't know how true that is, but I've thought about it a lot since then.

We can try to forge a more practical attitude about that connection, but it doesn't always work. There was a stretch a few years ago where I had terrible migraines. It's easy to see now how much they were tied to upsetting events in my life. Certain thoughts and worries were literally hurting my head. The pain was so bad that at one point while writhing around on a couch at 3 a.m. it occurred to me that death, if it came right then, wouldn't be unwelcome because at least the pain would stop. When I couldn't stop the pain, I would try to accept it, and that helped somewhat. Fighting the pain made it worse. Simply letting it be what it was made it more bearable.

My life at the moment is [knock on expensive violin wood] really going quite well. This is the place where I could have barely dared hope for the pendulum to swing during those literally and figuratively painful times a few years back. I'm not taking it for granted, and I'm not foolish enough to believe such fortune will last, but I've enjoyed this year very much. I have the love and support of my husband, my kids are all headed in good directions right now, health and work are fine, I've gotten to travel and spend time with family and friends, and even have a trusty little dog at my side who reminds me to be in the moment. Life is good.

In fact, when I'm honest with myself, the biggest sources of stress currently going on for me are all self-imposed and a matter of choice. Which seems ridiculous, but hear me out, because I like to believe there is an upside, or at the very least an understandable explanation.

For the past couple of months I have had the joy of all three kids at home. My oldest has been home from college for the summer, and we've tried to cram as much into that limited time as possible. Which has meant putting my normal projects on hold. I have barely been in my home shop, so the instruments that were rolling along so nicely back in the spring have not progressed at all. And the novel I want to be getting out into the world sooner rather than later just sits and gathers virtual dust. I only recently started going back to rehearsals, because they were technically optional this summer, and I wanted as much time as possible with my kids.

So I have been operating like a person with no creative pursuits, and frankly, it's a much more relaxed kind of life. There is time to hang out and play games and binge watch things as a family when nothing I want to get done "needs" to get done. It's been fun. But it's also not really me. If I went on this way indefinitely, I'm not sure who I would be anymore. Because I'd no longer be a person who builds instruments or plays music or writes books.

All those creative endeavors, though, require deadlines that I invent for myself. Because none of them are things I "have" to do. Not really. There are people waiting for the instruments they commissioned, but completing them is still a matter of choice. If I woke up one day and realized building instruments is making my life worse rather than better, I can stop, even if it disappoints others. There is no one out there requiring me to write more books. There are plenty of other musicians to replace me if I up and quit playing viola and mandola.

Once my daughter leaves for college again in a few days, and the rest of us settle into a fall routine that has us interacting less often, I will get back into my shop, back to regular practicing, and back to editing my latest novel.

All of those things require self-imposed deadlines in order to make progress. Deadlines are stressful, even arbitrary ones.

One of the few self-imposed deadlines I've managed to keep up with over my summer of fun, is this blog. Barely. When I worked for (the now defunct parenting website) Babble, there was no explicit number of posts per month that I was contractually expected to write, but I aimed for about two a week. That seemed to match the rate most of the other personal bloggers on the site were doing, and it felt natural. Plus I was getting paid, so I certainly had to produce something regularly. 

Since moving to this blog, the only reason to write is if I feel like it. But one of the important reasons for me to maintain this blog, is that writing regularly is good for me as a writer. There are enough other things happening in my life that giving up the blog entirely would be very easy, and few would notice if it ceased to be. But I like the discipline that some manner of deadline requires. I like making myself create something in this space on some kind of schedule.

The self-imposed deadline I've given myself on this blog is at least one post a month. And I've managed to maintain that all these years. I've never skipped a month, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

I've been trying to put together a post about my trip to Austria since May. But that post is huge, and every time I work on it, I see the end of the month creeping up on the calendar, and have to switch gears merely to get something posted before the deadline. The number of partially started drafts in my Blogger folder is getting rather silly. But hey, at least I'm writing. That's the point. 

Since nobody makes demands about my being a writer other than me, I have to be some kind of task master to myself. Same with instrument making. Same with any creative project that is important to my identity and my soul. But I have to choose stress to do any of it. I have to convince myself it's necessary, and then put pressure on myself to actually make progress on any meaningful kind of schedule, or nothing happens. Nothing aside from watching more Star Trek and baking cookies, which is all a lot of fun, but not what I want to define me.

This month I also meant to finally write about my trip to Austria. But did you catch the date? And the time? I wonder how many of my readers actually notice the time stamp on the things I post, and realize how many of them bump up close to midnight on the last day of the month. The people in my house certainly notice. I had to pull myself away from my kids tonight, pausing the show we were watching saying, "I have to go write something!" And one of them said, "Wait, is it the last day of the month already?"

But hey, my streak remains unbroken. I have minutes to spare before I hit "publish." And I will take my manufactured stress in order to remain creative over the kind of stress inducing scenarios life sometimes likes to hand out. I just need to remind myself when I start to panic over either of them, that it helps to cut myself some slack, take a deep breath, and maybe walk the dog again.

And I need to remember that there are physical ramifications to being under stress, and that dwelling on certain thoughts can cause physical pain. There are too many things in life we can't control, to not appreciate the ones we can. When I have moments of, "Oh no! My blog!" I need to balance the tools I use to make things happen with my overall well being. 

After a "summer off" I'm taking stock of how much stress I need or don't need to choose even when times are good. I have a sense that by the time I figure it out, my life will be about done.

Loss

I recently lost everything that was on my laptop.

I know I should have backed things up properly. I know about the Cloud. I even bought an external drive for storage this summer when I upgraded my machine, but I just never found the time to use it. I don't have a good excuse, but that's not really relevant right now. A small object fell on my keyboard in exactly the wrong way, which required replacing what was inside my computer. My last laptop was already wiped of all information. More than 20 years of notes and writing and projects and memories are gone. It's a lot to get my head around.

I would have guessed I'd be more physically upset about it. I'm sad, but I haven't cried. I'm also not letting myself think about it too much for fear of being overwhelmed. I'll have moments in the middle of the night where I'll remember some random item (like a recording of my brother's laugh that I used to click on when I need cheering up, notes on various instruments I built, bookmarks to sites I'll never find again...) and I feel that loss.

But loss is a strange thing. There are many types of it. And our predictions of what it will be like don't always match the reality when it happens.

The death of my grandparents, the death of my dad... Those are obvious forms of loss that I still feel every day. Not with the kind of crippling intensity that I did when those losses were fresh, but they are still hard. That shouldn't surprise anyone.

There are other losses, though, where my reactions do surprise me. The other day one of my daughters asked about a situation that caused a schism in my extended family about twenty years ago. As I was describing it, I began choking up. There are people whom I loved dearly that I always expected to be a part of my children's lives who chose not to be, and for reasons I still don't quite understand. People cut me and my family off, and that loss still hurts, even though I try regularly to let it go.

Sometimes I mourn a bit the losses I see unfolding in front of me that won't really be felt until later. The kids still living at home with us are teenagers, which means they are absorbed in their own private issues, and don't feel any pressing need to spend time with their parents. I'm acutely aware of how the number of days where they live with us are dwindling. They don't realize this time is special, because for them it's all they know. But every evening that goes by where they don't want to talk, or every concert I perform that they don't attend, I wonder if they will regret not being present for when I'm no longer around. But that's true for all of us all the time. If anything terrible happens to anyone in this house tomorrow, I'll wonder why I spent time writing this post tonight rather than be with them. That vague anticipatory sense of loss is something I wish I could dismiss, but I don't know how.

I often think about a friend of mine who while on a trip far from home found out from her parents that their house had burned down. Everything she had with her in the car was now everything she had period. The concept took my breath away when she told me. My mind went to childhood mementos like my stuffed toy dog Tippy, and fun things from my friends, and photos, and my favorite books and records, and my instruments. But she said it wasn't that bad. There was freedom in being released from objects.

Losing everything on my laptop was like a virtual house fire. A lot is gone that I wish I still had, but there is an unexpected sense of relief about some of it.

I tend to cling to a lot of things, both on my computer and in real life, primarily because I don't like losing memories. Small reminders keep things in my mind in a way that keeps them alive. It can look like hoarding, since I still have physical files of notes on my former students' lessons, and research I did in college, and articles from my dad, etc. etc. etc. I feel like as long as things don't pile up to the point where our lives are in danger, it's okay.

On my laptop, I liked the fact that memory hoarding was so compact, and all of it at my fingertips. I should have protected it better.

But I've also thought about so-called "death cleaning," and how people will have to deal with all of my stuff one day. I've seen how hard it's been on my husband this past year dealing with his mother's house and all of her belongings. It's got me asking who am I keeping things for? I don't want my kids burdened with old Christmas cards and notes I passed in seventh grade and a pile of Solo/Ensemble medals. Very little of it is of interest to anyone but me, and when I'm gone, it will be meaningless. I can picture poor sentimental Aden tortured by the idea of throwing out things I loved simply because I loved them. She doesn't need that guilt. I figure a few years from now when all the kids have moved away, I can start chipping at the contents of the house and worry about it then.

It occurred to me there is a role for "death-cleaning" for the contents of my computer as well. I wrote a lot of stories that I didn't ever intend for others to read, but I liked having them. I don't have to worry about them anymore. Maybe it's good that a whole lot of memories have been cut loose and I'm not responsible for them. There was a lot on my laptop that I won't remember having been there, so that loss is mysterious, but not necessarily painful.

There are projects that I am of mixed mind about. I had this idea about writing a letter to my kids each year on their birthdays, telling them what they were like, sharing stories and thoughts personalized to them. That was hard to keep up with, so although I did print out letters the first few years, I simply had running notes for each of them beyond that, and I always intended to find a quiet weekend at the cottage to buckle down and turn those into more letters. All of those are gone now, and it's kind of okay. That's not looming in the back of my mind as something I need to do anymore. I'll do something simpler one day to replace it. But I don't have to feel guilt that I'm not working on it.

Sort of like when I told the kids certain things got "lost in the move" when we bought the new house. There are opportunities for things to go sometimes. I'm trying to look at the data loss that way where I can.

The hard things are the writing projects I'm still interested in. Luckily my latest two novels I was able to retrieve drafts of from friends and family who were test readers and still had digital copies. I don't have to retype hundreds of thousands of words from printouts, so that's good.

But my sequel to my repair guide is gone. That hurts. Because I don't know if I have the energy to rewrite it.

Rewriting something that's been lost is a particular kind of pain. When I wrote my first novel, Almost There, I was doing it in a program called AppleWorks that was apparently notorious for not saving things. I would actively stop and save my work every few minutes, only to discover later none of the changes took. I remember losing essentially all of Chapter 10, and being dazed and upset by it, only to have to dive back in at some point and try to write it all again. 

There are few things I find more fun than getting into the flow of a first draft. It's enjoyable to simply write, and let the ideas come, and revel in finding the right words.

There are few things worse than trying to recapture that. Writing something again has no flow. It's all second guessing, and feeling sure whatever I wrote the first time was better. I'm positive that the new chapter that replaced the lost one from Almost There is superior to the original. That doesn't mean I don't still believe there were particular phrases and sentences that I would have loved to have kept.

I don't really want to rewrite the repair guide sequel. I liked what I had down. I'm frozen at my keyboard when I try to redo any of it. Maybe that's a project I can let go, then, and not worry about? I haven't decided.

I also had a collection of emails between me and Ian when he was deployed in Iraq that I had hoped to put together as a memoir, primarily for our kids. That's been a project I've felt guilty for not pursuing for many years. Maybe I can let that go? (Since it was essentially "lost in the fire?")

Thankfully I did have my photos backed up on an external drive, because my last computer didn't have enough memory for all of them. I've lost photos between July and New Years, and some of those I can probably copy off of Facebook. I don't have the video clip of me and Quinn meeting our new dog for the first time, but ultimately who cares? I have the dog. (Who is curled up at my side and reminds me to live in the present as much as possible. Domino's a good dog, and good for me.)

Do I wish I hadn't lost everything off my laptop? Of course. But it's also not a bad reminder that nothing lasts. I can't hold onto all of it forever, even if I hadn't lost it. Someone, someday, was going to wipe it all away anyhow.

Maybe this is a good time to look forward and not back.

In the meantime, I'm no longer worried about backing up my computer. There's nothing there! And that's sort of freeing.

Not Our Normal October (A post of too many photos)

Happy Halloween!

What a strange month in a strange year. 

Lots of things to catch up on, including a few things Halloween, and way too many pictures of leaves, so if you like photos, this is the post for you.

First off: No costumes. 

I never expected to have to go cold turkey on the making of all the costumes at once. I figured Aden would go off to college, and maybe every other year or so want me to help her make something again, and that would be fun. Mona's been mostly doing costumes on her own, but sometimes still needs help, and I liked shopping with her for fabric. Quinn had a few years left. We had been working our way through a list of different categories of creatures, and I think "amphibian" was next.

But no in-person school and no Trick-or-Treat--and frankly, no sense of time or feeling that one day is different from another--means no desire for costumes. So... no costumes.

However, I feel like I don't want 2020 to get to steal everything, and I know a lot of people pull up my blog at this time of year to see what we've made for Halloween, so I can offer up the pictures of some of the minis.

Every year for Christmas I use scraps from each of the Halloween costumes and make little mini versions for my kids to collect in a box. My thought was that instead of getting sentimental over the full-blown costumes and hanging onto them forever taking up space, my kids could have a little keepsake. Of course they currently hang onto all of it, but it's still a nice idea.

So, here are Quinn's costume minis from 2007 to 2019: Kangaroo (twice), Purple Cat, Blue Jay, 13-Lined Ground Squirrel, Skunk, Wolf, Pigeon, Iguana, Lobster, Lion Fish, Chimera, Hoatzin

(I have links here to all those actual costumes, but for some reason the images on the post about the 13-Lined Ground Squirrel aren't appearing, so I'll put that with the mini images.)

Kangaroo (2007 and 2008)

Purple Cat (2009)

Blue Jay (2010)

13-Lined Ground Squirrel (2011)

Skunk (2012)

Wolf (2013)

Pigeon (2014)

Iguana (2015)

 

Lobster (2016)

Lion Fish (2017)

Chimera (2018)

Hoatzin (2019)

I'm really sad not to have gotten to make any costumes this year. Maybe in 2021?

But instead, this month I put my Halloween energy into the window displays at the violin store. Normally the Bay View Neighborhood Association puts on an event called the Pumpkin Pavilion, and it's a weekend of pumpkins and music and food trucks, etc. Not such a good idea in a pandemic, so they decided to create a map of cool displays. We signed up, and had fun coming up with violin-themed spooky stuff.

I decorated the window on the left. I went with a Cell-O-Lantern, and a violin graveyard. There's even a coffin case with a violin Aden decked out as a vampire. And the white violin "ghost" in the back is an instrument we experimented with 3D printing a while back. (That's its own scary story.) I have lots of dead and destroyed instruments in our storage area, and decided a violin back or top cut in half could make a pretty good pair of headstones

 

Then to explain all the musical jokes in the graveyard, I put up a key on the side window of the store.

The window on the right side was all Aden's work. She wanted to do a sort of mad scientist laboratory using broken instruments.

I think my favorite thing was the scrolls in jars. They are just in water, but over time the water got good and creepy looking. (The scrolls also sank eventually, after they had absorbed enough water.)

For our efforts, today we received a GOLDEN PUMPKIN award, for best Halloween business display! 

Wasn't expecting that, but it made an otherwise lackluster Halloween an awful lot nicer. Next week we'll pack up all the headstones, etc., but I'll leave the Cell-O-Lantern up a little longer, and probably the jars of scrolls (mostly because I'm very curious what will happen to them the longer they sit).

Deviating from Halloween for a moment, the other big thing for me this month was that I got to spend a couple of weeks at our cottage in Michigan. I drove out there with just Aden, and it was absolutely the peak time to see changing leaves. We spent hours on that drive simply saying, "Wow!" over and over, and feeling ridiculous that we couldn't find better words. It was almost too beautiful, to the point that we were a little relieved after a couple of weeks on the drive home that things had softened to a more comprehensible level of beauty.

 

The original goal of the trip was to hand Aden off to my mom where she could isolate for enough time to then visit my brother's family in New York, but it didn't quite work out. She ended up spending time with her grandma in Detroit instead, while I got to see my friends for a weekend, and then Aden helped me shut down the cottage for the winter and we drove home together.

On this trip to the cottage I got to learn how to replace the heating element in the oven. (Plus now I own a nice new hack saw, because after driving an hour away to get the new part and discovering it was too narrow, I had to adjust the connecting plate by widening it to fit. Good times.) But the lovely thing at the cottage, is even though things go wrong and there are unexpected projects to do, it doesn't matter.

After months of being isolated at home, the cottage was a welcome break from that kind of frustration, and a way of embracing seclusion. The cottage is simple. It's easy to keep organized, there's no pressure to get anything done at a certain time. And I got to have some time to be truly alone, and it was wonderful. I kept a fire going in the fireplace in the evenings. I watched whatever DVDs I wanted from the library. I was unplugged from the internet (except for those visits to the library when I checked my email). I wasn't responsible for anyone or anything. I carved scrolls, ate garlic bread, and read books from cover to cover. I loved it.

Plus, I took walks and admired all those leaves and the lake. I don't remember a more beautiful fall.  (And keep in mind that I never use a filter on my photos. If anything, my camera kept toning down everything I was trying to capture.)

 

So, yeah. Very pretty. Not too cold, but not hot enough to make you sweat. Good jacket weather. On the days it rained, it was nice to be inside by the fire and read. When Aden was there with me, we watched movies and ate down whatever was left in the fridge.

The only sad part was knowing this should have been my annual writing retreat there if not for the pandemic. The past two years I've gotten so much writing done with my friend Fernanda, where we read each other's work and push each other to finish our projects. Although, to be fair, I'm not sure what project I would have worked on. Last year I proofread "Just Friends, Just War" which I published in the spring, and I added to "1001 Weddings" which is currently being considered by an agent (fingers crossed--I feel like this is my most marketable book to date). So I suppose if there were a year I didn't get my writing retreat, this would have been a good choice for it anyway. Still.

On the upside, I did get a kick out of seeing my first two books at the local library.

Okay, back to Halloween. The kids did what they could with it today. They made cookies. They made pie from actual pumpkins (which I've never done). Mona made some horns, so I guess we can say some costume work happened this year.

(They don't believe me that their cookies are cool, because they think it's just "Mom Compliments," but they are wrong. These cookies are cool.)

And now we're off to admire other decoration displays around the neighborhood. Tomorrow we may do a scavenger hunt for discounted candy. I still can't believe that our neighborhood's trick-or-treat finally fell on actual Halloween, and a full moon, and nice weather, and we didn't get to go. Yet another moment of 2020 where we had to make do and call it good.

I hope whatever your Halloween looked like this year that you enjoyed it! Happy October. On to the next month. (Leaving you with my demon dog! Spooky.)