I Made Two Rose Barrettes

Last week was Valentine’s Day, and I made each of my kids a ribbon rose barrette. I am not particularly good at sewing, but I know from experience that hot glue does not really work for this project. Besides, I’m not very good at hot glue either. So I got out my sewing kit and ribbon, told my kids I was working on a surprise, and asked them not to look. 

They did surprisingly well, even coming up to me multiple times to share stories, ask for things that were out of reach, and to seek conflict resolution support from me (which sounds quieter than it is), all while studiously ignoring what I was doing. I did not have quiet, uninterrupted time in which to focus on my ribbon rose project. I didn’t have time to re-do anything. If my thread snagged a corner of ribbon in the wrong place, and of course it did, I had to incorporate that particular unintended curl into my rose. If the medium-quality ribbon I had on hand pulled a bit creating a hole in the ribbon (because I am not good at sewing or because someone bumped my arm) as I attached it to the barrette, I had to add a few stitches. 

I like to do things well, but that’s not always practical. I asked myself why I was making these ribbon rose barrettes, when I could go buy something cheaper and / or better, maybe both. By the second rose, I was improving. Just think how much better they would be if I made a dozen. 

The two roses I had time to make are sweet, nevertheless, and the kids were delighted to see them on Valentine’s Day. Of course they were more delighted by the chocolate and the gummy hearts.

When a friend complimented me on them, I said, “Thanks, they’re adorable, but don’t look at the back. My sewing skills are terrible!” She didn’t reply with the obvious, “Oh, no one will look at the back.” She said something equally true and much more interesting: “The point is that you’re their mother and you took the time.” 

Taking the time to make is special, not less so at a time and place where anything can be ordered from Amazon for almost instant delivery, and anything not on Amazon is on Etsy. It is still valuable to make something, to pull the needle through the ribbon, to incorporate the accidental snag into the pattern of a uniquely imperfect rose.

Dispatch 1 from a Novel Formerly Called Red State: Weekend Fiction

In this character-driven absurd bureaucratic romp mystery set in an alternative, popcorn and pepper obsessed world in which the North won the first Civil War but fragmentation triumphed and the United States of Disunion was born, we follow an intrepid journalist and a loyal inventor as they uncover part of the truth about the potential murder of the Commonwealth of Kentucky’s three top leaders.  With the exception of accurate historical references, any relation to actual persons or news is purely accidental and illustrates that old saying that truth is stranger than fiction.

The Scene

Down the Little View Road, just outside Little View, Kentucky, an emergency crew poked at the wreckage at the scene of the crash. Popcorn. The charred bodies had been removed. As they moved about the scene, they crunched occasional popped corn kernels underfoot.  

The first victim 

Just a few hours earlier, Klair Plunkett  had dragged himself out of bed to face yet another day as  the Honorable Secretary of Gaming for the Commonwealth of Kentucky. If you had told him before the take-over that he would hate his new job, he would have laughed in your face and felt distinctly superior. He would have thought you were jealous of him for landing on the right side of a coup. He would have told you that he deserved his happiness. Regular people--even some mayors--thought it was glamorous, being in Cass’s crew. Thought he had all the power and had it easy. But it had taken him years of hard work-- drudge work. In other words, flattery. Now he was poised for prominence and success at last. People would have to flatter him for a change. 

That should be starting at home, he felt, but his wife had made it clear that, fond of him though she was, she was still not impressed by him, coup or no coup. She wasn’t picking up his dirty laundry or hopping out of bed in the morning to fix him breakfast as his grandmother had done for his grandfather. Those were the good old days, whatever anyone said, he thought wistfully. Of course, as his wife was only too happy to point out, his grandfather had spent his days out in the fields and needed a big breakfast. A small bowl of grits was really enough for a politician, especially one who was only in charge of games. He was lucky that his wife left him to fix his own breakfast, he thought ruefully. If she had done it, the serving would doubtless have been smaller, not to mention salted and buttered less liberally. 

Nothing was working out as well as he had hoped. His wife seemed not to notice that he was now important. The media called him one of the Tres Amigos, which was something, but on his gloomier days, he was disappointed to be merely one of three, and the other two weren’t his friends. They were fools.

Brinkman, The Secretary of Energy, seemed to have no plans.  the Secretary of Alcohol and Tobacco, was obsessed with minutiae regarding bourbon and had no vision. With people like that in charge, no wonder nothing ever improved. As Secretary of Gaming, Plunkett had ideas and plans for implementation. He would modernize the Commonwealth’s approach to gaming, work to allow Commonwealthers to play again. Throughout the Commonwealth, not just at Bubbleland. The hypocrisy of the rules that deemed Bubbleland exempt from the usual prohibitions simply because it was surrounded on three sides by the Ohio River and on the third side by  Tennessee was absurd. The mayor of Bubbleland benefited tremendously from this arrangement, but Plunkett felt sure that he would find powerful allies in the mayors from other areas of the commonwealth. Plunkett would straighten things out.

Don’t Care for Agatha Christie? Read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Anyway

In this brief and not entirely spoiler-free book review of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie (Does anyone care, at this point, about spoilers for a very famous and widely read book published in 1926?), I share my fraught relationship with the most famous mystery writer ever. And I tell you to read one of her best for a particularly engaging look at Poirot.

Christie is not my favorite Golden Age mystery writer. I first became obsessed with mysteries, as I remember it, when I was assigned to read “The Blue Carbuncle” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” around eighth grade. I then went to the local library and checked out mystery after mystery. That’s when I discovered Dorothy Sayers and read all of her mysteries. I moved on to Agatha Christie and quickly became frustrated by Christie’s heavy-handed manipulation. The inconsistent quality of her many novels caused me to take a long hiatus from Christie, which ended when, a few years ago, I happened upon someone’s list of her best mysteries. 

The fact is, I was looking for an excuse to explore the Christie cannon beyond Murder on the Orient Express and a few ill-remembered encounters with Miss Marple and Poirot. 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd will be on almost every Christie fan’s list of favorites. As well it should be. The amusing narrator Hastings is replaced in this novel by Dr. Shepperd, physician and friend of the murder victim. Somehow in this book, Christie’s tendency towards manipulation and over-the-top plot twists delights rather than annoys.

Why? Dr. Shepperd is one of the great narrators. This isn’t Ishmael of Moby Dick, for good and for ill, but Dr. Shepperd’s perspective on Poirot is engaging enough to make the book worth the read. At one point, I found myself wishing for more mysteries narrated by Dr. Shepperd, a series, to match the series narrated by Hastings.

Getting to know Poirot through Dr. Shepperd’s eyes is not to be missed. His sister Caroline reminded me of the sisters in Barbara Pym’s Some Tame Gazelle. I’d read a book about her, though I’m not sure I’d like Dr. Shepperd to narrate it. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd features village life and a superb version of the alibi fun that is part of the genre. 

If you don’t want to worry about how many minutes it takes to walk from A to B, and A to C, and B to C and back, or if it annoys you to think about the ramifications of a table that was moved a few inches, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is not for you. 

If you object absolutely to Christie’s trademark plotting and manipulation, this is not for you.

But it is for everyone else.

1/100 I’m not a blogger and this is my blog (part I)

I have surprised people many times by admitting that I do not have a blog. Over the years, as blogging has emerged, thrived, and developed, I have been asked: “Why don’t you have a blog!?” This is not a serious question, as I have learned by attempting to answer it. I do, as it happens, have a few lists of reasons why not to blog. 

The top of one of the lists is that I don’t have a personal brand. I have some lists about that too, but that’s for another day. What I do have is some self-knowledge. I know that I consistently come back to three things: I like to explore, I like to make, and I like to reflect.

1. Explore

I like to explore— to read widely, go to new places and bring new perspectives to favorite places, immerse myself in rabbit holes of research, and go on adventures medium and small. What of the larger adventures—wandering with no cellphone along a street thousands of miles from anyone I know thinking “I could get lost and disappear forever and no one would figure out what happened”? At this point in my life, with my best efforts, I can’t disappear for five minutes. My work email and my kids are always onto me. But I can develop my curiosity.

2. Make

I like to make—to bake, cook, doodle, arrange, build, art, and craft—sometimes in a straightforward way and others in a way particular to me and my life. I bake bread, for example, and cookies, and I build unrecognizable conceptual playgrounds out of my kids' toys. I doodle for three minutes while my students write.

3. Reflect

I like to reflect—through conversation, writing, and reading, as I look at a tree, a sunset, a painting. And as I consider the number of dishes produced by a simple meal and ask myself if it was worth it, given that no one wanted to actually eat the product of my efforts. In fact, on the back of my mind much of the time, I am asking whether it, whatever “it” is, is worth it. Somehow, even though the answer is often a resounding “probably not,” I am trapped into “it.” What does always feel worthwhile to me is to reflect, even when the result is disheartening. 

I realize this is all very not-suitable-for-branding, but as my grandmother often declared, giving the advice Polonius gives his son Laertes in Hamlet the weight of the scripture that many mistake it for, “To thine own self be true / And it must follow as the night the day / Thou canst not then be false to any man” (Act 1, scene 3).

So I’m not going to try to be brand-ready. Instead, I’m going to try out a range of ideas as I’m taking up the challenge of posting to this blog daily for 100 days. (Sort of. More on that later). This challenge came to me from my brother, Lucas McLaughlin, at http://lucasmclaughlin.com where he is in the midst of Artworking, a 100 day challenge of his own.

I asked for advice, as he’s several days ahead of me in the challenge, and with a far more developed personal brand. “Find your niche,” he said. 

I believe this advice to be excellent. The problem I’ve consistently run into is that I can’t find a niche.

Maybe I secretly don’t want one.

And maybe this blog can do some of the work of developing my space, a niche for myself that feels right.