Still No Room at the Inn

A different kind of Christmas story, but some of the characters feel the same. There’s a fourteen year old girl. She’s not pregnant, but she carries a heavy load. There are shepherds scattered throughout this tale, a high school principal, a guidance counselor, a police officer, keeping watch. Like the original story, a journey must be made, lodging and assistance is required and time is of the essence, but the innkeeper in this story is not a busy, distracted hotelier. It is an overwhelmed and completely impersonal mental health system.

Zero in on the setting for this drama- not a crowded, filthy stable, but an empty, windowless cell in the psychiatric lockdown unit of a suburban ER. No manger for a bed, rather a two inch thick vinyl covered mat on a bare tile floor. There are shepherds here also. They wear military type uniforms. They confiscate and lock up your possessions, show you the stance you are to take as you are “wanded” for contraband, and control the door in and out of the unit, in and out of your cell, a door with no handle on your side. They are just doing their job. Our fourteen year old young lady, scared and confused, bears her load with grace and dignity and waits for help.

Like the stable on that long ago night, the lockdown is crowded. Neighbors arrive on stretchers, in handcuffs, sometimes other restraints. They bring their people, just like our young lady brought you. We make a strange little collective, a collage of humanity, the dazed, the raging, the profane, the apologetic, the apathetic, and the sad. The sensory deprivation of the cell, the brightness of the light, the lack of information about what to expect, what to hope for, tests you.

A bed in one of three in-patient units in the city… that’s what you wait for, but like the original Christmas day, you are in a crowded city teeming with activity. Information is fed to you in little scraps sandwiched between thick slabs of boredom spent waiting for more little scraps until you feel like a lab rat staring at your door, listening to conversations in the hallway, watching the activity that passes by. With no clocks anywhere, time doesn’t pass so much as pause. The challenge for a fourteen year old in such a place is to keep her humor sharpened, to wield it defensively as needed, and sometimes to flatten it like a shield across her heart when the impossible looms.

Unlike our young lady, you are allowed to exit the lockdown and re-enter the larger world. When you do, the contrast is unsettling. It is December and all the world is planning a party. Swags of evergreen and twinkle lights drape the hospital doorways. The halls are swarming with cheerful ladies in green jackets selling cakes, cookies, wreaths. Tables are lined up featuring jewelry, bobbles, handmade crafts from around the world. You can barely navigate through the common areas. Even in the hospital, people are shopping.

A wise man finds his way to our girl’s cell, a pediatrician. He is kind, and gentle, but he cannot provide a bed at an in-patient unit. Another wise man, a psychologist bearing gifts, recommends two books to read when our fourteen year old returns home. He is apologetic that he cannot find a room at the in-patient unit.

A day, a night, a day.

It is Christmas in America, and I am looking everywhere for Jesus.

Maybe Christmas is just a holiday for happy people. Maybe the way we celebrate Christmas, the commotion, the gift buying and giving, the lights, the music, the hype and expectation of it all does nothing to invite the sad, the discouraged, the frightened, the lonely. A crowded church full of joyous, well-dressed people singing familiar songs does not automatically banish the demons that prey on the downtrodden. Nothing about a brightly lit tree or a house full of relatives can fill an empty heart. No gift that comes in a box or a bag will make up for returning home to a broken life at the end of the day.

A fourteen year old wakes up on a December morning and isn’t certain she can make it through the day without hurting herself, but like the young woman in Bethlehem whose baby comes early into an overcrowded world, there is no room at the inn for her. It’s a different kind of Christmas story, but it’s the one I lived this past week.

Why I’m Done with Santa

Let me first say that I am a Christmas freak. I always have been. The lights, the music, the tree, the food and decorations, I can’t get enough of it, and I can’t get it early enough. I am all schmaltzy and chirpy like an elf around Christmas time. I am dementedly chipper about Christmas.

Santa Claus, on the other hand, has been a big disappointment.

I was once all in Santa’s corner. I was a die-hard believer until I was ten, way past when other children had gotten the inside skinny on Santa. I was the dope that dropped my jaw when I overheard the second grade teacher tell her class to remember that the Kindergarteners still believed. I still believed. I was in fifth grade.

For me, finding that Santa was a bust made Christmas a bust. Santa was Christmas. Santa was the magic, the mystery, the faith, the hope of Christmas. He was the possibility that the world could still improve, if only one night a year, while I was sound asleep. Finding that my faith in Santa had been badly misplaced made me lose my faith in everything. After all, who or what could hold a candle to Santa? The Easter Bunny? The Tooth Fairy? Baby Jesus? They were pale imitations to the fat man who wiggled down my chimney once a year to deliver piles of presents and then zipped away into the night on his magical flying reindeer.

Now, as an adult, I can take a critical view of Santa and see that even if he had turned out to be real, he would have been kind of a jerk compared to Jesus. In a celebrity death match, Jesus would take down Santa in the first round. Here’s a breakdown of what the judges might consider.

Santa watches all year and decides if I’ve been Naughty or Nice.

Does this ever work as a behavioral motivation model? 360 days out of the year I would be the same, somewhat selfish, little creep I always was. Then a few days before Christmas I would ramp up my goodness quotient, and VOILA! On Christmas morning I got a heap load of presents. Every year, no matter what. I never got coal. If I had been at all analytical about this, I could have come to only one of two conclusions. Either Santa was a complete moron, or his standard of goodness was just about the same as mine.

Jesus’ standard of goodness incinerates mine. He took one look at my Naughty or Nice list, shook his head, and said “Your only hope for Christmas is if I intervene.” And he did intervene. And now he rips up my list and posts His in my place. Every day. No matter what.

Santa is always jolly.

There’s a reason he only comes to town once a year. One day a year he can pull off the jolly thing for 24 hours. Then he goes back to the North Pole where he does who knows what. Have you ever actually seen Mrs. Claus or the elves? That’s because they’re covered in bruises, and drink to get through the day. Have you ever wondered why Santa lives at the North Pole? Maybe it’s because it can be five o’clock there all day long.

Jesus wept. He got angry and turned over tables. He grew frustrated and disappointed. He was tired, and sometimes he snapped at people. He spoke truth to power, but remained silent when no good came of speaking. He was whipped with barbs until his skin fell off, then he was nailed onto wooden cross bars, hauled up vertically and left there for gravity to rip his heart apart inside his chest. Jesus was able to forgive all of us while he hung there, and he knew better than to be jolly.

Santa is big and fat and can slide down chimneys.

Santa can slide down your chimney even when you don’t have a chimney. Now there’s a marketable skill. Santa is also greatly beloved as a fat man but hasn’t lifted a finger to help with the self esteem of little fat boys and girls. Santa is an iconic figure, but not a role model. Nobody ever wants to grow up to be like Santa. He’s a fat guy who slides down chimneys for a living.

Jesus was, most likely, gaunt, dark skinned, calloused, weather aged, and had bad teeth. Despite what you might think around Christmas, he was only actually a little baby for the standard amount of time, and lived a much scrutinized life in public for three years. All but one of his best friends chose to be killed rather than stop telling the world about him. The one that lived was banished to a remote island forever. For two thousand years people have been trying to be like him or trying to do away with his influence.

Santa makes pit stops in the home of every child who believes in him, all in one night, and still gets home in time for breakfast.

Sometimes he needs help from NORAD and the local weatherman but still… On the other hand, he’s pretty inconsistent. He leaves much bigger booty for the little rich kids than for the little poor kids, and sometimes, in spite of what his agent and PR people claim, sometimes he just plain forgets or fails to show up at a home. He doesn’t always read his mail very carefully either.

Jesus is much more popular among the poor, the sick, the broken, the abandoned, the forgotten and the evil doers than he is among the rich and powerful and good people. In fact, you pretty much have to get to the point where you realize you are poor, sick, broken, abandoned, forgotten and an evil doer before Jesus will even make an appearance. Jesus is more about thoroughness than speed in getting his work done, and he doesn’t give up on those who are no longer children.

Santa can’t fly, but he is resourceful enough to find some reindeers that can.

But after all these years, has anyone ever actually seen this entourage in the air?

While he was dead, Jesus raised himself from the dead. He appeared to lots of different people, friends and enemies alike. A month after he had been killed, he appeared to four hundred people at one time. Then he disappeared and no one has found his body. People are still talking about it.

Santa is about pretending.

About smiling no matter what, about keeping your eyes closed, about telling yourself what you wish was true. You can only keep that up for so long.

Jesus is about becoming real.

It’s an adventure that only starts with Christmas.

Processing the Latest Development…

Last week, my life took a sudden turn. I’m still trying to think of appropriate metaphors to explain the impact this has had on me, but none of them work. Seismic shifts, blinding storms, whirlwinds, tsunamis, these are all disasters of one magnitude or the other and this change in my life is not a disaster, not for me. Other comparisons, Dorothy stepping from her house into Oz, Wendy discovering Never Neverland, Gulliver meeting the Lilliputians all evoke images of the fantastic, the magical, the otherworldly, and there is nothing remotely magical or otherworldly about this development. So the best I can do is to say that overnight, my life has changed from a much anticipated and long awaited drive in an idyllic countryside to a high speed, rubber burning, bullet dodging car chase through urban streets.

That’s what it feels like at least.

Last week, my husband and I were enjoying scouting the lay of the land as empty-nesters (albeit koo-koo bird empty-nesters, since two of our four kids have boomeranged back home, our youngest, a freshman in college, is home for holidays, our oldest brings her toddler over for babysitting three days a week, and my mother has moved in)…so although our home is not exactly empty, everyone living here is a grown-up. We can leave them. We enjoy leaving them. We leave them on a regular basis. Whenever we want. For as long as we want. Laughing as we go out the door.

Three days ago, Thanksgiving morning, we became the grateful, and greatly fearful, guardians of a fourteen year old fresh out of options for such a short life. She is depressed, anxious, and possibly still suicidal, but I really feel like she is the sanest person in our household. It was her circumstances that were crazy. She is a survivor. Just barely.

I am instantly back in long familiar territory. Braces, morning and afternoon school drops, friends, doctors’ appointments, clubs, sports, three square meals, homework, curfews. I can do this in my sleep. I am also instantly floundering in completely uncharted waters. Suicide watch, pharmaceuticals under lock and key, vitamin deficiencies, cutting, someone else’s child who I don’t know like the back of my hand, whose moods I can’t read, whose inside jokes are outside of our history together. The good news is, maybe we will have some time before snarky, sullen responses and disgusted eye rolling sets in. We have no baggage. The bad news is, how will I keep vigilant enough to know if she’s in danger? I don’t know this child.

I’m trying to live completely in the present. I can’t have expectations of raising her. I’m rooting for her mother. But I can’t be less than a hundred percent in. Her very real and actual life may depend on our commitment. Recovery, reconciliation, and forgiveness- I want these for her, but I also want to protect her from soul-killing imitations. Today I saw genuine and spontaneous joy in one of her smiles. I’m greedy. I want more, but I feel like a thief wanting more. That smile should have been witnessed by another mother. I have been blessed by such a big and consuming family life, that I feel ashamed to throw my whole lot in with another woman’s child. I don’t want to be like King David when Nathan warned him of having everything and still coveting the meager blessing of another. Still another part of me wants my old life back, and knows that when, if, Hannah returns home, I will be relieved. Every day that goes by, these two conflicting emotions will each only grow stronger. How do I live with either one of these desires except to wholeheartedly embrace the present, and trust that every tomorrow is in better, more knowing hands than mine?

Letter to Hannah

Four days until Thanksgiving and my niece is at Johns Hopkins Hospital after overdosing on her mother’s prescription medicine Saturday night. We got the news yesterday morning that she’s been cutting herself, the full length of both her arms covered in slices. I don’t feel very thankful today, and it seems a horror to me for the rest of the family to gather at my home on Thursday to “celebrate” while Hannah sits in the psych ward, broken at the age of fourteen.

I am full of so many emotions that are crying out for expression.

Rage. Where are the grown-ups in this child’s life? I am one of them. Guilt. For over ten years my husband and I have watched this sweet child’s life unfold like a slow motion train wreck. Why didn’t we do more to flag down help, to stand in the tracks of her lonely and dysfunctional life and say STOP THIS TRAIN RIGHT NOW! Incredible sadness. I am so easily satisfied by the joys in my own small world, and so easily ignore the injury and brokenness even in my own extended family. And how dare I? Because I am that child, I was that broken. I had a different train wreck of a childhood, more of a Running with Scissors scenario than a slow motion pile up, but I remember like yesterday the feeling of needing to hold the universe together since the grown-ups in my world were so clearly bent on pulling it all down on top of us.

Hannah, the world has failed you. I wish I could fix it, fix you, but I could not even fix myself and my own world. You might look at me and Uncle Bruce, at our family, and think we have everything. We have so very much, and so much that we’ve tried to share with you and with your mom, with your dad when he was a part of your life. But now I see that none of that, not our love, not our concerns, not our interventions, were ever going to make life right for you.

When I was a little girl I used to pray – to God, to Jesus, to whoever might be listening and responsible for the disaster that was my family. When I became a teenager, I decided that because nothing had changed and things had even gotten worse that God did not exist. In college, I thought that getting away from my family would make things better, and they were for a while. After a couple of years though, I was messing up my own life pretty efficiently and realized that the “crazy” was in me, not just all around me. I had given up on God many years before, but it turns out He/She had been listening all those years. I just didn’t hear back from Him until I was twenty-one. At twenty-one, sitting in a jail cell in Washington D.C., the Creator of the universe reached out to me, and I was just desperate enough to reach back. I can’t explain very well how I knew it was God, but I did.

I wish I could say I held onto God’s hand for dear life and never let go, but I didn’t. I’m just not that smart. I did even more terrible stuff and sank into even deeper despairs, but the incredible, powerful Love that reached out to me that day in jail never shrank back, never left. You will hear people ask why God lets terrible things happen, and I can’t answer for the things that happen to other people, but I know for certain that I would never have reached out and found the hand of God if all the bad things had not happened to me. Maybe life would be just fine if everybody behaved themselves and never hurt themselves or other people, but we seem to be inclined toward selfishness and self destruction as a rule. Hannah, you are only fourteen and the weight of keeping the world safe has already worn you down. I don’t know what lies in store for you today or tomorrow, but I know the power of Love and I know the name of Love. Cry out Hannah. Cry out for Love to reach you, and I will cry with you.

Finally I will be thankful, Hannah. I will be thankful for Love- not the love I have for you or you have for your mother, because our love fails. Our love hurts. I will be thankful for the Love that imagined you and had the power to create you, the Love that found me at twenty-one, the Love that can and does hold the universe together. I will be thankful for your future in that Love, and I will wait in faith and prayer for Love to rescue you.

A Day in the Life of an Award Winning Novelist

You used to be an unvalidated nobody, struggling to string some sentences together that someone, somewhere, might want to read. But no longer, because you have written a novel and your novel has won an award, or maybe even multiple awards. This is what you have worked for, what you have dreamed of since you were a child. It’s time to sit back and enjoy the fruits of your long, hard labor.

In the mornings, you wake to the smell of fresh brewed coffee and the rhythmic hiss of waves crashing onto shore. That’s because the cat knocked over your husband’s half filled cup where he left it on the dresser and the 6:15 light rail train that runs through your backyard is right on time. On your way to the kitchen, you notice the help has not yet gotten to vacuuming the dead leaves in the hallway from when the dogs dragged half the outdoors into the house. Hmm. You read the notes left for you by your family- reminders, pleas, a couple of outright and heavily underlined demands. You forgot what they haven’t- you are the help.

Exchanging dirty dishes for clean ones in the dishwasher, charging your dead cell phone so you can retrieve your messages, pulling on that blessedly stretched out pair of skinny jeans one more day before you wash them and they don’t fit anymore, you begin to wonder where your laptop is. Back in the day, when you wrote your award winning novel, your laptop served virtually one purpose- to advance your career. It sat obediently on your desk, where you would go each day to write, to do research, to complete administrative tasks like communicating with the publishing world. Now your laptop, a newer model than the productive one, calls to you throughout the day and night like a siren song with its array of capabilities, winks at you when you think about writing, and travels all over the place as you interface with the world in its many fascinating forms. You finally find it under a sofa pillow in the living room where you spent last night catching up on episodes of Modern Family. It is dead as a doorknob (yes you, the award winning author, still speak to yourself in clichéd idioms, saving your original word choices for the printed page).

Looking for the charger reminds you of all the ways your life has changed since your novel was published and won its award. Your desk is no longer visible. You can’t remember the last time you sat there. Is there even a place to sit still? You look under where your chair used to be. Oh there’s your favorite book signing pen, over by the stack of your novels that were misprinted and that you’re supposed to be using as giveaways but that you really use for kindling. No charger. But you do find the to-do list you made for last Valentine’s Day.

Your social life has taken a turn since you’ve become an award winning novelist. If people you’ve known casually all your life know you’ve written a book, they suddenly find you remarkable. Conversations with these people become almost impossible when you realize they are holding their breath lest they miss any of the dazzling words that tumble from your lips. Dazzling words have never tumbled from your lips- that’s why you write. At social gatherings most of the people you meet have never heard of you or your book, but there are usually a couple of people who are dying to talk to you. Mostly they want to know three things: if Oprah has read your book, if you’ve signed a deal for the movie rights, and whether your agent could take a look at something they’ve been working on. Sometimes they want to know if you’ve met and could introduce them to the “Fifty Shades of Grey” lady. You don’t even know where to begin with these questions.

You did have a brief sense that life had changed when the local librarians knew you by name, but then you found out it was because you have broken all previous records for overdue fines.

Now that you are an award winning novelist, you are actually earning money from what you love to do. If you were to check on your book sales, which you have firmly disciplined yourself not to do, you would find that even while you were sleeping, somewhere in the world people were buying your book. Two people to be exact. Cha-ching! Three bucks goes into the kitty. How on earth did you sleep soundly at night before becoming an award winning author?

But enough with basking in the dewy glow. Even you, an award winning author, must work and since your laptop is dead and you can’t find the charger, why not tackle the accumulated mess in your office? Well, there are a thousand reasons why not. Somewhere in the sloping hill of paper that is cascading from your desk is a partial draft of your next book. Your award winning novel was once just such an unsightly abomination to you, a heaving, shifting wedge of ruined characters and flailing plot twists. And now it sits on your bookshelf, a shining beacon to your hard work. Actually, fifty of them sit on your bookshelf because you are supposed to be at a book fair tomorrow where you will sit and smile and say, “Yes, this is my novel. It won an award this past spring. Would you like me to sign it?” Over and over and over again. And you will remind yourself that this is what you dreamed of, and worked for.

So you, the award winning author, will let this thought carry you along through your day, a day that will be a little like yesterday and a little like tomorrow and not so very different from the days you had two years ago before you were an award winning novelist. You won’t be jetting to Chicago to lunch with Oprah, and you will not face the temptation of running off with the leading man from the movie made of your book. Your daughter will still drop your grandson off for babysitting three afternoons a week, and your husband will still swat you on the bottom and say “Now that’s what I’m talking about!” when he crosses the room. There will still be people out there writing the next versions of “Fifty Shades of Grey”, and you will never be one of them. It turns out, for you, the award winning novelist, the fruits of your labor is the labor itself. And that, my friend, is a pretty good gig if you can get it.

What happened between me and Anne

This is not a paid advertisement, although it might as well be.

I had coffee in D.C. with a friend and afterwards he bought me a book by one of his favored authors, Anne Lamott. The book, called “Some Assembly Required,” is her journal of the first year of her grandson’s life. I’m reading it, savoring it, laughing out loud at it, and am now a fan of all things Anne Lamott. I fully intend to read everything she’s ever written, and will write in the future. I am now money in her back pocket.

I do this with writers, fall in love, gobble up their every word, pine for their next book. I am very faithful. Michael Chabon, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Jonathan Franzen, you will have me forever. But I feel a kinship with Anne Lamott. She is a writer. I am a writer. She is a messed up person of faith. I am a messed up person of faith. She is a grandmother. I am a grandmother. She is an anxious worrier with friends who impart great wisdom to her which she mostly ignores. I am not an anxious worrier, but my husband is, which is why I am determined to find ways to read parts of her books to him. He needs her. He needs the kind of friends she has. He has me, but he doesn’t appreciate me. Anne doesn’t always appreciate her friends either. Her die hard, last resort friend whom she only turns to when she is on the verge of spinning off into outerspace from anxiety, she calls Horrible Bonnie. Horrible, because Bonnie never worries.

I never worry either. I am very, very laid back. I am sure that my husband sometimes thinks of me as Horrible Lara. Worriers like to be validated in their worrying. Worriers worry about people who don’t worry. We make them crazy. We are icing on the cake of worries. They have to wring their hands doubletime to make up for all the ways in which we are failing to hold the universe together. But anyway, back to Anne Lamott.

I am sure that if I were to meet Anne, we would soon be best friends. How could she not feel the same way about me as I now feel about her? There is only one thing about Anne that bothers me. She has a more highly evolved work ethic than I do. She must have, because she is about my same age, but she has written over a dozen books and I have written just one. My one is a very good book, but still… Maybe Anne has written so many more books than I have because she is such a worrier and she worries that if she doesn’t write lots of books, people won’t want to be her friend. But I want to be her friend in spite of the fact that she’s written lots of books! So once she and I are friends, she can slow way down with all that book a year business. That can’t be good for her health.

The thing about Anne is, she writes not only novels, but also books about her life. Maybe I should be writing books about my life too. How hard can that be? You live a certain amount of time, then you write about it. It’s probably much easier than making up a bunch of people and then having to figure out what they’ve done with their lives before you can even write the book. Maybe, once Anne and I are friends, and seeing as how she already has so many books about her, she will want to write a book about me. I’m not that fascinating, but neither is she and she’s managed to write lots of funny books about herself. Anne would be able to spice me right up.

Anne lives in San Francisco and I live in Baltimore so that will make being best friends challenging, but it will be fun to fly back and forth to see each other. Being friends with Anne may actually improve my productivity as a writer. Although it’s hard to imagine how Anne even has time to live her life with all the writing she does. Anne is so prolific that it’s kind of annoying. I enjoy reading Anne’s books and they make me want to write more, and better, but Anne herself makes me feel kind of lazy. And who wants a friend who makes you feel like an underachiever? Anne’s problem is she just keeps on writing, even when the rest of us are stuck. Anne could make being stuck as a writer into a book.

Which is too bad, because I really think we could have been friends.

Stormy weather

Baltimore, where I live, and sit writing now, is bracing for the “Perfect Storm.” As in communal disasters of every shape and form, I am mainlining information from my syringe of choice, CNN. It’s going to be terrible, ie: “perfect”. And even though it looks, as of today (Sunday evening) as if Baltimore’s hit will be a little less terrible than it might have been, meaning our flood surges will be manageable and property damage may not be as widespread as it could have been, Baltimoreans will nevertheless be pretty damn grouchy over the next few weeks and I will be one of the most supremely grouchy of all. Because I heard today on the radio that our area is looking at a possible two weeks without power.

I do not choose to get all twitchy and psychotic when I have no electricity, I just can’t help it. I have developed an extremely high tolerance to large quantities of comfort. Light, food, warmth? These are just your base levels of comfort. People were actually able to meet these needs before they had electricity. I have no idea how, but I’ve heard about it. I, however, have lived my entire life under the influence of electricity. My mother used electricity when I was in the womb. I’m like a crack baby; it’s in my genes.

Don’t misunderstand me. I can withstand some levels of hardship; like I tell my family, having FIOS and being a customer of AT&T are character building. But when it comes to my mental health, in spite of the marvelous advances in pharmaceudicals, I admit that moderate levels of advanced comfort are required for me to maintain my equilibrium. I feel shaky even writing about it, but this storm has the potential to inflict massive damage to my psyche.

The worst part is knowing what lies ahead. I’ve been through this before. The first twenty-four hours I will coast on the residual effects of electricity already in my system. My hair is glossy and blown out, my clothes are clean, my appliances charged and able to sustain long periods of use. The inital crash will also trigger some extra adrenaline and endorphins that see me through. Candles, flash lights, batteries, fire in the fireplace in the winter, late hours drinking wine with the family outside in the summer. It’s not so bad. The first day I have hope.

The second day, I’ll be jonesing a little- making phone calls to see who has electricity, where I can get some, when my own supplier will be back up and running. Third day, I’ll still be flicking lightswitches when I walk into a room, phoning my supplier every five minutes like a love sick fourteen year old. The clothes I wear will be the ones I wore yesterday and slept in last night. Withdrawal is starting to drag me under. By the third day nothing in my house will get put away, dishes will lay where they were last used, clothes will be draped on furniture and sluffed into piles on the floor, cans, wrappers, bottles will litter my suburban homescape.

Fourth day, I will congregate in communal spaces with the other suffering junkies; we will stare into space, share our meager rations, and trash talk our supplier. Fifth day, I will look exactly like the street lady downtown and won’t give a rat’s ass. I’m a writer. I don’t have an office to work from. Inside our house, nightfall arrives at 2:30 in the afternoon. I will spend long stretches of the day in bed.

Day six, I will be angry, bitter, a little delusional. I resent that there are places in town, friends, neighbors who are getting their regular electricty; and I’m not talking about the weak-willed phonies with generators. Please. Don’t even talk to me about generators. Generators are like methadone. People with generators are still in the grip of their suffering, still wanting sympathy, still clogging up the supply chain with their selfish needs, and won’t even appreciate the purity of the rush when they finally get their fix. Day six I will be plotting revenge.

I got straight once. I took my four small children to South America to live in a city on the edge of the jungle one summer. The city conserved power by never turning it on. I went cold turkey for the first week or so, thought I would lose my mind but didn’t, and then came out the other side. I was happy to have a lightbulb that sometimes worked. I used it to iron baby clothes. I would sit outside our apartment in the scummy, humid evenings and mend socks by the light of the moon. I was happy. I was happy. Then I flew home to the United States. Being back in the United States was like a hallucinatory mind trip to paradise. So, of course, I started using again.

So here I sit, staring into the abyss. This storm is coming, and all I can do is wait. You can shame me all you want, but I’m telling you it’s going to get ugly.

My name is Lara, and I’m an addict.

Hello blogging. It’s me, Lara.

Sitting across from Lauren Cerand in a cafe in Soho… she’s having sorbet, or maybe I’m having the sorbet and she’s having something else, but she’s saying I should blog. And I’m thinking yes, I will blog. I will enjoy blogging. I will be good at blogging.

Since then, I have been to Venice, to Athens, to Crete, to Mykonos, to Santorini, and in all these places I have thought about blogging. I have blogged in my head. I have blogged about art, about traveling, about the quirkiness of the human race. All in my head. To great success, in my own head. In my own head I have been amazing and articulate.

So now, back in Baltimore, I sit down to blog. First I design my page. I pick colors and fonts. Then I will blog.
It is lunchtime. I change the colors and fonts. It is dinnertime.
It is tomorrow. It is next week.

I sit down to blog.
I have nothing.
This will take some practice. Some discipline. Some courage. Some thought.

Of all the threads of life and work that I muse on all through the day, how can it be when I sit down to write I have nothing? Emptiness, nada, junk, worthless white noise.

Writing is like meandering down a wooded lane. You can be thinking about something, but then a trail of tiny beautiful color rises impossibly out from between a crack in a paving stone, or from the middle of a bank of snow, and you are suddenly thinking about possibilities, about risk taking, about reasons for continuing life in the midst of overwhelming circumstances, and you want to stop walking and put all those beautifully coherent thoughts down on paper immediately. But you can’t. Because there is a reason you are walking down the wooded lane. You are headed to an appointment. Or your computer is back at your home and you are outside of your child’s school. Or you are insanely hungry and must eat before doing anything else, even writing. And so that coherent gem of a thought, that perfect essay or story or poem that presented itself so generously and spontaneously, like a gift wrapped kiss from a lover, is by the time you get around to writing it down, gone. Like the wisp it always was, the merest grazing of neurons in your cluttered brain, a hopeful synapse with no blueprint or recipe for how to recreate it.

Writing is like sitting down to a gourmet kitchen full of ingredients after you have just binged on a Big Mac, and attempting to create an exquisite meal. You must find a way to make yourself hungry again before you can summon the imagination to assemble the ingredients into anything palatable, much less remarkable. Writing is wrestling with the lazy donkey in your stable in order to get him out to the field to plow a furrow in which you fully intend to plant seeds that, when fertilized, watered and weeded, have only the slighest chance of becoming the garden that is the vision in your mind. But meanwhile, you partake of meals that elevate all the senses, you walk through the breathtaking gardens that other people have cultivated and you think, it can be done. These people have done it.

Writing is like that. It is messy and boring and unending and hopeless and insanely optimistic.

I have no idea what blogging is like, but I’m going to find out.