Thursday, June 24, 2010

Vietnamese interlude plus a literary bite

Dan and Nicole were trying to decide what to do for dinner when I called. Half an hour later we met at Pho and Beyond, a new Vietnamese restaurant in the neighborhood. I discovered the place at my Coffeeshop Writers Group and have been craving one of their delicious meals. Dyou think I'm pregnant?


My blue-eyed boy was up with the birds this morning to go to work and install a new billing system for his company. Boring work, he said, all math, but he and his 3-man team worked for two months to get the thing working. Unfortunately, there were some unforeseen kinks since they couldn't test it out but figured it out and will re-launch next week. That's my boy!

Nicole finished teaching at Willard -- see Dan's T-shirt -- on Tuesday and is reading her way thru the 51 days left in her pregnancy, not that we're counting. She said, I just wanna meet my daughter!

I drove all the way out to Roxborough to swim in Nancy's condo pool. As we approached it, I said, Ah! My favorite smell: chlorine. Like Pavlov's dog, I get excited when I see the blue of the photo. If you drive by my house late at nite you'll see me gazing with longing at the photo of the pool on the blog. Remind me to paint my own David Hockney-style pool picture. In fact, I've just put it on my To-Do list.

I picked these lovely hydrangea not b/c they're featured in the classic film The Manchurian Candidate but to give my mom and Nancy across the street.

So how come they're still sitting here?

Um, er, gulp, uh.

Excuses, excuses! You'll take em over tomro w/o fail or else you won't be allowed in Jean's pool. Fer-shtay?

Yessum.

My writing teacher Nicole Bokat instructed me to contact 40 literary agents. So late at nite, over a bowl of popcorn and grapes, with my eyes totally blurry from exhaustion, I sit with the radio on and send out email query letters. You read each agent's website and taper a letter to suit their needs. Taper is not quite the word I'm looking for. It'll come to me later.

I decided to count all the emails I'd sent since June 11 and shocked myself to find I'd sent out about 40. Is that possible? Where numbers are concerned I can't be trusted. Anyway, I finally received a note back where I was asked to send the first 50 pages.

Congratulations, wrote my teacher, when I told her.

Marion just called and left me a message. She thought our New Directions meeting at the Giant Supermarket was outstanding. She praised Helen for doing a great job as the leader. I had already emailed Helen to tell her so. I'm one of the few people who believe getting a therapy degree is a useless waste of time. Helen doesn't have a degree, nor does Mandy or Ada, yet they're better than most therapists.

For sure.

Ora Lee got to the coffeeshop first and pushed some tables together in a corner. It was so nice and cool in there and best of all, we could HEAR one another, unlike at the Willow Grove Mall with its echo chamber and acoustics so poor that George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra will never be heard there.

Excellent turnout, a dozen or so. I'm so sad I can no longer call them The Mallsters. Every person emits some sort of energy field. At one point a woman named "Harriet" with a very heavy field was speaking. I gazed over at Helen who was leaning forward in her chair with the most intense expression I've ever seen on her face.

She was breaking into the heavy energy field this woman carries with her wherever she goes. Harriet is a positively brilliant woman yet the emotional deprivation of her childhood left her bruised and scarred which she carries around like an invisible ball and chain.

As for me, I'll lose all respect for myself if I don't finish polishing my newest poem The Visitor and get it up here.

In the meantime, read my daughter's excellent blogpost on a six-hour walk she and Ethan took.

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