Blog Alerts

Just a quick alert to my readers.

If you have read any of the blogs and were unable to leave a comment, this is to let you know that you can now leave comments without having to sign in.  However, if you enjoyed what you have read so far and would like to be notified when a new blog is sent out, please click on Subscribe at the top of the Home page.  That way, you get an email when a new blog is posted. And I get your valuable Feedback.  Win-win situation.  Janice

7. Adios, Holidays

    Well, the holidays are behind us, and I don't know about you, but I'm coaching myself to "Breathe" again.  It's amazing what a deep, deep breath can do for you.
    The Christmas decorations have been taken off tables and mantels and hearths and sideboard. I'm back to Minimalism again and it feels so good, clean, and organized.  Full disclosure: they're not all wrapped and stored in the Christmas Box yet and no one's allowed to see the garage for another two days.
    This week's presentation to the Writers Group on Friday is a very long dissertation which will form Chapter One in my book.  It is the result of a conversation I had with one of my volunteer drivers who takes me to the meetings every week.  She has also joined the group and is our "stand-up comedian". What can I say? As the mother of triplets, she has a LOT more funny stories than I have!
    I was whining that to start my book of memories with where I was born and when, sounded terribly dull and boring to me, when in reality the exciting part, personally, happened much later in life.  Laura said, "Well, why don't you start there, and then work backwards?" Did I mention she's a genius as well as the mother of triplets?
    So that is what I did. I ended Chapter One with the following paragraph:

    My life began on October 1, 2005. But I was born 78 years earlier in Ithaca, New York, on a cold, snowy Thursday morning, January 13, 1927.

    My mother had written in my baby album a nursery rhyme published in 1873. It was to teach children the days of the week, while forecasting their future:

Monday’s child is fair of face.

Tuesday’s child is full of grace.

Wednesday’s child is full of woe,

Thursday’s child has far to go….¹

Come. Join me on the journey.

1Friday’s child is loving and giving,

Saturday’s child works hard for a living.

But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day

is bonny and blithe and good and gay.

    Now, in  the chapters of growing up in Auburn, Syracuse, Dallas, Phoenix, Zurich, Rio de Janeiro, San Juan, PR, Estepona, Spain, London and Hitchin, England, Kelowna, BC, Canada and finally Tucson, I will attempt to entertain you with the stories of My (not so) Perfect Life.

    Stay tuned.

BTW, I have had the settings of my Blog corrected to allow everyone to make Comments without having to sign in. Just write your comments and click on Publish.  I'll look forward to hearing from you. And yes, if you read the above blue words carefully, I do turn 91 next week.  Have mercy!

6. Homage to Erma

One of the chapters I have written was about building our house in Spain when we decided to retire there in 1970.  

    A great many people remember fondly the writings of Erma Bombeck, the humorist who wrote weekly columns, appeared on the Today Show, and wrote books on everyday life as a suburban wife in Phoenix, AZ in the '60's, '70's and '8o's. Erma wrote “The Grass is Always Greener over the Septic Tank” in 1976 and it became a best-seller in 1978.

    But I never heard of her, because my husband and I left Phoenix in 1965 and lived abroad for 44 years. Fritz had worked for Carrier Air Conditioning for 39 years but in 1971 while we were living in San Juan, Puerto Rico, he decided to retire to Spain.

Fritz had grown up in Barcelona, and kept close contact with his friends from the German School there. When one of his friends, Hans Hoffman, became the German Consul in Malaga we would always stop by the Consulate for a long lunch with him on our vacations to Spain. On one of those visits in 1968 Hans sold us two acres of land in a finca (plantation) that he had developed over the years. It was called Finca La Cancelada, between Marbella and Estepona on the oceanside of the coastal highway, 45 minutes from Gibraltar.

    The finca had been a sugar plantation: a large piece of land which Hans had divided up into parcels, outlined each parcel with oleander hedges, put in gravel roads, and our water supply was a fresh-water spring up in the mountains which he had funneled down to the finca's water reservoir.

    Once the decision was made we packed up once more, arranged to ship our furniture and in early 1971 flew to Madrid, with our furniture going into storage in Malaga, on the Costa del Sol.

    After two months in Madrid, we received our Residencia Permit (to live permanently in Spain) and promptly moved to the finca, into a furnished apartment over the garage of an existing villa. There were 20 villas in the finca overall, belonging to English, Belgian, German and American ex-pats. We even had a former Russian Princess living there.

    Using the floor plan of a house we had visited during an Open House the previous winter in Tucson, we found an architect in Marbella who recommended a Danish contractor whom he felt would be reliable and started building our retirement villa. The contractor's truck had the motto painted on the side panels: “For peace of mind while building: --Cunild,” That motto obviously leads to a future story: whether it turns out humorous, or one of those stark, raving mad, what were we thinking? stories remains to be seen.

    Two months after we started, while pouring the foundations of the house, my husband got a call from Carrier asking him to come back to work as a consultant on a temporary project. None of the houses at the finca had any telephones; in fact, in 1971 we didn't even have television. Carrier had called a nearby hotel and a messenger came to the apartment requesting that he call Carrier immediately. Fritz accompanied the messenger back to the hotel, where he found out that the consulting job was in England, not Spain, and would start immediately. Carrier had purchased a factory on the Isle of Wight; they wanted to turn it into a manufacturing entity for Carrier window air conditioners to ship and sell in Europe. It was to be a 6-week assignment.

    Being a workaholic, how could he refuse? Then began the rationalizing:

“You love designing and building houses.” And “You learned to speak enough Spanish in Puerto Rico to finish up building the house.”

    No problem. Fritz rented a super studio apartment just off Hyde Park Square in London and traveled weekly to the Isle of Wight, getting the factory in operation.

I coped with workmen, most of whom were former fishermen. I began turning my Spanish 101 into Advanced Conversational Spanish as Fritz took off for London and I was left at the finca to begin picking up great cuss-words in Spanish, and construction words like vigas (Beams), techo (Roof), azulejos (Tiles), posso negro and posso blanco (Septic Tanks: poop and pee, in that order). Every 2-3 months he would fly down to the finca and deal with whatever crisis needed to be straightened out.

    The 6-week assignment interlude turned into a year and a half.

    There would be the occasional messenger treading the by now well-worn path from the hotel phone to my door, and a pleading message from my husband to join him in London for a few weeks.

    Eventually the villa got built, and we had the celebratory paella party for the workers when the tiled roof was finished and they hung the Spanish flag from the chimney.

    We hired a gardener who planted geranium clippings from the neighbors' gardens, hibiscus plants, bougainvilleas and a lot of grass, little plugs by little plugs.

    On September 14, 1971, we celebrated our 25^th Anniversary by going to a nursery and buying a large mimosa tree, planted it in the front courtyard and christened the house Villa Mimosa.

    We enjoyed sitting on the porch with our neighbors with our gin and tonics watching the ferries pass by on their way to Morocco.

    When we began getting visitors from the States, mostly friends from Arizona, I had to begin explaining why there was one large square on our front lawn that was greener than the rest.

    And that was when they told me all about Erma Bombeck and her wonderfully funny wit.

    Erma died, beloved by all her fans, in 1996. Thank you, funny girl. And yes, the grass really is always greener over the septic tank.

    

I found out much later, on a trip back to Phoenix that Erma and her husband had lived a block and a half further up the street from our Phoenix home all the years we had been in Spain.

5. How Far Do You Go?

  So, you've decided to take up the challenge and write your memoirs, because you think you have something to say.

    Okay, that was the easy part. 

    As you start writing about things that happened to you, however, you discover that if you write about this or that, and tell it like it truly was, you're inevitably going to come to grief. You're going to hurt someone's feelings. 
    Do you admit that things weren't always rosy? Do you mention something unpleasant about a relative who is held in high regard by the rest of the family?  Do you ruin somebody's reputation?  Willfully? Do you admit to your own mistakes, and express your (now) heartfelt regrets? 

   How far do you go?  As I started clearing my mind of unhappy events, unfortunate decisions, serious mistakes, questionable relationships, I realized I was sitting on a bombshell if I were to publish those articles.

    I was surprised when talking to other memoirists that we all have faced this dilemma.  

   But the book should not substitute for the psychologist's Barcalounger with the nearby Kleenex box. So, how far do you go?
   Why waste your time trying to convince everyone that you led the perfect life, the golden life, the supremely happy life, if in reality you contemplated suicide a couple of times?   How far do you go?

    One of my fellow writers gave me the answer.  Very short, very simple. very succinct, just not sweet. She looked at me and asked, "Are you writing Fiction or Non-Fiction?"
    So. That was it. I had to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.
    Hopefully, Gentle Readers, as you read excerpts from my Work in Progress, you will find that the whole truth also contained many happy moments, many, many funny moments, pride in hard-won accomplishments, and pearls of wisdom scattered here and there.  I have tried to create a comfortable balance between humor and sadness, excitement and boredom, happiness and depression, and learning and growing.  I hope that at the end of each page, you will feel the urge to turn to the next one.

3. The Reason I Write

    As I joined the computer generation in the Eighties, I appreciatedthe ease and speed we could communicate with our friends and family. When we were living in Rio de Janeiro (1968-1970) we had to write letters by hand, and our daughter who was at Stanford would receive it a month later. But with the advent of the Internet, suddenly you could receive an email message, and six minutes later, send back an answer, so communication between South America and Europe became instantaneous. What a miracle.

    Whenever something triggered a memory, I would write back detailing a little anecdote that related to the message I had received.  And often, I would hear, "Janice, you write such funny little stories, you should write a book."

    Well, over the years, when we moved from one foreign assignment to the next, the stories of strange things built up and since it was the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, (no computers, no Skype), I made the decision after my husband passed away in 2005, that I should record some of these memories for my grandchildren, so they would understand what we had encountered in our daily life, while no longer having the safety net of living normally in the States.

     I soon discovered that writing a book was clearly not the same as writing an email. There were rules to follow, regulations about grammar and punctuation to observe and Spellcheck became my dictionary.

    So I joined the Rillito River Writers Group at my nearest library branch and now I have to discipline myself to follow certain guidelines, as well as develop a very thick skin, as my weekly essays are critiqued  by ten or more zealous fellow writers.

    In my next Blog I will tell you the most difficult decision a Memoirist has to make: How Far Do You Go?

4. Kissing the Blarney Stone

    The other day during a jewelry class I was giving, I told a story about one of the places I had lived in abroad, adding a few funny embellishments, and as the class was laughing, one of the students said, “Oh, Janice, you have the gift of the gab. You must have kissed the Blarney Stone”!

I stopped and said, “Well, you caught me, because I have kissed the Blarney Stone. Would you like to hear what it’s like?” They nodded, because they knew another story was coming whether they agreed or not.

The full story of visiting Blarney Castle is told in the chapter of my upcoming book, but in case you're wondering how kissing the Blarney Stone affected my gift of the gab, I can tell you that the only thing going through my mind as I was hanging upside down outside of that ledge was: "Don't blink! Don't blink!  Oh, God, please don't let my contacts fall out!"