You know how you think, if only I could invent something? Like Velcro? Like the SCUBA tank or the Fushigi Ball? Or little kid Crocs? Or the DeLorean (I thought it was cool).

I'm going to patent Jackie Water.

Water that I put in any glass is better than any other water, from any source.

I can fill a glass from the tap and add ice and, within moments, someone in my family will ask, "Is this your water?" And that person will proceed to drain the glass.

I fill it up again and the same thing happens.

It doesn't matter what the person's age. My son who's 26 will come and drink my water as readily as my son who is four. My twelve-year-old daughter will talk up two stories to get at this water. People will come in from outside, from down the street; they will wake me up at night for this delight.

I flatter myself that it's because my family - and my children's friends, close relatives and people I've met more than once consider me hygienic, sparkling, refreshing, kind of like pure water. They think they can imbibe confidence and grace along with the H20.

The truth is, your mother's water is like your mother's kiss when you're hurt as a child. It just works. It's to be trusted. It's simply better.

When one of my older children was young, he was explaining to a group of other, more sophisticated six-year-olds that the Tooth Fairy had brought him a dollar. Looking down her nose, one of the other kids said, "Don't you know that your mother is the tooth fairy?"

Horrified, my son turned to me and said, "Are you the tooth fairy?"

Thinking quickly, the woman whose daughter had left the fib out of the bag answered for me. "Yes," she said. "Your mother is the tooth fairy. But she's the tooth fairy for everyone."

That's the philosophy behind Jackie Water. A little irreplaceable security in every sip.

             Perhaps I've watched 'The Apprentice' twice. Perhaps it is because I am unjust to Donald Trump, unfairly prejudiced against his hair comb, although I admit his other abilities.

            I watched 'The Celebrity Apprentice' once, because I can't figure out if Sharon Osbourne is gallant or nuts - and because she survived colon cancer, the disease that killed my husband.

            What I really like to watch are cooking and designer shows. My favorites are 'Chopped' and 'Project Runway.' I have a son who's a chef and love seeing tension juxtaposed with knives. And Heidi Klum's icy gentleness is somewhere between Supernanny and Berlin, 1938. She fascinates me.

But when I say that these are my "favorites," I mean I've watched them ... maybe four times each.

            Except for 'Law and Order,' 'Glee' and 'The Good Wife' (Dick Wolf, I'm still ready for my cameo!) I'm not a big TV fan. I was addicted to 'West Wing' and, a thousand years ago, to 'The X-Files,' and I'll watch almost any drama and have even been caught watching the Hallmark Channel.

If I were a big TV fan, I wouldn't watch reality TV. Reality TV seems, to me, like a business lunch, that is to say, it's neither thing. Shows like 'Bad Girls,' and 'The Hills' and that one about the rich girls with the long hair and the Armenian last name make me want to set myself on fire. I keep waiting for the show called 'Ridealong with the LA County Coroner,' and mark my words, it's going to happen.

But talk shows pre-dated reality TV, although the two forms have blended in the age of rants and reunions.

So why do I want my own talk show?

Why am I willing - no, eager! - to make a fool of myself in front of God and country by submitting a video audition on Jacquelyn's Audition: Oh, Jackie! (Reinvent Yourself. Reinvent Your World) - OWN TV to be considered as a contestant on a reality show for which the grand prize is ... well, your own talk show on OWN (the Oprah Winfrey Network?)

Undoubtedly, it's because it's I remember from being a child sneaking down the hall at night in our apartment to watch 'Dick Cavett.'

I've watched old films of the Dick Cavett show and it would never make it on TV today. Everything is plain, slow and cerebral. The guests sat on regular chairs and Cavett's monologues were often about his obsession with things that nobody had really got on board with yet - like the dangers of the airplane then known as the Super-Sonic Transport, 'The Concorde.' And yet, when it came to the Concorde, Cavett was prescient: The Air France airliner crashed ten years ago next month, ending effectively that mode of expensive, unnecessary high-speed travel. Cavett also had really funny people on. At the age of 11, I didn't know much about Gore Vidal and Truman Capote but they fought in a way that I found hysterically bitchy and cool. Charlie Rose is the closet thing around to that old show now. But it's just not funny, or if it is, it's too dry for the modern palate. Bill Maher is incredibly funny but too vulgar even for me and definitely too vulgar for daytime. 'The View' is the closest thing around but it's too often a hen party or mean-spirited or silly - with Barbara Walters' exasperation plain when she has to listen to her co-hosts take off on a subject with no regard for facts and plenty for their own polarized beliefs. (I exempt Joy Behar. I love Joy Behar.)

If I watch talk shows now, it's generally Joy Behar. I don't like that Jon Stewart, although he's really smart and terribly funny, doesn't really have "guests." He has 58-second confrontations with other smart and funny people, or people with whom he has a bone to pick. Joy Behar luxuriates with her guests. Then she adds more. Sometimes, it's just one person. It's like a long visit with an old friend.

And that's what I would want to do - a daytime vision of Joy Behar with a little more snap and slapstick a la Ellen DeGeneres (there is only one Ellen and long may she reign), with some stories that are really stories (like Oprah's story about Janni, a seven-year-old schizophrenic, who is the beautiful and tragic daughter of two of my dear friends). There would also be some visits that are really visits, in the manner of James Lipton on 'Inside the Actor's Studio,' although perhaps not quite so ... er, long-winded and worshipful (sorry James; really, still ask my son Marty to be on one day when he's famous!).

So let's do this. Go to Jacquelyn's Audition: Oh, Jackie! (Reinvent Yourself. Reinvent Your World) - OWN TV and vote for me. This is how you do it.

For you, it's a win-win. If you think I'm a self-seeking nut, you can see me fall on my bizonga.

If you think I've got a decent head and a good heart and some chops, maybe you'll identify with me as one of your own.

Anyhow, if you're not gigging, you're dying. So let's have some fun before we die.

 

 

 

 

  Our daughter Mia was nearly eleven, and sweet childhood was a setting sun on the far horizon: Princess gear and soap bubbles had given way to flat irons and Team Edward. That's how it is, I thought. They grow up sooner than we know, sooner than we did. The big tin trunk that held Mia's American Girl doll and its many homemade outfits sat high on a closet shelf: One day, she would give it to her own little girl. The Disney Channel had gone the way of teddy bears and even the Animal Planet was on waivers. Although she still slept with the chenille blanket she called "Fuzzalumps," she folded The Fuzz decorously under her pillow, with only a protruding corner to stroke.

And we fully expected that the older of the two daughters we adopted six months ago from Ethiopia, who was then nearly twelve, would hasten this bittersweet process forward. She would be older than Mia not only by a year, but made old by witness, deprivation and grief. Merit's father died of AIDS when she was four; rapidly, her beloved mom, formerly a textile designer, sickened and finally had to relinquish Merit and her five-year-old sister into care. In one year, a child who had once enjoyed being nearly middle class by Ethiopian standards (living in a house owned by her family, playing soccer in the yard, going each day to what she called "the good school") had become the little mother to her little sister, the fetcher and carrier for her ailing mother and then, suddenly, an export, thrust into a new world.

            Just half a year later, I look down at them over the railing from the second story of our house at Mia and Merit. And I am astonished anew by what life places in your hand when you hold it out - expecting a dull coin, receiving a flower, Mia and Merit, now eleven and twelve, are not watching the Disney Channel. They're watching old Flintstones cartoons. At their feet, tucked under blankets, are their dolls, dressed to the nines, doll hair in ribbons.

            How did this happen?

             Merit and Marta arrived home on the evening of Christmas Day. Although Merit loved the iPod handed down from her older sister Francie and the fancy sweater, she was, she later told me, shocked that little Marta received a doll and she did not. "I love dollies," she said. "I used to have a doll of my own." Needless to say, Santa soon made up for the error via Craigslist and the doll she named "Jodie" became Merit's most treasured companion. Even I was embarrassed when she talked animatedly to Jodie and wanted to bring her along when we went shopping. I was so accustomed (too accustomed) to little girls who behaved like little women. Had we ever encouraged Mia to grow up too soon? Not ever. Like every parent, we dug in our feet and clung to every vestige of childhood, from Halloween dress-ups to forbidding Facebook. Until we met Merit, we thought Mia was "younger" for her age than many of her friends - some of whom wore mascara and carried a different purse every day to the fifth grade. But Merit put it straight when she said, "Sometimes I don't want to grow up. If you grow up, you can't play. You have to be a busy woman." That wisdom had been hard won, but it still was a treasure.

            Months passed and Mia rolled her eyes over Merit's "babyish" ways. When Merit asked Mia to play "castle" or "dolls" with her, Mia either gave in with long-suffering grace or politely declined. One day, abruptly, when Merit and I were laughing about how difficult it was to braid her doll's hair, Mia got huge tears in her eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked, fearing, as every parent who adopts an older child does, that I was being too preferential to the newcomer.

 "I cut my doll's hair off," Mia admitted. "I was only nine and I wanted her to have hair like my best friend. But it didn't go right and I messed her up. So I hid her. And then, Dad put the trunk away and I can't get it down."

            And here I thought, in sad silence, that Mia had hidden her doll because she'd outgrown her - not because she'd scalped her.

            We got the trunk down.

            It was filled with recent but still poignant memories. Mia's doll did have incredibly bad hair, but even I was skillful enough to doctor it up. There were clothes and shoes and a doll-sized table and chairs and a microphone and a fancy cheerleading outfit. Hours passed before Merit and Mia emerged from their room. And now, although neither girl can wait to see the newest vampire flick, their dolls are usually around, as well. All the kids have turned away from the computer (sometimes) and begun to build campgrounds from sheets and chairs, as Mia did when she was seven. They catch bugs. They feel free to yell and run. They dress up the dog. Mia's "makeup" bag is still a bag, but it's now filled with word search books and finger knitting loops. The other day, they asked me for jump ropes and clay, two things that their sisters from Ethiopia absolutely loved before the orphanage and couldn't wait to get their hands on again.

            What I believed, when we made the controversial decision to adopt two older daughters from Ethiopia, was that they would teach our original children that life was not all easy, that fresh food and hot baths were not entitlements, that shoes and toys were not to be taken for granted. We thought the children would learn lessons of compassion, humility and tolerance. They have and some have been difficult. But my mistake was in thinking that the gifts would all be on one side. What I hoped, when I dared hoped, was that our children could help us to give back the childhood that life had taken - especially from Merit.

            Instead, the reverse was true.

            Merit came seven thousand miles and what she brought with her was not the exotic lessons we expected but something else that, in our house, it had become rare, and nearly endangered. She brought back innocence.

 

Lately, and I'm not old enough for this, that old gang of mine is breaking up.

Friendships I thought were mine for a lifetime have ended emphatically.

I've been dumped.

These departures left me shaking - wondering if what my husband says (at his worst moments) is true - that I'm the hardest person on earth to get along with. He says I have a wit that sometimes disables rather than disarms, gallantry that can be overbearing and that I'm charming rather than nice.

Oh dear.

I wouldn't want to be that person's friend either.

Neither do I think I am that person. I don't try to nick people with a tendency toward sarcasm. I've ended up apologizing to my older kids, in tears, for just that kind of behavior. I don't try to push people into things I think are 'good for them" (except my husband, which is perhaps why he said that).

So how did I lose friends and fail to influence people?

I know why two of these long-term friendships ended. In one case, I was talking to Grace, a friend for a dozen years, about different kinds of marital infidelity. I was taking notes because this was a chat with a purpose, meant as fodder for a novel. Grace knew this. She told me a dozen stories. Of all those, two showed up in the book, both thickly disguised. But Grace knew that one referred to a member of her extended family. She detonated and the fallout buried any good feelings we might have had for each other. I apologized over and over - in writing, through other friends.

And it turned out that Grace had not, for years, had much use for me.

A political argument with Sherry's brother ended another friendship.

Although she didn't agree with a single thing her brother said, Sherry seemed to feel that I should have treated his feelings with more respect - that I embarrassed him publicly. I don't know this for sure. Sherry wouldn't take my calls. She wouldn't return my emails. She finally sent me a letter, which I returned unopened. I just didn't want to see myself through those eyes.

As it turned out, Sherry confided in friends we have in common that my personality had been "stressful" to her for a long time - that our friendship felt "like work."

In the third case, I have no idea what happened.

The last thing I remember is hugging my dear pal Annie goodbye just before she moved to Chicago. The next thing I knew, she wouldn't speak to me. Annie has told other friends that, after her divorce, losing me is the greatest heartbreak of her life.

And yet, she won't tell me why she lost me.

The point of all this is the interesting part. Obviously, there are three ways I can take this:

1.     I'm a pain and people can put up with me only short-term.

2.     There's something I'm doing wrong that I need to examine and change.

3.     I'm a bad judge of friends.

 

Another close pal, a man, says it's the third case. He says that despite their wonderful qualities (he knows my friend Grace, and rather well) I felt so keenly the delight of being cherished I overlooked far, far too much. I invested these people with more intelligence, more charm and more insightfulness than they ever had. He said to try to think about what others might say about my three friends.

I thought about what other people had said. They'd called Grace a virago - funny, fierce, smart and intolerant. Although her fix-it generosity could save the day, her coruscating scorn could blacken any moment. Grace was someone you would never want on the other side, even in a game of checkers

Sherry only wants to be with her husband, her sons and her brother. They do everything together; she'll break long-standing dates or ask to bring her husband along (at the last minute) at his whim. Her fear of upsetting the boat of her nuclear family means that she must be always the peacemaker - doing anything to avoid conflict. Sherry needs a massage, a therapy session, a chiropractic appointment, three hours of meditation and a reiki practitioner's visit each week - just to stay sane. She is serene and delightful; who wouldn't be, with that much self-care? We were a bad match to begin with, a geisha and a bullfighter. This isn't to say I won't always miss her. Our families were close. We shared that common language of the best friendships. But I can feel a certain peace.

And Anna? Anna is the most ambitious woman I've ever known. She prosecutes her ambitions through a superficial warmth and motherliness; her "friendships" are really coalitions. When you can't advance her any longer, or if you become a liability, even to a small degree, you're outside the wire.

Now granted, I'm a pain.

I still speak first and repent later. I'm impatient and moody and expect people to know what hurts me, without my saying it. I'm trying to change that.

But think of the people you consider your nearest. Do you overlook too many things - from small slights to large oversights - because you don't want to give up a long past?

I happened to be at a lecture Anna gave, not too long ago. And I fully expected to burst into tears at the sight of her. Instead, to my shock, I found her talk dry, didactic and ever-so-well-rehearsed. I reached deep down to the bottom of my soul, as the song says. And I felt ... nothing.

 

 

I know how much of a trial they can be.

            I know how hard they lean and how fickle they can be, and how punishing, annoying, interfering, thoughtless and silly.

            My husband's once shocked me by giving away half of the Christmas gifts we'd carefully chosen for her -- and to another relative, so we actually saw them.

            Mine was beautiful, flirtatious (even with my boyfriends and friends' husbands), loud, gallant, creative and occasionally cruel. Too often, she made me be her when I only wanted to be me.

            I still wish I had a mother.

            Even when the agony of seeing their mothers age afflicts my same-age friends with an unbearable poignancy, even when their lucid moments become fewer and their demands greater than my friends think they can bear, I still wish I had a mother.

            As a mother, I know that my love is not a canoe, but a raft. It's unsinkable and stable and has room for many. It's occasionally stormy and soggy and uncomfortable. I know that I'm sometimes unkind. I'm always ready with a guilt trip. I use my small gift for words to a big fault. But my kids are lucky to have a mother. They're lucky to have this mother, who is not just their biggest fan, but the whole auditorium, whose regard for them is not as small as the galaxy, but is the great purple sky with all its amber stars set down around their shoulders as a blanket. Despite everything, I wish I still had someone who felt that way about me. My kids never can. My husband never can. My mother-in-law never can. A few of my friends come close. But only by my difficult, neurotic, addicted mother was I adored.

            She died before I was 20. 

            For years afterward, I dreamed that she came to sit on my bed. She wore the long white cotton nightgown she wore in her last illness, a brain tumor, but the red-brown feathers of her cap of hair covered the great geological fault above her ear where the surgeon had taken his saw. She told me, and she could speak again, that she couldn't listen to what I had to say -- or rather, that she could, but if she did, she could not hold me. I had a choice. I chose for her to hold me. Her hands were tiny as the hollow-boned wings of birds. She smelled of the old Jean Patou cologne called 'Joy.' After I became a mother, not many years later, she stopped coming. I wish she hadn't. If she would come once more, I'd choose the first option. I'd tell her about Rob's gift for languages, and Martin's singing voice, and Francie's steely will (Francie is most like her) and Will's enormous temper that goes along with his enormous heart. I'd ask if there was a third option. I'd ask if I could take her back, as she was when she died, speechless, with seizures, her damaged brain willing her feet and hands to contract, for just a moment -- so she could see how only some of the bad mothering she did and all of the good have lived on in me.

            I wish I had a mother, if only for a moment ... not only this month, but every Christmas, every Thursday night (we liked Thursday night TV) and every time I see one of her gestures in one of my children's repertoire. 

 

He's not a vampire. He's not a werewolf. 

And he really does live in the house at the end of the block.

But there's something unusual about Ben Highland. Is he merely sad and confused? Is he dangerous? Is he even of this earth?

Meredith Brynn can't be sure.

The entire Brynn family is in an uproar when Meredith meets Ben. The youngest child in the family, Owen, has a mysterious illness not even specialists can diagnose, although the toddler is losing ground quickly.

Meanwhile, although Meredith Brynn is in love for the first time in her life, some instinct warns here that she can't even tell her twin sister about the boy of her dreams, Ben. But Meredith and Mallory Brynn are the twins with something extra: Born on New Years Eve, one minute before midnight and one minute after, one of them can see the secrets of the past and one the secrets of the future.

Mallory knows that Meredith is, literally, drifting away from her, toward some destiny Mallory can't foresee.

In the last book of The Midnight Twins trilogy, Watch for Me by Moonlight, the story of Meredith and Mallory comes to a poignant and startling conclusion, but not before fate nearly divides the sisters forever.

             Imagine traveling 7,000 miles to give yourself into the care of two people - one whom you'd known for exactly five days and one you never met?

            That's what two young girls from Ethiopia did exactly one month ago when they came to our home.

            Imagine being thrust into the midst of a Wisconsin winter -- never having seen snow.

            Imagine everyone around you, except your younger sister, speaking a language in which you know one phrase: "I'm well, thank you." And like Abba singing Dancing Queen, you have no idea what that phrase means.

            Imagine living inside a house your house would have fit into five times.

            Imagine being given medicine - and blood tests and exams - simply at the will of strangers.

            Imagine going from Ethiopian orphan to semi-spoiled brat in one week.

Imagine mastering the most key phrases in the English language that kids need to know: "I'll be there in a minute ..." "More cookies?" and "I'm NOT tired!" and "I don't want to eat that!"

            Imagine feeling safe enough to have a tantrum, for the first time in your life.

            Imagine never having seen a closet or a toaster or a laptop or a freezer or a Popsicle or an indoor pool or a piano.

            Imagine taking all that in your stride, and, just thirty days after the first time you saw its red roof, spotting the place you live from the road.

Imagine, when the driver asks if you can see the house, answering, "Not a house. My home."

            Imagine knowing two people so trustful and brave. Imagine having the privilege of knowing them for the rest of your life.

     Cars and sweaters, chocolate and cologne. Diamonds and DVD's. Flat screens and flat irons.

     The selling season, it seems, will never end.

     First came the pre-pre holiday sales. The moment the pre-holiday sales ended, the holiday sales and now the post-holiday sales began. They'll be followed by the Valentine's Day Toyota Bash, the President's Day Premiere, St. Patrick's Day Lucky Diamond Dazzler Sale, the Spring Sell-a-thon, the Memorial Day Miracle Electronics Event, the Independence-Day-Freedom-from-Interest-Til-2012 Sale, the Labor Day for Less Preview ...

     And it will start all over again. Two months before Christmas, there'll be "early bird" specials. Two days before, there'll be "last-minute" special savings.

They'll all be the equivalent of gumbo - which is served with tomato sauce in a restaurant when the last of the sausage and fish is about to go out into the bins. It gets repackaged into some alluring and makes us feel as though their trash is our treasure.

     We can't resist. We can't stop the cycle. A new bow, a new bauble. A new pitch.

     Everything's on sale, all the time. Including us.

            Kirkus Reviews, the pre-publication review service will close, I learned today.

            Editor & Publisher, the venerable magazine of the publishing industry, which sponsored Kirkus, closes its doors this year too, after 125 years of watch-dogging the watchdogs. Editor & Publisher was the great-hearted, no-prisoners giant of journalism, the place where cubs such as I was a quarter century ago once drooled over dream jobs.

There were jobs then, and a hunger for them.

There was news then - beyond speculation about the serial marriages and poignant deaths and addictions of celebrities, reportage beyond reporting as fact a pundit's opinion on something as hot and controversial as the hot-air balloon dad. It was the last, good time for the work I loved. At its end (and at its zenith) under Greg Mitchell, Editor & Publisher questioned weapons of mass destruction and the whole cant of reportage on the war.

Then there was the other Nielsen publication that went down just the other day - Kirkus Reviews. Ironically named for the gentle and elegant Virginia Kirkus, once the head of children's publishing for Harper, Kirkus Reviews published what the service considered to be bold and impartial reviews, but which were actually nasty and mean-spirited. The reviewers had their good days and the literary writers they venerated, except for those venerated few, literary writers mostly, the reviews revered.

While I'm sorry that eighteen people lost their jobs at Kirkus Reviews, those eighteen are responsible for more collective heartbreak than Warren Beatty in his heydey. Perhaps because the reviews were unsigned, the writers, whom many of us imagined to be frustrated authors, felt permission to run the gamut from fainting by damned praise to school-marmish sanctions to outright flaming, including barbed suggestions that the author of such intestinal contents might best serve arts, letters and the commonwealth by putting down the pen forever. Maybe they were Pulitzer Prize winners earning lunch money. Maybe they really thought they were warning people against spending that fatal $24.95 that would besmirch their intellectual lives forever.

Bad reviews have never seemed entirely worth the candle. They might afford the writer that brief, intense head rush that only an expulsion of pure spite can provide. What function, really, do they serve? A critical review - one, for example, by Meg Wolitzer in the Washington Post -- that explains for readers and writers what a book might have been and where it missed, is a service. It gives the consumer a choice. A negative, sarcastic review could be construed as a warning: Don't go here! But I never believed a bad review was meant to save the consumer. It was meant to publicly scald the writer.

I know people who've gotten only great Kirkus reviews on their books, and I've received a few - about the same number as the number of second thoughts John Mayer gives a romance (please excuse the Lothario references; they're just so apt when it comes to callousness).

It's an odd day when we mourn the great heart of the dying giant of journalism, and simultaneously look around for just the right stake to drive through the heart of a nasty little gnome of an institution like Kirkus Reviews.

 

 

          

Do you have a Facebook account?

Most people have ... two. Sorry.

Do you "MySpace?" Do you "Tweet?" Do you get in your "medium" number of Tweets on Twitter each day? (It's five).

Are you LinkedIn?

Do you blog on Blogspot or do you use a Henchy platform on a 3.1 grayscale PD24 EVE interface?

Do you post your pix on Twitpix?

Do you FlipVid? Do you send your FlipVids to ALL or just to Advrogato, Bebo, Baroo, CafeChic, Daily Strength, Daily Booth, Daily Planet, Daily Buzz and WowowWow?

Do you podcast? In stu or out stu?

Is your e-mail subject grouped? Targeted? Do you have a Blaster?

Are you streaming?

Are you screaming?

The obligation to market under the guise of "friendship" or "community" is not just neither-nor (like a breakfast meeting or a working vacation), it's a time-sink, in the same way as buying a house with character is code for buying a house that will never work. It requires a big learning curve. It requires skills other than the skills you brought to the table. It requires all of us to be perky - or lewd, or world-weary or political - even when we're not.

"Social marketing" is a contradiction of terms that's going to have a backlash. Like a social-marketing Armageddon. I don't know what it will be. But I do know that, 20 years ago, my kids who are now graduating college had these little toys like Tamagotchis, digi-pets that needed to eat and nap and be let out three times a day or they'd end up with crosses over their little digi-eyes and wings on their little digi-shoulders, signifying that they'd gone to digi-heaven.

And I got so nuts that I would actually line up the Tamagotchis to tend them - until one day, I tended them with a hammer. I bought the children other things. Yo-yos. Drawing paper.

No one is going to do away with cyber tools. But up with my "social" obligations, I am right now fed. Maybe that'll change. I'll Tweet you in.