I don’t know why some men think macho is a good thing. I don’t know the reason for life but that doesn’t stop me from living it. I don’t know who keeps whispering to me in the dark stretches of the night. I don’t know the capitals of all 50 states, or the geography of Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if I’m going to go on living tomorrow. I don’t know if matter has an anti-matter, or if it matters if it does.

I don’t know what I’m writing but I’m writing anyway because I said I would. I don’t know what good this all is, maybe none at all because I’ll die anyway and my ignorance won’t matter any more, not that it ever did. I don’t know and wish I did, but perhaps it would spoil the surprise of heaven.

Sometimes it is wise
not to see how far it is
across great waters

I know I want to write because I feel a pressure right underneath my breastbone. It is this tiny winged being with ballerina slippers and a golden crown and filmy soft white wings. She’s a fairy of course, which doesn’t sound like an uncomfortable thing to have living in your chest, but you would be wrong to think so. Her soft wings tickle the inside of my ribs but because they are inside I can’t scratch, so the tickling just goes on and on. Her golden crown has sharp pointy spires which poke into my liver and kidneys and esophagus or whatever else is in there, and I bleed from the inside. And those cute little ballerina slippers of hers – well inside those soft as butter slippers are tiny toes of steel, and when she stands en pointe those toes dig deep into my heart, making dents as deep as canyons, into which the blood and trapped dreams pour, and pool until they’re stagnant.

Even if I try to stop up my ears I hear her telling me in her high shivery voice like a doll’s tea kettle: “You know what you want to write about, now go ahead and write it.”

The sheep didn’t need it anymore so I took it with me when I went home to America. I went through customs with the sheep’s jawbone wrapped securely in my middle-aged underwear, because perhaps it was illegal to transport animal bones and I didn’t want some officious customs agent taking it away from me.

At home in my studio I cleaned and scraped and polished the jawbone until it was purely white, no yellow left, and I painted it then with deep blue spirals, making it into an object of holy mystery. I gave the jawbone a place of honor on my altar, between a rock shaped like a breast complete with nipple, and a hawk’s feather I found in my herb garden.

I go there to meditate when I feel that life is just too much to understand, and the now-holy jawbone comforts me with its message of art after death.

But sometimes this isn’t easy. Words by their very nature are not the truth – they are second-hand removals from the truth. They are descriptions of the truth.

When I want to practice writing “real” I will write a short piece about children. The younger the better, preferably at the stage when they’ve just become verbal, say three or so. Three year olds have no filters. They see the world in ways that you have forgotten, because they haven’t been around long enough to know how things “should be.”

Here’s what I scribbled after spending some time with my grandson Desmond a couple of months ago, when he was almost three:

One time when Desmond stayed at my house, I gave him a kiwi fruit for lunch. He called it a green strawberry and asked me if it was sick. I said no, it was a kiwi and he laughed because he said kiwi sounded like what the birds say.

I peeled the kiwi and he picked up the skin and asked, why does the kiwi wear a coat? Then he asked where I got the kiwi, and I said I bought it at the grocery store but maybe the grocery store got it from a farm in New Zealand or Australia, countries a long way away where the kiwis and the kangaroos are. That got his attention because Desmond likes to jump like a kangaroo.

He asked me to tie a scarf around his waist so it hung down his butt and he pretended he had a long tail like a kangaroo. Then I said, but Desmond, kangaroos have very big feet too, which gave him the idea of putting on my shoes so he’d have big feet and a tail.

He hopped over to the table where his peeled and sliced kiwi fruit was waiting for him, and he at last consented to eat it. His verdict: he prefers his strawberries red, but he likes being a kangaroo.

There’s another reason underneath this – Teacher Kim also loves being right. Every time she teaches she is again proved right – everyone really does have poetry within, everyone really does have something to say, everyone really does matter. “I’m right, I’m right!” she cries joyously in a voice like bells, and her good mood overpowers any stinkiness I might have been feeling before she appeared.

I love Teacher Kim.

I remember when I was beautiful; when I was a warm hayloft filled with night and silver moons, chuting stars, stirring hay. I remember the soft sounds of huffing and sighing, and the smell of sweet breath of a lover stinging my nostrils. I remember when I was round, and open, and full. I remember when I was the moon Herself, smiling.

Pablo does not hide his light. He does not say, “Oh I am only a kitten, not very important.” He goes ahead and plays with his toys and his tail, and his light gambols with him, a happy bouncing ball of dust and kitten life.

Pablo creeps onto my chest when I visit and curls between my breasts in the small hollow where it’s smooth and warm. He sleeps with his tail almost in his mouth, so he looks like an earmuff. He purrs in harmony with the rhythm of my heartbeat in a peace only possible in the exact right place, that place where thoughts depart and purrs begin. The glow of warm oranges lights the room.

That trait is curiosity. When you write for someone else, your client’s life and ideas must be as interesting to you as your own. You need to really want to know what Cleveland looked like in the spring, even if you’ve never been to Cleveland and have no plans to go there. You need to want to understand what it felt like to be a soldier in the Vietnam War, even if you would never consider the military life. You need to want to know the secrets behind the plumbing business, or the history of a house you have never seen, or … you get the idea.

To be a successful ghostwriter, you must have a rock-solid belief that life is fascinating and that everyone has a story or an idea that can illuminate someone else’s life.

The most practical benefit I got from being a published author is that it opened doors in helping me to establish my business and my reputation as a ghostwriter. When I was writing my own “stuff,” I couldn’t make enough money to quit my day job and be a writer full time. It wasn’t until I started writing for other people that I was able to go out on my own. There’s a lesson in there somewhere – I think it is this: “It’s not about you.”

Even when you write your own stuff, it still isn’t about you — it’s always about your readers. If there weren’t any readers, there’d be no point in writing. Writing is just another way of communicating; but writing allows you to communicate without the restrictions of time and space. I think if you keep “it’s not about you” in front of you all the time, you can’t go far wrong.

Our father was impossible to buy gifts for. He didn’t believe in what he called “conspicuous consumption” so he had all the “things” and “gadgets” that he needed or wanted. For Christmas and his birthday I often bought him books, and my brother often bought him things like sweaters or slippers, but these get old after a while, you know? One memorable birthday when my brother was around 12, he bought my dad a bag of Walla Walla sweet onions, because Dad had claimed that they were so sweet they could be eaten raw like apples. Then my brother dared Dad to eat one. Which he did. We have pictures.

But 16 years ago we were both adults and had been struggling to buy memorable birthday presents for many years, with varying degrees of success. That was the year our father turned 79. As we discussed our familiar dilemma, one of us said (my brother claims it was him, but I’m not sure this is true – it could have easily been me) “Hey, Dad loves crab, why don’t we just get him a whole bunch of crab and throw a feast for him and the whole family – all three of his kids, and all his grandchildren?” There were 6 grandchildren at that time, aged 22 to 1 month, although later there were more, and great-grandchildren too. Our father was crazy about his grandkids. He was an unusual man for his generation – he loved, absolutely loved, babies and little kids. So having a party centered around his kids and grandkids, and crab, was certain to make him happy.

We brought our mother into the picture, since she was the one who’d have to clean up the mess the party made of the house (we didn’t tell her this, but she knew it was true) and she agreed it was a great idea. We called this festival Crabfeed and it was a rousing success. There were Mom and Dad, their three kids, the kids’ spouses, the 6 grandchildren (at the time) and we had to put the extra leaf in the table to hold all the whole just-cooked Dungeness crab. (We live in the Pacific Northwest where Dungeness crab is to die for.) We also added steamed clams (my brother’s specialty, made with Chardonnay, butter, and garlic, and evil befall the grocery purchaser if she forgets the garlic, which I did once, ten years ago, and am still hearing about it today), and shrimp salad, and for one of our members who thought she was a vegetarian at the time, we had some pasta with tomato sauce. (It ruined the look of the table, but hey, we are an accepting family. The next year one of the other younger grandchildren caught a glimpse of a crab being boiled, and being a tender-hearted girl of 7, refused to eat the poor things. She joined her vegetarian cousin for pasta that year.)

We ate and ate and ate, and while we ate, we talked and talked and talked and laughed a lot. We told old stories. (You can bet the Walla Walla Sweet story was told). We told new stories. We talked about hopes and dreams for the future. We hashed over current events. We argued a little bit, although not bitterly. We loved each other.

And every year since then, around Dad’s Sept 27th birthday, we get together for another Crabfeed. We’ve not missed for 16 years. We have members in our family who don’t remember not having Crabfeed. It has taken on a life of its own. In our family you can’t miss Crabfeed – it would be like missing Christmas.

Last year, when our father was 93, was the last Crabfeed he attended. This year he will not be attending, at least not in the flesh, since he died a month ago. But Crabfeed goes on. We hope it goes on until the great-grandchildren are grandparents themselves. It is our holiday, our very own, a simple party just for us, full of crab and laughter and memories.