Posts for category ‘nostalgia’

Let’s see, where were we…ah yes, subscribing to hard copy journals, and buying actual books as holiday gifts. As you may know, all of this Living Life Not Through Screens stuff is something of an ongoing project of mine. When I asked myself awhile back, “Self, how did you spend your time before the Internet?” I came up with a list and have been endeavoring to replace a healthy chunk of screen-time with some of those artifacts of habit from my old life.

I re-subscribed to a physical newspaper. To my surprise, this might be my favorite new old habit. The newspaper is portable and lightweight. It does not require a good phone signal. It has a pleasant smell. It leaves evidence of its existence on your fingertips. It can be spread on the bed on Sunday morning and not burn your thigh. If I read an article I want to share or save, I can always find it online and use the actual paper to line Peanut’s cage.

I started listening to whole CDs at a time again, not as background music but as a discrete activity that involves full engagement. There are different ways to do this: lying on the floor with your head positioned between speakers L and R is good, especially for Led Zep. If it is Richard Thompson, turn out the lights. Or shoot them out. You can also just put your feet up and read liner notes, study lyrics. Oh, wait! You can only do that if you buy the CD rather than a download! Yes. Exactly. Hold it in your hands and feel assured that you own it, and it can’t be taken away by angry Internet gods or a twelve-year-old hacker in Des Moines who creates a hard-drive-eating virus.

I write letters, delighting in my paper and fancy pens. Not a lot of letters, but a few, here and there, to people who like to write back. Imagine getting something in the mail that is not a bill or advertisement. Feeeels goooood.

What else did I used to do with my time, before 1995? I spent at least some of it feeling bored and lonely, two highly underrated states of being. More on that later.

As part of its Tween Issue, Time Out New York has a great feature by Rebecca Stead (author of the wonderful When You Reach Me), which you can read here. (Thanks to Mitali Perkins for the link.) I’m about the same age as Rebecca, and love her story about working at the Subway for 40 minutes a day, during her lunch break, when she was 11. (A memory she uses in her book.) That’s totally a scene that could have come from my life.

I’ve often thought about all the stuff my sister and I did around San Francisco at seven, eight, nine, ten years old, and I look at the kids that age I know now and am sure their parents would never give them the same freedom. I’m talking about, say, 1975-1980. Specifically I remember:

…riding all around town with my sister, or alone, on the MUNI system. Our family didn’t have a car. Once every couple of weeks my mom’s boss would let her borrow his car to take care of errands, but otherwise it was all bus, all the time. Involving transfers and waiting on street corners, cold and hungry, with no cell phone or iPod. Oh the humanity!

…walking to school by myself. My grade school was about four blocks away, then in fourth grade I moved to one nine blocks away.

…playing out on the streets with other kids until dark.

…playing out on the streets by myself until dark.

…walking to Golden Gate Park with neighborhood friends to hang out on the playground. My friend Rachel and I buried coins in the woods surrounding the Rose Garden and went to dig them up, later.

…going to Mountain Lake Park with my best friend, Christine, and playing forest primeval, and hanging out in caves in the foothills around her dad’s place, pretending to be super-sleuths. Totally isolated.

…in sixth grade, my school was more like 20 blocks from my house. We’d walk home at a very leisurely pace, up Geary or Clement, stopping for pork buns or piroshki or a Boudin roll, and to look at Hello Kitty stuff, and maybe get home an hour and a half after school was out.

…laundry duty! My sister and I would load up the cart (the kind old Eastern European ladies push/pull home from the grocery store) with dirty clothes, walk the five blocks (uphill!) to the laundromat, and attend to the laundry for a few hours. One thing that made this fun was the wearing of rollerskates, inside the laundromat—until the day my sister fell and busted her chin open, and a KINDLY STRANGER drove us home (I think).

…taking the bus to and from ballet theater performances, two little girls in stage makeup…eyeshadow and lipstick.

…walking up to the community garden by myself and staying there until dark, living out whatever little fantasy game I was playing: the play structure is a ship, or the sand is hot lava, or the basketball court is the Land of the Lost fog pit.

Sometimes my sister (four years older) was with me, but often enough I was alone or with friends my age. We weren’t stupid. If we sensed a car slowing near us we’d ignore it and walk faster and start looking for an adult. Once or twice some random man on the street exposed himself. But, you know, I’m not scarred or anything. It wasn’t like the world was safe and children weren’t being molested and cars weren’t running over people. I was semi-sort of beat up a couple of times on the bus. And I do understand that a city is different from the burbs—with more people on foot and using public transport, you get the panopticon effect (thank you, E. Lockhart, for teaching me a new word!).

In Stead’s article, she quotes Susan Linn: “…these ['tween'] years are a time of great intellectual and creative flowering.” I so buy that. I read more books between the ages of 8 and 12 than I’ve read in the last 20 years, I bet. My imagination was at its very ripest and I distinctly remember that the times I most richly explored it were when I was free from adult supervision or peer judgment. The era, and my mom, gave me the freedom and independence to explore it, and without that I doubt I’d be a writer.

All of this is one of the many reasons I so enjoyed When You Reach Me. Reading it made me feel like I did on those days living my independent little life in the city.

If I had kids I would totally read this book by Lenore Skenazy:

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But I don’t, so you should.

I went to see American Teen on Friday, a documentary following a bunch of high school seniors in Warsaw, Indiana. I was a leeeetle worried during the first five minutes, because there was this scripted voiceover and then a couple of shots that were obviously set-ups and felt very Laguna Beach-y, but then it loosened up and felt more genuinely documentaryish. It confirmed what I (and a lot of YA authors) always say: the experience of being in high school doesn’t ever really change. It could be 1984, it could be 2006, but the fundamental issues are the same.

 It should be reassuring for those of us who write about teens and sometimes wonder if we could be out of touch. Every single teen followed in the movie had a storyline that could have been the plot of a classic YA novel: the offbeat girl who may or may not be in love with a jock and just wants to get out of town, the queen bee who gets bit in the ass by hubris and has her own sad secret, the sports star whose hangs on coming through in a high-pressure game, the loner guy who thinks all his problems will be solved if he can find true love. All those things that can sound overdone and cliche are happing in the daily lives of real teenagers, and they will continue to happen, and that is why YA books will still connect year after year.

(Across cultures, too! I just found out that the Korean rights for both my books have sold, so look for them in your Seoul book shop in 12-24 months.)

The high school experience never really goes away. I spent two hours on the phone this afternoon catching up with a friend who had gone to my twenty-year reunion. I heard some great stories about how people were doing well, and some funny stories that could have easily taken place in the great halls of T.N. in 1987. Then I spent some quality time with my yearbooks and wished again that I could have made it to the reunion. You have to kind of laugh at who you were, and who the other people were, and the crazy ways we could hurt each other without realizing it. Or at least, without realizing the lasting impact. I did some not-so-nice things myself, it’s true. Most regretful of all, my senior quote in the last yearbook is tremendously dorky. I thanked the teachers. I said they didn’t get enough credit for all they “do for us.” Thus I am immortalized as being the lamest suck-up of all time. But then I married someone who became a teacher, so at least I’m consistent.

Enjoy your long weekend, if you’ve got one. I spent today in my PJ’s, revising and avoiding the late summer heat wave. Tonight, a storm is supposed to come in and cool everything down 30 degrees. Permanently, I hope.

EspressivoOn Thursday, I read Emily Wing Smith’s forthcoming debut novel, The Way He Lived. You know how in As Good As It Gets there’s that scene in which Helen Hunt is trying to get Jack Nicholson to pay her an actual compliment, and after several really lame attempts he finally says, “You make me want to be a better man”? Well, reading Emily’s book makes me want to be a better writer. I quickly got over my artistic jealousy and wrote a blurb, that you can see here. If you’re going to any of the big conferences coming up, look for an ARC and snap it up.

Grave

When I brought to the rummage sale the small box of records G. had pulled to donate, I found these:

Ack! Just give away my childhood, why don’t you! (He thought they were his. No excuse.) Fortunately, I snatched them from the hands of death just in time.

Allegro

The Dierks Bentley show was fun. Some of my fears did come to pass: a group of young people next to us basically binge-drank all night, and by the time the second warmup (Bucky Covington) was done, one guy had already puked at his feet, one seat away from me. (I know. Sorry.) Soon after Dierks started, another from the group couldn’t stand up and his friends were alternatively propping him up and trying to get him to stay seated. We moved to some empty seats nearby and then I flagged a security guy who was walking by and not long after that, the guys were removed.

I’m not trying to kill anyone’s fun or anything, but when your friends Read more »

For those if you in sunny AZ (okay, just the Phoenix/Tempe area), I will be in your neighborhood this week. If you happen to be home at 11:30-ish a.m. tomorrow, I’ll be on Good Morning Arizona on KTVK TV-3. (Of course by then you will have already seen my friend Tammy on The Today Show talking about her 105-lb weight loss!)

Tomorrow night the 11th, I’ll be doing a teen writing workshop (for teens) at Changing Hands Bookstore in Tempe at 5 p.m. and a reading and signing there at 7 p.m. Details here.

Tuesday the 12th you can catch me at Barnes & Noble, 21001 Tatum Blvd in Phoenix, 7 p.m.

Wednesday I’ll be back home and at the Sugarhouse Barnes & Noble, which is the coolest B&N in the valley – 7 p.m.

And then on Thursday, you can celebrate Valentine’s Day by listening to me on BlogTalkRadio with Mr. Media! And, you can call in with your burning questions. I will remind you about this closer to Thursday, but for now you can go to the site and set it up to remind you and the call-in number is right there as well.

Friday I will sleep.

In other news, we saw There Will Be Blood yesterday. Fortunately, there wasn’t that much blood. If you don’t know, the movie is based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil! Sinclair’s The Jungle was one of my favorite “assigned readings” in high school, though the last 30 pages or so fell apart for me as Sinclair was working harder at making a point than telling a story. Apparently, the same thing happens in Oil!because the last 15 minutes of the movie felt like that, too. However, Paul Thomas Anderson is indeed brilliant, and G. and I always find ourselves having days-long conversations after seeing his movies. The movie felt a little Flannery O’Connor-esque, too, with charlatans and family secrets and battles of will and personal demons. (Fortunately, for most of There Will Be Blood I understood more or less what was going on. I can’t say the same for the O’Connor novel, Wise Blood, that this reminded me of.) Daniel Day-Lewis is truly mesmerizing in the movie and I will not be at all surprised if he wins the Oscar.

Last, I’ll leave you with these pictures from the SF trip – the first is of Mark and me in front of our old grade school (which has an all-new building). The second is me thuggin’ in front of the old corner store near the school. We basically went in there and told the guy that we grew up in the neighborhood and that I stole candy from the store. Sorry! He didn’t seem all that surprised. (And by the way, if you’re looking for a mint condition VHS of Slimnastics you can find it there.)

In church today, the Old Testament reading was from Psalm 107. I leaned over to G. and reminded him that was the passage we read at my father’s little memorial service. It wasn’t a funeral, because he was cremated, and it wasn’t really a memorial service because my sister and husband and I were the only ones there who knew him, but it was something. And it was something we needed, and friends came to support. Anyway, when I whispered that to G. he whispered back that it was two years ago. And that didn’t seem right. Two years? Only two? But he’s right – it was Thanksgiving 2005. That seems like a different lifetime. I was still at my job at FPC and my book hadn’t come out yet and G. hadn’t started grad school and I just can’t believe how much has happened in the last two years.

And it seems like a favorite family of ours just moved back after doing school in Scotland and now they are leaving again. We said goodbye today. They cried. We cried. Lots of hugging. Sigh. Now I have three more reasons to go to Seattle.

Not that long ago my friend E. and I went for a walk and she told me she was pregnant and I couldn’t say anything forever and now she’s due, like, tomorrow.

In other news, my wonderful agent had this made to surprise me and it arrived yesterday morning: 

Sticker. Shiny.