Month: February 2023

Are They Empty, Those Promises?

Deb Zuroski, , , Leave a comment

It’s such a day here. Full of that unfulfilled promise of better days to come. We all know that promise won’t be kept but it doesn’t stop us from believing, just for today.

One of the Apple Store guards is across the street right now. He’s standing in the doorway of the salon, eating an apple fritter from the bakery. Don’t ask me how I know it is an apple fritter. I just know. OKAY?

I’m not sure why he chose to stand in the salon doorway, other than it’s out of the way of the pedestrian traffic but still allows him to watch all the people passing by. He should have brought one of those collapsible seats because there is a lot of traffic today, a lot to see.

My favorite of the sights is people meeting unexpectedly. That just happened a few minutes ago. A young man was seated at the tables outside, in front of the big garage door, when another man called out and ran across the street to him. Such a smile he was wearing. I couldn’t see the seated man’s face but he must have smiled too because, if anything, the man crossing the street smiled wider. This is why I say there’s a promise in the day – unexpected joy.

A woman just walked into the coffee shop. She did not get a drink. Instead, she sat at one of the small circle tables and opened her bag. It’s full of books from the store next door. She peeked inside, like she hadn’t just bought those books, like she couldn’t wait to unwrap the present in front of her. (Isn’t that what books are?)

I’ve been joking with one of the new baristas – there are always new baristas because it’s a difficult, thankless job – about gathering a group of women to discuss the weather with Mother Nature. I figure we outnumber her so we can probably take her, right? (Yes, I’m aware that I sound like those men who totally think they could fight a wolf and win.)

Anyway, so today, when I saw her, she said that our threats must have been successful because TODAY. See. She thought about our discussion. We are indeed each a part of another’s mosaic. 

A big group just came out of Pamela’s Diner. One of the women is wearing a winter coat, hood up. Meanwhile, a young woman passing that group is in a half shirt, you know, the underboob kind. (I would totally have worn those shirts 35 years ago.) If I had to decide the temperature by looking out the window, I’m not sure what I’d do … layers?

A young man just walked by me to take a prime seat by the window as it was vacated. This is important so just hear me out … there is a lot of scent description in books – cooking smells, nature, you name it. I write those descriptions too but I don’t usually pay attention to the smells around me when I’m sitting in the coffee shop. (Okay, except for yesterday, when my son joined me after his shift at the diner. He totally smelled like pancakes, a thing he didn’t particularly appreciate when I told him.)

Just now, however, as that young man took that perfect seat, the strongest scent of Axe wafted behind him. And then a girl sat down with him. She’s cute. She makes him smile. He has dimples when he smiles. I hope she notices those dimples, notices that he likes her. I hope she doesn’t mind the Axe cologne. (She doesn’t seem to.) He’s wearing a bright white shirt with delightful multi-colored dots across it, like the very beginnings of a pointillism painting (or perhaps the shirt one wore while creating the actual artwork).

At another perfect seat by the garage door, a woman sits with someone who seems to be her son. She’s listening intently as he talks. He’s a surprisingly still talker, his arms mostly in his lap or resting on the table. There’s an iced coffee in front of him that he’s barely sipped. As I watch, I realize that tableau could be me with one of my kids. What a gift it is to watch a child reach adulthood, to learn a person – perhaps myself – through their many phases. 

Much love.

Are They Empty, Those Promises?

Who Is Your Home?

Deb Zuroski, , , , , , Leave a comment

It’s windy today. Leaf sparrows skim along the ground, more quickly than their bird selves, and then take to the skies with less elegance, directionless, in fact. They rustle without risk, drawing the attention of my neighbor’s cat. He has killer instincts without the mental acuity to recognize bird from leaf. It’s a pleasure, truthfully, to watch him expend his boundless energy on something that is already dead.

My next door neighbor – the 90-something man – is a little mad at me but he can’t yell at me because I’m helping him with something. As such, when I was talking with him yesterday morning, he told me (very loudly) how angry he is with … ahem, SOMEONE ELSE (me, he means me) because they don’t rake their leaves.

I was so delighted by this interaction that I have been telling people about it since yesterday. I’m not going to start raking my leaves either. This spring, my BIL will be helping me transform my yard into a pollinator garden. Perhaps that will please my neighbor (it absolutely will not). 

There will be a walking path in the new garden so he can bring his wheelbarrow through my yard – which is almost exactly the size of a postage stamp. He is, in fact, pleased about the path, which might also encourage the mail carrier to stop stepping on my flowers (it absolutely will not). 

It’s Friday evening and I am dumfungled. Every word I write is the most words I’ve ever written for a single story. Every additional minute I live is the longest I’ve ever lived. Each of my heartbeats adds to the longest stretch of heartbeats …. You know where this is taking us, right?. Some weeks feel like a combination of achievements and hurdles. I suppose it’s yin and yang but right now it feels more like being shot and poisoned.

There’s a poem – I Saw Emmett Till This Week at the Grocery Store – that I think about often. I won’t interpret it for you here. Like all poems, it is best that you read it for yourself, take from it what speaks most clearly to you. I’ll say only that it shouts to me in a melancholic whisper that hurts every time I read it. As it should.

Poems are strange that way. Every day I read poems that speak to the particular moment I’m experiencing. Is it just the right poem finding me at the moment it’s most needed or is it me taking what I need from those words? Who knows? If you don’t like poetry, may I suggest that you aren’t reading the right poetry? There are so many types. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the only good poetry is dead poetry. Please. Shakespeare was great and all but have you ever read In Praise of My Bed?

As the snow falls here in Pittsburgh today (don’t get me started. I’m very bitter), novel revisions are underway – yes, I removed my agency from that sentence but I am, in fact, the one doing the revising. At this stage of the writing process, though, I feel as though my characters are in charge of telling their story. The novel – written from the butler’s perspective – is called The Butler Loves the Governess. It’s set in the very early 1800s and includes some rather delightful love letters. 

Anyway, I’m only the conduit. The butler is always trying to take charge of the story telling. Our arguments have been … interesting. For example:

The butler: I need to prove my love for the governess.

Me: Hmm. And what do you have in mind? 

The butler: I’m going to hold up the mail coach that she’s riding in.

Me: ….

The butler: I’ll need a pistol

Me: What?

The butler:  And a mask.

Me: Eamon, this is not a rewrite of The Three Musketeers

The butler: What kind of story is that? Do they get pistols?

Me: Well, actually, I think they use swords

The butler: SWORDS! Yes, swords. That’s a great suggestion. Much better than pistols.

Me: [drops head to desk, sobs]

Mostly, it’s been a delight, even if none of you ever get to read it. Of course, I fully intend to keep asking agents to consider it. I’m water on a stone, you know. Eventually, I will wear them down. 

I’ve been listening to a lot of new-to-me music this week: Oh Wonder, Josie Man, Madison Olds, 5SOS. I think my current favorite song is “Tattoos Together” by Lauv. I’ve only listened to this song like a million times this week. I think it encapsulates that teenage feeling of temporary but eternal love, how frantic and deep that emotion seems at 17 or 18.

Eamon’s calling to me again. I think he wants to “discuss” how he’s going to pine for the governess in this latest scene – it’s a new chapter that I’m adding near the end of the book at someone’s request. He doesn’t know this yet but he’s going to write a bunch of letters that he won’t be able to mail because REASONS. These new letters are going to be full of piney, angsty grief. It’s going to be delicious. Got to go do that right now!

Much love.

Who Is Your Home?

Mosaic

Deb Zuroski, , , , , 5 Comments

Today, I was talking to one of the baristas at the coffee shop and we agreed that we were not in … er, top form, let’s say … in our 20s. He can’t understand why anyone was even friends with him. I’m not sure why I’m still alive. We did stupid things in our youth. Some of us are still doing stupid things in our middle age. Ahem. 

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about viridianmasquerade’s thoughts: 

What are the experiences, who are the people that make up my mosaic? I still sometimes sing a version of The Christmas Song that a friend and I wrote to celebrate McDonalds, particularly their chicken nuggets. We were 17 and I had a terrible, no-good, very bad job there (that often provided free food at the end of the night). Every Christmas, when Bing Crosby starts singing The Christmas Song on my playlist, I think about sitting at the lunch table with her and another friend as we wrote our new lyrics. ”Happy Christmas to all and please stop back again.”

Did you know that tuna – in water, of course – is my preferred bulk-up protein? When I was a bodybuilder many years ago, Joe, from a dirty little place called Joe’s Gym (still operating in my hometown), taught me the calf exercises I still use and encouraged me to eat tuna after every workout. 

When I was 21, two friends and I traveled to Cancun and nearly got ransomed or sex-trafficked or possibly murdered by two young men we met there. There is a certain (popular) song that I can’t hear without thinking of that trip and the drive deep into the heart of the jungle on a single-lane dirt road while the radio blared top 40 songs. 

My favorite banana bread recipe came from a woman I met after grad school. It was her grandmother’s recipe. My friend, and colleague at the design firm, wrote it out for me late one weekend afternoon while we sat in a local restaurant and ate grilled cheese and bacon sandwiches followed by a shared slice of caramel apple pie a la mode. I haven’t seen that woman in 30 years but the recipe is still great. 

I turn on lights – or use the flashlight on my phone – as I walk through my house because my father made me afraid of the dark when I was a single-digit child. He’d hide in dark places throughout the house and jump out at me. He’s been gone for 14 years (and I moved out 35 years ago) but I still turn on lights wherever I am.

All the wooden spoons my mom used to punish us are long gone. She even broke one of them on my back when I was still shorter than she was but as mouthy as someone twice her size. I remember her advice every time I use one: don’t let wooden spoons soak in water. Wash them by hand with a damp cloth. Even now, that’s the way I wash my wooden spoons, though I’ve never hit a child with one. 

Much of the music I listen is from someone’s recommendation: Affordable Floors, Steely Dan, Sufjan Stevens, Orville Peck, Creepy Nuts. Those songs and those people all included in my story because of a casual suggestion that they probably don’t even remember.

So many people make up that mosaic … it’s mostly dark colors, deep blues and chocolate browns, colors of sorrow and grief; but there are a few bits of lightness to add some beauty to the whole miraculous mess. Also, it’s important to note that it isn’t finished yet, not for a good while. At least, so I hope.

Much love.

Mosaic