Letter to Fourteen Year Old Me

Dear Me,

Oh, dear me, dear me, sounds like I'm wringing my hands. You're thirty four now. Seems hard for a fourteen year old to imagine, I'm sure, her life twenty years gone.

I'm jealous of you, the fourteen year old me, nostalgic for you. All of your boyfriends and various states of undress with your boyfriends are approaching, and I remember the idea of first love and horny sex but that's all it is, an idea. I don't have the energy these days to relive it. I envy you those times, but not the heartbreak. I say there is nothing I can do to save you from that pain, nor would I want to. You got your heart broken many times, but it led you to the man you are married to today. You have pilot projects, test cases, comparison studies ahead of you. I don't advocate hesitation or caution when it comes to love.

If I could infuse you with confidence in middle school and high school, I would.

You are still a writer, you'd be pleased to know that. Ramblings and poems and navel-gazing stuff and trying to make sense of the world, and some of our stuff is published.

The things you remember are not the classes, or the college classes, or the jobs. The strongest memories are being outside in nature with the ones you love. Your best memories are the times you don't get credit for, where you are merely enjoying yourself.

Your only regrets are the way you have treated people. At some point in the next twenty years sarcasm will become a crutch, and you'll spend years disentangling yourself from it and forcing yourself to speak openly, and see the world openly.

You do live in a city, even though you never thought you would. But you take your son fishing and camping. Your children pretty much rock. But don't worry about that yet. Enjoy just you for a while.

You gained a bewildering confidence somewhere along the way.

Try again to get into that creative writing class in college. Go on those trips, goof off, lay in the sunshine more.

The best things that happen to you are other people. Be open to them.

And put some sunscreen on your face, because we get skin cancer at 25, at a time we don't have health insurance, for God's sake.

And just be prepared: the only constant is change.

My sister has begun a women's group, to talk about those things that are extremely important to talk about but are shunned in mainstream culture, or ridiculed, or forgotten. Women's lives are intricate and not just for Oprah magazine. One of the group members had a suggestion: "It is an idea for women to contemplate their life journey, and to write yourself a letter. The letter is from the person you are now, to the person you were 10 or 20 years ago, telling yourself what you would like to say to your younger self, to spare yourself pain or to help yourself on the way if you could have... Here are very poignant examples to inpsire you.think I will do this activity-http://www.oprah.com/spirit/Letters-to-My-Younger-Self-Trisha-Yearwood-Barbara-Boxer/1"

Fran's First Town Meeting

Oliver sat in the back like he was watching a trainwreck.

Rio Luna's courtroom doubled as the Town Council's meeting place. The five men huddled behind the judge's bench, shoulder to shoulder, squeezing their chairs together to fit behind the large wooden block. The gavel was pushed aside but the message was not lost on Fran.

The Chairman had a shaggy gray moustache, the hairs of which floated when he talked. The other council members nodded up and down along with the Chairman's voice.

The issue was paint. To be specific, paint the Chairman called gaudy and "not at all in the spirit of the Rio Luna town philosophy of conduct." The person in question was young, and female, and new. Not really new, because she was born in Rio Luna, but new because she decided to paint the bar a different color after she inherited the business from her deceased father. New because she had just added a small renovation to her bar and was serving coffee in the morning.

The paint was neon and the style was semi-Victorian, and the few tourists that flew through Rio Luna on their way to Vegas preferred it, rather than the old cafe with vinyl seats.

And the old cafe was owned by the Chairman's brother. Fran took her coffee at the bar.

The young bar owner, in her twenties, poor thing, was rubbing her thumbnail with her index finger, over and over again, and was looking sideways at the council, making eye contact, but keeping her head averted all the same. Her testimony was fractured and nervous, and no one in the meeting remembered what she said.

Fran sat at the folding table behind the podium, put together in her button-up dress. To her amazement, the only emotion she could muster was amusement.

The Chairman finished speaking, and said, "Well, Fran, unless you have a response to that, I will call a vote to close the bar. I think we've all decided."

Fran said, "Two words come to mind." She pointed at the Chairman. "Pontificator." She pointed to the other four men behind the judge's bench. "Sycophants."

The court room was silent. Fran wasn't sure if they were stunned or if they needed a dictionary.

Denver traffic report

the highway is a metallic millipede
with thousands of cars for legs

stop still slow still stop still slow still stop

sinuous movement

the other appendages and I
we're in this together
moving downtown
only to reverse course and
crawl home after dark

I know why Enri writes on the train

Beecher's Birds

"There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away." - Henry Ward Beecher

The greatest gift you can give a writer is to ask her to write.

Why haven't I been writing? I feel like an old cooked transulucent onion, stuck to the bottom of the stove, nothing to offer the world. Depression, maybe.

I am the woman who gets invited to a meeting to hear a grand new idea and then when she shows up, tries her best to control the meeting and everyone there.

I am the waitress you will take your sandwich order and bring you the special anyway.

I fight and manipulate to make sure my way holds in spite of any new information or dissenting opinions.

I am a fighter who can win any battle at work and has all the connections and they have no idea who they're dealing with and I like it that way.

My soul has bags under her eyes.

I have had to fight at work, for about 15 months now, and maybe a little at home too, fight to keep my identity. But in the process I've holed up and blocked myself from change. Survival mechanism, I suppose.

In all the fighting and surviving and winning I can't imagine any fun or enjoyment in life. Writing, sex, food, play, exercise hold no allure for me. In my fortress it's no fun. Those little birds of Beecher's are on the tin fortress roof, so small and delicate in the sunshine that I can't hear them through the stone.

So what advice do I have for myself? What is this warrior princess to do?

Well, the advice that will always hold true for me, no matter if I'm six or ninety, is don't take myself so seriously.

And I feel my sister on the sidelines with her sign that reads, "Let Go." Learn to let go.

What if I did show up to a meeting and didn't try to drive the outcome? What if I learned to listen?

Now my sister switches signs. The new one says, "Letting Go Is Not Giving Up."