The hardest part

Is this what they see from heaven?

Last night I finished the most difficult section of my book. I knew it would be hard that's why I put it off until I was about a third in.

It’s about guns.

How is it that a sixty-or-something so-called humor writer ends up writing about such a serious subject? Because I didn’t always write light hearted, nostalgic, make you smile and feel good stuff. I used to write hard-assed opinion pieces that pissed people off. The letters I received, which proclaimed me an asshole, didn’t bother me. It meant someone was at least reading what I wrote and that, dear struggling writer, is what we do. Write something they will read.

It was about children being murdered in their classrooms.

January 1989, twenty-five year old disenfranchised drifter, Patrick Purdy parked his vehicle behind the Cleveland Elementary School in Stockton, California. He set the vehicle on fire and then shot 106 rounds from a Chinese made AKM assault rifle, into portable classrooms.

It was about teachers going to work and never returning home.

I wrote a piece, (which went out over the wire service), defending a citizen's right to own assault rifles. Why did I, the mother of an infant and a toddler defend a killer’s right to arm himself?

It was about how we had to un-list our phone number.

People found me and called me and told me how brave I was to stand up to politicians who were using the tragic event to back their agenda to ban semi-automatic weapons and high capacity magazines. Crazy was on my side, sanity was not.

It was about defending a killer’s right to kill.
Defending the killer was never my intention but once the reader was imbued with that perception there was no going back. I wasn’t ashamed that I had written the piece, my intentions, (which I will not go into here), though misdirected, were noble.

It happened again.

Newtown.

This time my daughter was affected.

It’s odd really, that the Stockton killer, a quarter century before the killings at Sandy Hook,  bought his assault rifle at the Sandy Trading Post in Sandy, Oregon. I cannot write more about what happened here in Connecticut. We have still not picked all the pieces of broken glass from our hearts.

It will never stop.

That chapter, which follows twenty-five years of my thoughts regarding the people’s right to arm themselves, chronicles three pieces, two older op-eds and a new column, each distinctly different in their approach to the second amendment. What happened before, and what happened after each one was published, speaks volumes regarding readers opinions and my own. It speaks to my change of heart. I’m not as anti as some might expect, but I’m sure not as pro as I once claimed to be.

Guns

It’s a four letter word like fuck. How it’s used proclaims its meaning.

Giddy-up old cowhand

I’m a wrangling.

There’s ‘bout a hundred horses on this here ranch. Some are pretty dang wild and a few are positively loco, but most are just plain docile, likable and easy to corral. For the last couple of months I’ve been rounding up the best of the herd, tryin’ to make ‘em into a real team. I got ‘em all down on the south-forty. Been lookin’ them over and I pretty well decided which I’m gonna use for my writin-rodeo.

Problem is they just keep movin’ around. One day they’re over by the barn and another I got ‘em tied up down by the gate at the beginning of the corral. I know I’ll finally figure out exactly where they are supposed to go but right now, they are a buckin’ and a bouncin’ like a handful of jumpin’ beans on cooks cast iron skillet. Just gettin’ them in a row like a bunch of quackers is one thing, figuring out what I'm gotta use in between each one is another day down by the watering hole altogether.

I got my boots and I got my shovel because Gene, Tonto, Roy and Dale them beasts sure do shit a lot. Once I get that stuff cleaned up the show'll be on the road. I’m gonna’ be takin’ some time off soon to do what I gotta’ do just to make it right. Lookin’  forward to it too. 

Hi ho Silver, away!

Not yet Kemosabe, I have to get up the nerve to tell the Sheriff I’ll be using some of my vacation time to buck my broncos.

When was the last time you took time off from your nine to five to write?

Humble in ev-er-y way

   I cleaned my office today.

Every surface was covered with writer’s crap. Edited pages, wads of tissues, (I had a cold), copies of my columns, invoices sent to my editor, bagel crumbs and check-stubs. Six half filled glasses of diluted orange-dry. There were confetti piles of Post-its with scribbled notes that don’t make sense, agent email addresses, and snippets of advice and methods I’ll never implement. There was even half a Snickers under some papers; how the hell that was spared an eaten demise is a wonder.

Rearranging some of the furniture freed up space and allowed me to move more easily while at my desk.  My book shelves look like the writing section at BAM; novels have their own shelves in my bedroom now. With them removed I feel more at ease and not so under the nose of the more accomplished. My office, my writing place is clean, tidy, pleasing to the eye and to my sense of order.

Then I printed the first 108 pages of my memoir. Then I pondered how odd it felt to call this project a memoir. It’s not structured like any memoir I’ve read but it is about me, about what has gone on in my head and heart for the last twenty-five years. To write about oneself is self-aggrandizing but it isn’t just about me.  It’s about what I have said, (published), why I said it, and about what happened once the papers were sold,  my mouth was shut, and my computer was turned off.

Seeing the half inch stack of paper is gratifying. I’m proud that I have come this far and that I actually found the old stuff and resurrected it. I’m pleased by most of it, a little makes me cringe, but some...it’s as if someone else, a writer with a much more eloquent mind wrote it. When I come across a phrase, or a short piece that just seems to nail the right sentiment, I am aghast that I, that little ole incompetent me, could build a framework of words which stands so ‘square’ against our tilted world.

I’m boasting. I’m tooting my own horn. I’m taking self-aggrandizement to great heights here but that’s okay. It pinks my cheeks and makes me feel uncomfortable but the few people, (writers), who will read this, the few who have read some of my stuff and know me, they understand. Writers know how good it makes you feel when your writing place is clean, the words are in order and the efforts look good.

I’m feeling like I just put on a new outfit which I believe fits me perfectly. I feel unbelievably good about what I see in the mirror. But like any writer I often have doubts, I just have to ask.................................................

do I look fat in this?