I know Beth Cappadora.
I know all the Cappadoras.
Nobody knows them better.
As my son Dan used to say when he was a little boy, "You made them up. You're the boss of them."
Maybe you know them, too - a family you met thirteen years ago when 'The Deep End of the Ocean' was published and became the first book in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club.
Beth Kerry and Pat Cappadora grew up together, went to high school together, went to college together and - just when their parents had almost given up a secret hope - fell in love. It was never an easy marriage but it was always a strong one, built on passion, deep common values and shared memories.
All that ended when their three-year-old son, Ben, was kidnapped from a hotel lobby when Beth was meeting friends at her fifteen-year class reunion.
The Cappadoras would never be the same, not even nine years later when a miracle happened and Ben, healthy and whole but with scarcely a thread of memory from his early childhood, was restored to them.
I know the Cappadoras so well that when I had a dream that told me what their heartbroken and troubled older son, Vincent, would do at age 29, and how what he would bring his family their greatest triumph and their greatest despair - why, all I had to do was write it down.
When Beth stretched out her hand to touch the air above Vincent's head as he slept in her guest room, I didn't have to say that he was her SON. I knew he was her son. Why else would a woman in her 40s dare not touch a young man in his 20s? He was her son, obviously!
Not so obviously!
In fact, many of you will meet the Cappadora family for the first time in No Time to Wave Goodbye, the novel that takes up when Beth and Pat are at the peak of their emotional and financial success, when Vincent has overcome (at least some of) his demons and become a documentary filmmaker, when Ben has joined his dad in the family restaurant business and the little sister, Kerry, is studying to be an opera singer. You'll see them for the first time, with all their flaws, their rough humor, their often hidden love for one another.
I just sort of thought everybody would know that!
Why did I think everybody would know that?
When I wrote the first version of this novel, I was writing about the song inside of my head and assuming that everyone else knew the words.
Even good writers do that. I don't think many writers who've written fifteen other books do that - but ... I know these people. Personally!
When I wrote the second version, I still didn't get it.
When I wrote the third, was close to getting it. But then I thought of a stronger story and had to do the whole thing over again.
When I wrote the fourth version, my editor had something to contribute.
When I wrote the fifth, my other editor had a few firm words to add.
The other day, when I saw the cover and knew that the book was finished for better or worse, a great friend of mine suggested I add two sentences.
And so I did.
The other day at my publisher, Random House, the great editor Kate Medina told me, "Oh Jackie, twenty-one rewrites is nothing...."
I hope she didn't hear me when I yipped.

   If I had my way, I would do only the research and never write the book. That's not true. I love to write but it's exquisitely painful and there are as many do-overs as there are with parenthood -- except that with writing, living witnesses don't remind you of the time you smoked a cigarette (for the next twenty years).
   And so I  set out to do research and one segment of the research was particularly arcane and very specific for No Time to Wave Goodbye.
   I had to find out about doing a wilderness rescue in far less than optimum conditions -- in scantily charted territory, over rock slicked by snow and ice, with an experienced tracker and two dedicated but clueless family members.
   And enormous stakes. The stakes had to be sky-high.
   I enlisted the help of the great outdoorsman and wilderness survival expert (for, among others, the History Channel) Greg Davenport (gregdavenport.com). Greg helped found a wilderness survival program, works in emergency medicine and has done some amazing rescues himself (all while being dad to um... by now, seven children) with his terrific bride, Dawn.
   Greg could not have been more helpful, loving and confiding. Although we never met in person, I sent him specific questions and through a series of gargantuan emails and long telephone conversations, I began to have the smallest sense of just how vital the smallest thing can be in a fight for survival.
   And I don't necessarily mean a dramatic Everest quest.
   A human being who gets wet in freezing temperatures and can't properly warm and dry himself will be death on a cracker in a shockingly short amount of time.
The least thing (such as a film cannister or screw-top plastic holder filled with Vaseline-soaked Q-tips that can coax a fire into starting) can be the margin between life and death ... the breadth of a Q-tip, the head of a match, the inner layer of wicking glove, the batteries that are new.
   In No Time to Wave Goodbye, the Cappadora brothers, who were aged 12 and 16 in The Deep End of the Ocean, now are 25 and 29. And they have existed in s limbo world of conditional love, competition and contempt since Ben returned from nine years with the family of the elegant, mad woman who abducted Ben as a toddler.
   On the night of Vincent's greatest triumph as a man in full, the family is cast into an unimaginable redux and the brothers end up needing to go out into a trackless wilderness with a brilliant guide and her air-scenting dog to search for a child neither of them can bear to lose ...
   Inadvertently, in describing for me in detail the risk of hypothermia high in a (fictional) mountain range north of San Francisco, Greg gave me the most powerful image for the whole novel: A sleeping bag.
   I should add that we both did these interviews under survivalist conditions. I have two boys who are five and three and my co-worker has boys who are five and two. My ten-year-old daughter acts, alternately, as the kindly teacher and the mistress of dominance. Add the mutt and the Saint Bernard pup, and the constant swirl of human traffic -- either in delight or distress -- at Greg's house and my own and it becomes a small miracle that we spoke to each other at all.
   It was a matter of survival.


yours
Jackie M.

The 'S' word is a scary word to writers.

That's not true. It's downright terrifying.

The 'S' word means you're on the ropes.

Unless you've built your life on a continuing character, a la Sue Grafton (www.suegrafton.com)

Hugely successful writers are adapting their novels to screenplays.

That's not what the 'S' word is.

'S' is for SEQUEL - which often means trying to get another bit of squeak out of sleeping characters that made your biggest seller so big. Sometimes, they're happy to get out there and do a marathon again. Sometimes they're flabby and tired and just want to go back into their dusty covers and tear open another bag of Doritos.

SEQUELS ARE NEVER AS GOOD AS THE ORIGINALS.

Okay!

That's what they say. But they're not always correct.

Sometimes, writers learn things in the years between the original and the, ah, following book. Sometimes, one of the things is how not to write down ... everything they know.

I was so frightened of the 'S' word that it took me five false starts and three titles to give myself permission to write No Time to Wave Goodbye,  which is a continuation of The Deep End of the Ocean, a book so successful I was fooled into thinking I was the next Mary Higgins Clark. Which, as it turns out, I'm not. But I am the only Jacquelyn Mitchard, and so, when I made bold to continue the story of Beth and Pat Cappadora and their two sons, lost and found, despite my sudden and urgent need for a three-week nap,  and a family-sized bag of Doritos, I knew I was the only one who could find my way back into those complicated lives.

But in a few days, I'll tell you how this idea was born, how it changed and why it's so kind of swell now.

Yours,

Jackie

     Last weekend at One Writer's Place, a student friend of mine and I had an experience worthy of fiction - all in the diehard quest for good bakery.
    I'm going to commit a writing sin (one for which I might chastise my students) and describe One Writer's Place before I relate the story. This is for the sake of you who might come across this blog in an accident on Google and who don't know the name of Jacquelyn Mitchard from the name of a good brand of packing tape.
   One Writer's Place is a place and idea.
   The idea lives inside a modest Cape Cod home that we found and furnished, mostly with used things we bought on Craigslist or which were donated to us when we explained their purpose. My immensely generous and brilliant pal -- the artist and colorist Cristina Reverdy (whose paintings now are on display at the Cultural Center of Cape Cod and also on www.yellowhousestudio.com) enlivened the house and made it beautiful, right up to the mermaids on the upstairs bedroom wall.
   She did this for the cost of the paint, for the love of art and for love of the mission.
   The mission is to give writers of all kind (from song to screenplay) and small-form visual artists (such as Susan Reading, who makes amazing fabric jewelry, while also hosting the renowned Novel Evening Book Club) a place to be who they are. The photography of my best friend's son, Christopher LeClaire, hangs on the walls (see Chris' beautiful photos on Facebook).
    There is no jury to judge the merits of the work or the idea.
    There is no qualification beyond the wish and the will to do something creative, especially when that wish and will has to be squeezed like toothpaste out of a life packed tight with multi-colored and conflicting responsibilities. It's possible to stay at One Writer's Place just for a week - which isn't possible at most real writer's residences, which are intensely competitive and should be. They come with a great deal of prestige and terrific perks, which this place does not (although the mattresses ARE new and very, very comfortable). But fifteen years ago, when I was a newly widowed mom -- facing her forties with no money but three young sons who needed it, no hope but the need to shape a dream from it and no time but the urgent need to make some of it from mist so that I could find out who I might try to be for the forty-odd years or more of life I had leftover.
    To come here as a resident, you have to be able to drive a car, ride a plane or sit on a bus, pay a cleaning fee and feed yourself.
    That's it.
    You have to provide references, but they need be references not to your talent but to your character. In other words, don't make this your first stop after you do five years for arson. (By the way, whoever it was took the three baby turtles that used to sit on my window sill with the mama? Hey, I don't know who you are but it's on your karma, not mine.)
    The whole thing's based on trust.
    So far - except for those turtles, which you can return, no questions asked - it's worked out.
    A writer can also take classes here (I don't know how to make jewelry).  I only know how to write, some days better than others. That costs more but includes gourmet meals and very nice mattresses as well as a few words to the wise and some pretty difficult work.
    The day of the do-or-die bakery run was one of the days that I was in the midst of teaching two back-to-back seminars scheduled the previous fall.
    I mention that this workshop and retreat had been scheduled the previous fall because, last fall, neither I nor my co-worker, Pamela, realized that the week I would be here was the week of my younger children's spring break as well as the celebration of Easter and Passover.
    Huge guilt (appropriate to the season), huge secular grief (my youngest sons are already three and five; how many more times can the Easter Bunny come?). Huge infliction of my angst on my husband and mother-in-law.
    At least, Pamela explained to me, her gaze shining tears nearly ready to spill, the weather would be beautiful -- spring by the ocean, the daffodils in bloom, the birds at work on their nests.
    And it was the kind of weekend that accounts for the high rate of alcoholism among people who yearly endure the harsh winters on the North Atlantic for the sake of the short season of forgiveness. On Friday, it was bone-cold. Saturday, it rained for twenty hours straight.
    I couldn't color the bunny eggs, so I decided I must have hot cross buns for my students.
    Because one of my students, Candace Hammond, is a feature writer for the Cape Cod Times, and because she - I think it was she - had written an article that glowed about one bakery's legendary Hot Cross buns (the kind in the nursery rhyme that are one-a-penny, two-a-penny but cost a little more, though not very much more, now).
    As a result, the bakery got orders for about 5,000 Hot Cross buns, buns that the owner had to bake, cross and cut by hand. And although they stopped taking orders on Friday, on Saturday, we found out through a covert phone tip, that more hot cross buns might be forthcoming on a first-come, first-served basis sometime before noon.
    Candy and I set out at the appointed hour (11 a.m.) and arrived at the bakery.
    It is in Chatham, Massachusetts, and it is called Marion's Pies. (Marion's Pies does feature uncommonly good pies despite the Sweeney-Todd like sign next to the door that reads, 'Good children are welcome. The others will be made into pies.' This is a legacy from the founder and from my few encounters with her, one of the only human beings on earth who ever scared me on sight, was not entirely out of line with the prevailing philosophy at the time.)
    Although the line at the door was only six persons long, cars filled the parking lot and lined the sides of the street for a block either way as though there was an estate sale in progress hosted by someone who wanted high prices for the Tupperware but was going to throw the antiques away after the final gavel dropped.
    The new owner of the bakery - whom I'll refer to as Not-Marion -- was conducting the run on the bun-bank with the aplomb of a Brooklyn police officer. Even from outside, we could hear her saying, "Look, stand back! If you've got a number, we'll get to you. If you don't, we'll get to you. We have chicken pies but not with vegetables. We'll have those later," Not-Marion said.
Mildly, the gent in front of me remarked that it was amazing what a person would go through to get out of making a pie.
    "We are here for the hot cross buns," I told him.
    "Fat chance," said he.
    Indeed, Candy and I had remarked to each other that we were standing outside in line, wearing winter coats and sheltering under an umbrella the size of a parasol for $8 worth of flour and icing, it did not seem right or anything except cowardly to turn back at that point. By 11:30 a.m., we had advanced in the line and could see twenty people inside standing in front of the counter - a space about four by twelve feet - in ranks three deep.
    On the porch under the awning stood a truly terrifying Easter bunny.
    Since I have been an Easter bunny (I was a blue bunny in a mall and it was one of the things an editor can make a person do who's desperate to keep her first daily newspaper job) I knew what rigors of heat and itch the person inside the bunny must be feeling; but truly, the aspect was not reminiscent of Harvey but more of Stephen King.
    That bunny was six feet tall and had eyes like tar pits.
    "It's going better than Santa," one father remarked, as he coaxed his three-year-old closer (why do we do this to children?) until the child looked into those soul-dead bunny-head eyes and screamed.
    "I have coulrophobia," Candy told me, sotto voce.
    "What is that?" I asked, watching the little kid run for the safety of the car with his father in hot pursuit - while the bunny, who was actually a nice young guy passing out eggs with jelly beans and bottles of soap bubbles - looked crestfallen in a creepy, monstrous but rather fetching way.
    "It's fear of clowns," Candy said.
    Later, I looked it up and found that coulrophobia actually is an EXAGGERATED fear of clowns - which presumes that everyone has a fear of clowns that pertains to some degree and I certainly do. (As does Stephen King. Read the novel 'It,' or if you have really truly exaggerated coultrophobia, don't.) Mine stems from an early-childhood viewing of the Disney movie 'Dumbo,' in which the clowns were, as some are, in fact, vicious jerks who made fun of the poor orphaned baby Dumbo as well as pretending to smack a man dressed up as a human baby with a bat and some other things that might have been wildly hysterical if you were a sociopath.
    I love to sing the song 'Baby Mine,' to my children but cannot sing it without breaking into sobs, and wonder, re 'Dumbo,' why do we inflict these things on children? And what do we think about the children who do find the clown scene funny? Do we make sure they don't like meat?
    A woman who had taken refuge under the awning, next to me and the bunny, who contritely held out a jelly-bean egg to me which I accepted on behalf of my abandoned children, told me that her 28-year-old son had attempted to conquer his toddler's fear of Santa Claus (this is called "Santaphobia").  "He let my grandson watch him put on the coat and the boots and the hat and the beard and he kept telling him, see? It's only Daddy. But the minute my son went into the bathroom and came out again with the costume on, the baby got hysterical."
    Why do we do these things to our children?
    Betimes, Candy and I got into the building and asked the question of the hour. "Do you have any more hot cross buns?"
    Hysterical laughter. The people behind the counter became red-eyed and wolfen. As one, they cried, "I never want to see another hot-cross bun!"
    "Five thousand hot cross buns, and then another few hundred today!" called another.
    I didn't dare speak again. In fact, I didn't want to know the answer. It has been so long and I had come so far. I had abandoned my other students (not to mention my children who would need therapy) on this fool's errand for reasons I quite likely don't entirely understand myself.
    "But have you got any hot-cross buns?" Candy asked boldly. Candy is tall and blond and slim and soon will have arms like Michelle Obama because she's getting personal training free to write a feature story on how to get arms like Michelle Obama.
    "Well, yes, we do," one of the women behind the counter replied. "We're just sick of them, is all."
    The presumed owner, meanwhile, was engaged in battle with a determined woman of some eighty years - the kind of rugged Yankee I will never be and who is made only from genetic material found on the Eastern seaboard - who had ordered a shepherd's pie WITH vegetables. She was irate to have come out in weather so foul she could barely pilot her Volvo for being unable to see through the windshield to get it and was now being told to wait or come back later.
    "I'll tell you one thing! Marion wouldn't have put up with this!" said Not-Marion and many of us nodded at each other in the universal gesture that says, yea, verily. By then, one man had abandoned his place in line after learning that a fellow who had just left with TWO DOZEN hot-cross buns had also smashed in the front of the car of the guy still waiting in line.
    And it was at that moment that the thing happened that provided the lyric passage in the whole encounter.
    "You can pay your money and go down there and actually get your pie," said one of the women behind the counter. "Or you can stand here and argue with me." All of us held our collective breath. "In face, I live nearby you. And I'll deliver it to you myself," she went on. And everybody looked at his or her neighbor and thought how glad we were to be in this downpour at this time and place to witness a simple act of pure human generosity from a woman exhausted beyond the ability to cut through dough. "It's a holy weekend in everyone's tradition, no matter what you are," she said to the crowd. "And darn it! Let's BE NICE!"



    

There's an old Italian proverb that says life is good if you have something to work on, something to love and something to look forward to. What I have to look forward to, and hope you'll feel the same, is a true adventure.
I'm chartering a great boat to sail  around the exquisitely beautiful islands of Fiji for seven days - and to bring a few students of writing and lovers of books! We will also have the chance to deliver humanitarian supplies and help remote village communities.
We won't be going to the Fiji some tourists know - the few islands that have resorts -- but to the true deep end of the ocean. And because of the charitable component, most of the cost will be a tax-deductible donation.
Each person on the expedition will have the chance to tutor a child, paint a classroom and deliver humanitarian essentials to people in the Pacific Cultural Triangle, where three completely different cultures live on three adjacent islands.  And the way we'll get to these destinations is beyond imagining: The Tui Tai is a magnificent motor-sail expedition yacht that brings to mind Jacques Cousteau's Calypso - with an on-board spa, great food, a wonderful staff, a full SCUBA operation and the up-close chance to learn writing techniques.  (www.tuitai.com/onboard_facilities.cfm)
The dates are May 11-18 and, due to popular demand, I have a second trip going May 18-25.
Alas, I can only bring along a few people, eighteen to be exact.
See my website (www.jackiemitchard.com) for updates, your donation amount, photos, and a tentative schedule.
I say "tentative" because this will be a true adventure. Through the Naqaqa Giving Foundation, this trip is an experiment in service and cultural exchange, rarely-seen ceremonial performances, magnificent and exclusive vistas ideal for inspiring your pen and mind. Since we're going so far off the grid, to places with no electricity, no cars, no phones -- and since those lovely cabins can only hold so many people -- this cruise experience is not for everyone (at least, not at the same time).
     We've worked it out so the cost can be $6000 per person plus Fiji government taxes.
This cost covers everything onboard - service, food, drinks, spa, laundry, literary exploration, the best SCUBA and snorkeling on earth, kayaking, mountain biking, rain-forest hikes, waterfalls, and exposure to unique cultures. With the tax-deductible component, this might be the most amazing bargain ever. Tui Tai was selected by National Geographic as one of the 25 "Best New Adventures for 2009," and has won enormous praise (www.tuitai.com) from many publications and guests.
Take a look at the ship, the destinations we have in mind. If this feels like a match for you... get out your sulu (Fijian for sarong) and come away with me!
            
Yours in friendship,

Jacquelyn Mitchard
 

There's something new on my discussion board.
Nothing.
Actually, there's a brand-new discussion board. After several tries, we have found one that is useable by a normal human being and doesn't take up your whole day figuring out how to reply to a comment or make one. It also resists the customary barrage of Viagra ads and worse that have been the bane of previous efforts, as people who do evil for fun set their machines to keep posting comments in the same stupid vein around the clock and, unless people are registered users, the board is helpless to resist them. They slip past even human efforts to disapprove them. It's called crashing and there was a spate of it last week before the new board went up -- some in Japanese. (I can't imagine what that said and didn't ask my son, who reads it, to translate).
But now that things are back to normal, please come back.
Register to chat about my books (new, older and upcoming) and let's start talking again.
My discussion board is one of the most joyous ways I have of greeting new readers and loyal readers, students and friends.
You don't need to talk about my books.
You can talk politics -- hope and disgust -- or parenting or anything else you please. I'll look in and answer most posts as I see them.
But you do have to go through a few steps to become a member of this club and one is disclosing at least a "handle" if not your real name and signing up in an accountable way.
Steve, the creator of this gorgeous site, has provided a step-by-step way to get onboard and if you follow it, we'll be chatting in hours.
I'm not a writer who sends back a note that says "Jacquelyn reads all your emails but doesn't have time to respond." I believe that a letter (critical or kind) from a reader is an effort that deserves an effort in return, so you can expect a personal answer.
So jump on there.
This has been a lively place in the past and I'm bugged by the sound of silence.
Makes me feel unloved! Sob.
v. best,
Jackie M.

I'm probably as politically correct as a person needs to get through the average day, but I feel a big snooze coming on, tinctured by a spurt of irritation, when the discussion turns to the controversy over Malia and Sasha Obama's puppy dog.
    Every time I turn on the radio, I hear another animal welfare advocate pointing out that the President and his wife should set a good example and do the right thing by choosing their children's pet from The Humane Society or a no-kill shelter rather than getting the kind of puppy the children want - which apparently is a labradoodle, a fashionable mix of a Labrador and a standard poodle that has a great deal of pep and a nice personality.
    Why can't our inevitable intrusion in the Obamas' personal life wait at least until they move in?
    I think back to the flack over Chelsea Clinton's not attending a Washington, D.C. public school but going to the Quaker Friends school instead.
    She was ... the President's daughter. Different rules apply. Different standards of safety and scrutiny.
    If different standards don't apply, then why not relax and stop trying to force two kids to dance to a tune they'll have to dance to for the next eight years by backing off on Puppygate?
    I've adopted shelter dogs and even shelter ferrets and they turned out to be remarkable companions - as did the mutts given me by friends and the purebred pup I got for my last birthday. Giving a dog a new chance at life is admirable. Though I know this is heresy, not everything a President's family does needs to be admirable. In fact, given the last administration's friends-and-fam track record, the Obamas can hardly go wrong.
    In my opinion, President-Elect Obama should practice a couple of sentences:
    "I like my wife's dress" and "That's family stuff."
    Fashion pundits from several magazines in the know - used to photographing starlets, fully-established stars and over-the-hillers in clothes that leave nothing anatomical to the imagination, criticized Michelle Obama's red-and-black election night dress as "too aggressive," when her charms is exactly that: She does and says and wears mostly what she pleases and is, for that alone, a breath of fresh air. I, for one, am tired of seeing double-breasted suits and tunic tops with pumps and stacked heels.
    Delving into the personal life of such a new and different and eminently interesting family is almost irresistible.
    But people who have been on the other end of that kind of attention tell me that it's absolutely overwhelming, a sort of form of torture. It's bound to begin. But it might be kind to let two young girls have a deep breath and pick out their own puppy dog first.
    

 

This is kind of an exciting week.

Okay, I'm easily excited.

This week, my website will have a brand-new discussion forum. I'll be able to answer each of your questions specifically, without your having to scroll down to the bottom of a line of comments. I've wanted this feature for some time and my mighty webmaster, Steve Bennett at authorbytes.com, was finally able to grant my wish. You'll have to register (that's to keep porn-folk and spammers away) but only once. After that, we can discuss books (mine and anyone else's) and manners and politics (mine and anyone else's) to our hearts' content.

I really love a lively exchange with readers and haven't been able to have it recently because I wasn't able to use the gosh-darned forum myself ... and I am fairly computer-literate.

Speaking of computer-literate, my son Rob has begun college at Full Sail in Winter Park, Florida, and this week I'm going there as part of a campaign I'm doing to inform people about Dry Eye. I have this problem -- which, for me, includes really itchy eyes, blurred vision and extreme eye fatigue by the end of the day. You might have it, too, because it affects women over forty disproportionately, although plenty of younger women and men have it, too. Dry Eye is a real medical condition and while there is no cure.

But there is a treatment I now use, eye drops I use twice a day.

But the fun part is that the company that makes the product sponsored a website called www.dryeyebokclub.com. It's a site that features the top ten "tearjerker" books of all time -- narrowed from an original list of fifty. Among them is 'Gone With the Wind,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' 'Little Women,' and one I particularly like: 'The Deep End of the Ocean.' I'm going to be discussing some of these books over the next few months on that website, and i hope you join in. There's also a quiz on the site about Dry Eye -- so that you can see if you have it too. It's not life-threatening, but it can realy be a pain, especially after a long day at the computer.

Right ... back to computers.

My son started college last month at Full Sail University, a place that specializes in highly creative students who want to major in music production, entertainment lighting and game design. Rob, who worked for five years after high school, is my eldest, and thought college would never be for him. But he's so excited by all the offerings at Full Sail that the first thing he said was, "I'm going to have to go back for my Masters!"

One of the great thigs about Full Sail (besides its being virtually in Orlando, a pretty good place for a young single guy, but also the way they "do" classes. Students take classes in intensive fashion, concentrating a full month on Calculus, for exmple, and a full month on Composition, eight hours a day with a lunch break and a lab. And then, they're finished with that course. For the kind of person who's easily bored, it's a dream school.  Rob will have his Bachelors degree in Game Design --- specializing in the kind of games that tens of thousands of people play simulatenously all over the world.

The last exciting thing is that I'll be teaching my first retreat at One Writer's Place on Cape Cod. Only four students will attend; it's a very exciting chance to focus on their work in an intense and intimate setting. We'll work together, eat together, walk together and turn our focus both inward and on each other's work.

If you have a book in you, fiction or non-fiction, you might want to write Pamela English at penglish@mailbag.com to find out about One Writers Place retreats and residencies. Soon, there'll be a website that more fully desribes this longtime dream of mine. On it, you'll be able to apply for residencies and learn about the schedule and cost of the retreats.

By the way, this blog is organized in a terrible way -- a way I would never tolerate from one of my students.

But I did that on purpose.

Yours,
Jackie M.

We came home from the Hawaiian Islands Writers Conference, where I'm lucky enough to teach some pretty gifted students every Labor Day week. Every morning, we'd opened our windows to the sight of surfers gathering with their boards under one arm and their Venti Mocha Latte with Skim in the other hand, paddling out into the undulating Big Blue, where sailboats with sails in colors nature never saw plied back and forth.

We threw open the glass doors and sat on the porch in tee shirts and skivvies, drinking our own coffee before the sun came up. Gradually, my daughters awoke - wondering what that day's adventure would be: Sea turtles? Waimea Bay? And I got ready to stroll to class.

When I came up my own driveway, I involuntarily pulled my sweater closer around my shoulders, although it wasn't colder than 60* F. The trees were dark with rain; the swimming pool was still warm but looked like an alien installation on our lawn instead of the integrated part of summer it had been just two weeks before. When I got inside, the children were all business, the girls quickly tossing their sundresses and swimsuits into the wash and emptying sand from their backpacks - to replace them quickly with pencil boxes and lined-paper notebooks.

Two tearful goodbyes to the college kids who go away and a renewal of old friendships for the one who still lives at home, but only in broadest sense of the term, and they were all ... off.
The catalogues that advertised the Last Blast Sale of Summer went into the recycling and the mailbox was already stuffed with new ones advertising Halloween costumes. (I immediately had to turn down urgent requests to be Iron Man, Batman, Superman and every other Man.)

Even my littlest, who's not yet two, came up and told me joyously, "I'm going to preschool!" And he wasn't kidding. Although his dad, who doesn't work outside the home, would have to stay in the building with him for the first few months, he would enter the three-year-old class on Monday.

Everything is so soon ended.

Fall makes me as wistful as summer makes me lazy and lush with the sense of possibility.

The drum is playing for me, too. Things thought of but not created are due. The editors are back at their desk and wondering about summer publications and Christmas stories.

It's as if I never wore an off-the-shoulder blouse to class, and that was just eight days ago.

This morning, my five-year-old told me what he wanted for his birthday - which was in August.

The next one, that is.

I wanted to say, in the words of St. Augustine, "One world at a time!"

He already knows the words to the song I sing to him and his brother, written by the Bard of Wistful, Joni Mitchell, which is painted in gold fabric paint on the arm of my blue jean jacket: "We can't return/We can only look behind from where we came/ And go 'round and 'round and 'round in the circle game..."

The surfers are still there, slugging their coffee, curling up on their boards for an nap, in the endless summer places where people with actual jobs slip off their business suits and into their wetsuits to hit the beach at lunch.

I love the changing of the season and would never want to live in a place that was always-and-forever sunny. For the brief time she lived in Florida, my grandmother sent me mournful poems. One read, "Let me see branches black against a winter sky/Let me go home to snow before I die."

And soon enough there will be a few magical flakes, then a few hundred distressing ones and a few million horrors that will make a mess of everything but never (not ever) close down school.

Spring creeps up, shyly revealing bits of itself leaf by leaf, teasing with a green promise.

Fall ... falls. And until something really fun happens, so do my spirits.

There is nothing to which I bring more expectation than summer - not Christmas, not trips to exotic or even comfortable destinations. In a book I read once, and which, to my occasional distress, I can never forget, a woman loved summer so much that in June, she told her daughter summer was upon them; at July 4, she said that it was important to treasure every golden day. And in August, she said regretfully that summer was leaving.

I suppose that if I didn't have so much work to do - work of the earning kind - I would home school or un-school my children. I don't know that I could teach them the new math or the old math but I could teach them to recite poetry and draw, identify leaves and birds' nests and teach them to love music. Summer approximates that. It isn't as though I have endless hours to spend wandering the fields and beaches with my kids. But I am greedy about the days I spend with each and all of them - whether it's going to an afternoon movie or finding the perfect scallop shell. We don't do many fancy things, wherever we are, but we do them together.

In September, when most parents heave a sigh of relief, I am miserable.

Now that three of our kids are in college - two away - the house feels not only empty, but barren. And though I believe that all but one of my children have more or less liked school, I really don't. I think the social side of it resembles a savanna with prey and predator relationships of the most searing emotional kind. All I ever needed to know of shame and heartbreak I learned in seventh grade. Every birthday party to which my daughter isn't invited, every recommendation that we set more structure for our son - these affect me as personally as the torture inflicted on me at the hands of four girls in middle school who systematically excluded me from their sleepovers and their pre-party dinners and discussed them in front of me. I am reminded of the nasty little kids who made fun of everything from my braids to the fact that I wore jeans instead of dresses to school -- and yes, in the 1960s, little girls at my school were required to wear skirts and dresses to public school.

The advertisements for stocking up on lined paper and washable markers, when we only taken a swim ten times, offend me.

But it's more than that I don't have much use for school or the fact that doing well in it is more a matter of negotiating systems of status and social complexities than learning.

Every morning in summer, the way we do summer, is an unopened book. We might just walk the dogs. We might just play Scrabble. We might watch the old version of 'Little Women' and cry. We might get lucky and convince our two-year-old to take a nap so we can. There might be a play that someone who's twelve and someone who's twenty-one both want to see. And the conversations we have over dinner, almost every night, because in summer, dinner is a big deal almost every night, would make comic and poignant reality TV.

It's July. It's time to treasure every golden moment. Soon, the corn will come in and sadly, summer will be leaving us. My children will grow older, and move, and have families of their own. But I think their closeness to each other will change, but not diminish. Still, I savor every drop of that laughter, that teasing, those whispered confidence. I want not only every golden day, but to be around to see forty more golden summers - even if one day, all I do is watch.