Joan Didion

photo credit: Gary Leonard

I didn't have a clear view of Joan Didion on Wednesday night when I went downtown to hear her at the historic Vibiana Theater. I had bought my ticket for $20 several months ago, before the publication of Didion's latest memoir Blue Nights, and it was general seating. The room was cavernous, a former church, I think, built in the late 1800s. About six hundred people sat in folding chairs in the grand room; a woman lurched over me to a saved seat about five minutes into the program. She apologized profusely and made a big production of sighing and sitting down. Didion was about the frailest speck of a woman I've seen in a long time, wrapped in a soft pale purple shawl, her long fingers constantly in motion as she spoke and read from her essays and books. The woman next to me literally typed and texted into her iPhone THE ENTIRE HOUR that Didion spoke. As you know, I've been in a mood of late, and I was unable to tune the woman and her phone out. Rather, I was constantly mindful of her and her texting, which completely detracted from the iconic writer, and I spent more time debating whether I should say something to the texting woman than I did listening to Didion. As my son Oliver said tonight when he lost in the second heat of the Raingutter Regatta at his Cub Scout meeting, EPIC FAIL.

I've read nearly all of Joan Didion's writing and admire her writing immensely although I've never felt particularly connected to her writing emotionally. Does that make sense? 

The first thing she read Wednesday night (and before I became completely and utterly distracted by THE TEXTER) was her famous opening line from The White Album:

We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

The White Album was published over two decades ago, and lays bare in the driest of tones and most beautiful language the culture of California in the sixties and seventies, yet that line rang through the crowded church as true as it ever had. Didion's two latest books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights chronicle the respective deaths of her husband and her only daughter. It was difficult to imagine what stories Didion must have created in order to live through those deaths.

I thought, a bit, of those of us here, in blogworld, who write our stories in order to live, who craft with words in attempts, somewhat vain, to make sense of what will probably never make sense. I'm not sure why there's comfort in the crafting, but there is. Didion also stated that she always writes for an audience and never for herself, that the relationship between writer and reader is as intense as that between the actor and the audience in a theater. 

I'm still thinking of these things, two days later, and despite the fact that THE TEXTER (or my inability to ignore her) prevented me from really hearing much of Didion's talk, there was something in those few words that I did hear that will resonate for a very long time.

Sunshine, Dry Air, Baseball, Pedophiles and Boy Scouts

It's a beautiful day in southern California, albeit a bit on the scary-dry side and we're headed east and north to a baseball game in the deep, dark valley. I've got on a tee-shirt and jeans and will bring along an umbrella to shield my lily-white skin from the wicked rays of autumn. I opened the newspaper this morning casually, like I said yesterday I generally only scan the headlines and then politely fold it back up and place it on a stool for The Husband to peruse when he comes home from the Mistress -- but this morning's headlines screamed, atrociously, to me BOY SCOUTS FAILED TO REPORT ABUSER so I placed my coffee cup down and unfolded the paper and my heart quickened and my stomach sickened. It would seem that back in the dark days of the seventies and eighties, many boys were abused sexually by Boy Scout leaders and the organization didn't report these known incidences to the police but removed them from their positions with kind letters, assuring them, the pedophiles, that their positions in the community would not be ruined or embarrassed or whatever else. The said pedophile then skipped off to Canada and proceeded to do exactly the same thing and the Canadian scouts overlooked it as well.

Well, damn.

Whether this is going to mimic the Catholic Church pedophile scandals remains to be seen, but as the mother of a Cub Scout, I'm sick about it.

Reader, what would you do?

From the archives

You know, I've written a lot of damn posts. Nearly two thousand posts, actually. And lately I'm hard-pressed to write anything of worth at all. But I do love this blog, love the toil of it, the inspiration I get from my blogging community, the comments, the connections, the everything. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that blogging has changed my life in the profoundest of ways. I try to come here, to the blank screen, at least once and sometimes twice daily to jot down my thoughts or post a poem or a photo or tell a silly or a sad story. I come more than once or twice to read all of your posts. It's all good.

I'm feeling a little dry, though, dry like the southern California air in October. Dry like tinder, needing just a tiny spark to flame up and spread.

I randomly went through my archives, and this is the first thing I landed on. I'm going to be lazy and re-post it.

A Reposting of Trapeze Artistry and Humor


Now, I'm off to sell popcorn on the street with Oliver for his dang Cub Scout Troop.

And then I'm headed for a day of complete and utter pleasure, I think. But more on that later.

Car Talk

I've always thought if I were a child psychologist, I'd conduct my sessions in a minivan or other vehicle. My boys have always opened up to me during our incessant car rides around town, and I'm not sure whether it's the comfort of the ride or the fact that no eye contact is made (other than my surreptitious looking into the rear-view mirror to check out their expressions), but they often divulge their darkest thoughts and ask their deepest questions when I'm ferrying them out and about. Yesterday, Oliver and I listened to NPR on our way to watch Henry play flag football on the other side of town after school and were mesmerized by a story about a woman who was recently caught and arrested in Saudi Arabia for driving without a license. Because of strict Muslim law, this woman was convicted and given the punishment of ten lashes. And not with a wet noodle.

What's a lash? Oliver asked.

A whipping, I replied. Oliver gasped.

Then the conversation veered off into women and the Muslim religion, the United States' relationship to Saudi Arabia and oil and all that stuff in terms that I believed a 10 year old could understand.

That's why I don't like religion, Mom, Oliver said. It causes a lot of problems.


A few minutes later, Oliver piped up that he had been selling popcorn for the Cub Scouts in our neighborhood, and one of his friend's mothers (and my friend), who happens to be gay and is married to another woman, told him that she didn't like the Cub Scouts organization because it discriminated against gays.

My heart sunk. This is an issue that I've long struggled with -- as long as Oliver has been in and relished everything having to do with Cub Scouts. It's sort of paralyzed me, to tell you the truth. I love Oliver's Cub Scout troop and experience -- he's been doing it for nearly four years and thrives there, and I've turned a blind eye to the obvious: the Boy Scouts of America have a long history of discrimination against people of color (now overturned) and homosexuality. I told Oliver these things and confessed that I'd struggled with them over the years.

Why didn't you tell me that, Mom? he asked. Oliver has several friends who have two mothers or two fathers. He's shared the podium with them at our school on No Name-Calling Week when he passionately stood in front of the entire student body and educated them about the use of the word retard.

Does it make you not want to be a Cub Scout? I asked.

Sort of, Oliver said. We were quiet for a bit, and I gathered my thoughts and took my opinions and stuffed them into a tiny compartment and told him that I thought we could work within an organization to educate people about what we knew was the right thing. I told him that I hoped our Cub Scout troop was enormously tolerant, and I told him that our pack leader, an African American, had shared his own story of discrimination back in the day when he had joined the scouts in La Jolla, California. I told him a little about Don't Ask Don't Tell being overturned last week, how long it had taken this country to do that but that I believed whenever people are oppressed, whenever their rights are trampled upon -- whether they are women or people of color (other than white) or homosexual -- they eventually fight and push and right the wrong. I told him that we had to support these things and we should think about how we could support them.

We didn't say much after that, just sat there in the car, thinking.