Of Protecting Cyclers and Making Family When Needed

Friday was the birthday of my dear friend Elena who died five years ago, and yesterday was the annual picnic to celebrate her life. I have written about her before. Today I have some new thoughts to share in a two-direction blog post as the anniversary of this tragedy rolls around again.

The first direction. On Elena’s birthday Friday, in a spine-chilling coincidence, a prominent psychiatrist in our community was struck by a dump truck while biking to work at 8AM and he was killed. He was 56 years old. He has been described as “the heart and soul of mental health services” in our county. For most of his career he spearheaded the county mental health services program and in this capacity helped countless individuals. Just recently he left his county job and took on the role of psychiatric services provider for veterans through our local Veteran’s Administration. His name is Dr. Doug Rosoff. I did not know him, but his death has caused me to have flashbacks to the loss of Elena, also biking to work, also struck down at about 8AM, also by a dump truck, and a few weeks shy of her 56^th birthday. I see articles in the newspapers regularly about cyclists struck down by motorists and killed. How long will it take for city planners, traffic planners, public officials, communities to find ways to better protect our bicyclists? My 20-year-old son Sudi cycles all over the Bay Area on his street bike (Elena would be so proud of him for it). I pray for his safety every morning when I take my walk behind the lake.

The second direction. Yesterday I saw Elena’s parents who flew to Berkeley from Chicago to join us at the picnic. Candy and David raised three children and all three died without marrying or producing grandchildren. Elena was the last of the three. They are now in their mid-80s. Since Elena’s death, many of her friends have remained in regular contact with Candy and David and have formed close relationships with them. I call them every week to chat and have become very close to them, especially Candy. I am not the only one. At least half a dozen friends of Elena my age call them weekly and another half a dozen call them at least once a month. Whenever they visit Berkeley, they are kept pretty busy visiting with one after another of Elena’s friends. And when I call them, Candy gives me all the latest news about Elena’s other friends who remain in touch with them. I think this web of relationships that we, Elena’s friends, have formed to embrace her parents is most unusual. They have become like family to us. While Elena lived, we did not know them all that well. But since Elena has died, many of us have become deeply attached to them and an integral part of their lives. It is almost as if we have become their adopted children. And we talk with each other about them the way people our age talk about our own parents. Concerned about their health. Telling funny anecdotes about them. Humoring them. Loving them. We have fallen in love with them. We have made the family we needed in Elena’s absence.

Elena and her godson Sudi (being silly).

Elena showing the love for her godson Sudi.

Seeing Our Own Stuff

One moonlit night, walking on the beach during a family vacation about ten years ago, I had a conversation with my ten-year-old son and his friend (whom I will call Lawrence). There’s something about the ocean in the moonlight that seems to inspire us to wax philosophical. The boys and I talked about the things we liked and didn’t like about ourselves. Finally, Lawrence said, “But you know it’s always hard to see your own stuff.” A good insight about human nature from a child. I have been thinking of that conversation lately and wondering how come we so easily see what’s going on with other people but have such difficulty seeing our own stuff (as Lawrence put it).

I notice things about other couples, other families, other relationships that make me wonder why these people can’t see what I find so obvious. I know a couple who is miserable together and I can see that it’s time for them to separate but they don’t see it yet. They would be so much happier if they just got a divorce, but they are not ready to go down that road. I know a family where the mom puts on a stern countenance with the children and she doesn’t even realize that she is creating a mommy-persona for herself that runs counter to the loving person she really is. I wonder why she feels compelled to behave this way in her role as a mom. It’s bizarre to me. She loves her children dearly, and yet she is evolving into a bossy and hypercritical mother. I know a young man who is narrow-minded in his vision of what he does for a living. He is unwilling to consider expanding his horizons and locks himself into a job situation that isn’t working for him. Here is a couple where one person monopolizes the conversation and the other person never speaks. There is a mother who always eats from the same plate as her small son while he is clearly anxious that she will eat up the things he wants. She doesn’t see it.

I witness other people engaging in self-destructive behaviors or going in directions that are bound to make them unhappy. Sometimes people know these things about themselves but are unable to take the necessary steps to change course or transform their lives. But oftentimes people don’t even see what they are doing, don’t even recognize the changes or transformations open to them that would improve their lives. It’s a little crazy how blind we can be to our own stuff.

What a shame that we can’t successfully or effectively help one another to see this stuff more often. I would never criticize a friend’s parenting practices for fear of offending her. It’s not my place to tell a couple that I think they should get a divorce. And even if I did do something that socially inept, why should they listen to me? I have no right to criticize or advise on certain deeply personal topics. I would be overstepping bounds. It makes me wonder what there is about me, about how I conduct my life, to which I remain blind. I wonder what I don’t see that might transform my life or improve my life. Even if someone were to be bold enough to tell me what they see about this, I doubt that I could hear it because I’m inside my own reality, my own perception. I would think they are off-base and don’t understand the complexity of the situation. And I might take offense, become angry; so then what is accomplished?

If only we were as good at seeing our own stuff as we are at seeing someone else’s.

21st Century Family Communication

For parents of adult children who embrace technology and social networking, this is a fabulous time for family communication. Yesterday, as most days, I touched base with all three of my children in one way or another. Sudi texted, Akili phoned, and my girl posted on Facebook and tagged me (fun flurry of comments ensued). And yesterday didn’t even include an email from any of them. Each of my children has their preferred way to communicate.

Sudi is fairly impossible to reach via any method other than texting. So texting it is. And if we need a conversation I text “call me” and he texts back “why mom?” – OY! But then he calls. I rarely use my cell phone (I work at home and there’s a perfectly functional phone on my desk) plus it doesn’t have a keyboard so it’s clunky to use for texting (it’s an old flip phone). However, if I need to reach my youngest I turn the phone on and text. It never ceases to amaze me how swiftly he responds to a text and how slowly he responds to anything else. He never listens to his voice messages so that’s useless.

Akili calls me all the time. Whenever he has dead air in his life, like when he’s stuck in traffic or walking to the grocery store, he calls me. During the four months that he was recovering from his broken ankle in early 2011 he called me every day, often more than once. Then he got a job and he called me every evening at 4:30 when he was stuck in commuter traffic. These days he calls at least four times a week, usually more. He sometimes emails us a link to a funny vid or image, or to a movie trailer. We rarely text unless I’m out of town. He responds if I email him, but I don’t need to do it much since we talk so often.

Then there’s my daughter, who rarely calls. But she emails me often and she frequently communicates via Facebook, where she posts hilarious images and jokes on my wall or her father’s or her own (and we exchange comments). Akili took down his Facebook account last year and Sudi has no personal account. If I text any one of my children, I get a reply immediately. It’s as though they go through life with one eye constantly on the cell phone. Everywhere. Online in the grocery store, at the movies (it vibrates silently), in the dentist chair, restaurants, clubs.

Meanwhile, my husband and I email each other throughout the day. I sometimes feel as though I’m at “family central” here in my study with my computer and cell phone, communicating with everyone. And even though Ron and I live miles away from our children, we remain part of each other’s daily lives as if we lived down the street. It’s good for them because we are not near enough or involved enough to cramp their style or meddle in their affairs, but we remain connected and know right away if something terrific happens or a challenge arises. Good deal.

Publishing Industry Truths

On Friday I participated as a panelist on a panel entitled “Paths to Publishing” at the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. From the questions that writers asked, and from the subsequent session I attended with Jack Shoemaker, editor-in-chief at Counterpoint Press (which published my book), I realized that most of the writers present knew very little about the publishing industry. Some of them clearly imagined that they will make a lot of money from publishing their book. I literally heard people gasp at certain points in my presentation because they were shocked to hear the statistics I provided. So for today’s blog, I’m going to share some of the information I offered to them, plus some. It’s an eye-opener.

Editors, agents, and publishers are overwhelmed by manuscripts. Shoemaker receives about 1,000 manuscripts a year at Counterpoint (that's about 83 a month). Whoa! Who can read all that? That’s a big reason why writers are so frequently rejected. I have a rejection letter from everyone who is anyone in the publishing business. But Alex Haley received over 200 rejection letters before his epic book Roots was published. And there’s a famous story about Jerzy Kosinski taking one of his bestselling novels, slapping a pseudonym and a different title on it, and shopping it around to see what would happen. It was roundly rejected by 13 agents and 14 publishers, including Random House, which had already published it. LOL!

My advice to the writers at the conference after I shared my brief thoughts on rejection letters was that if they couldn’t land an agent or a publisher, they should think about self-publishing. Depending upon choices a self-publisher makes about how to publish, self-publishing can be an honorable choice and a viable path to publication. It can be the mechanism through which a writer reaches their audience, and that’s what writing is all about. Self-publishing is an old and well-established tradition. Books that were originally self-published include James Joyce’s Ulysses, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, The Wizard of Oz, and Joy of Cooking. That piece of junk, the 50 Shades of Grey Trilogy, erotic romance books that have monopolized the bestseller lists for weeks, was originally a self-published e-book. I couldn’t get past page three in it, but obviously it has something that people like because they’re reading it like there’s no tomorrow. Jack said in his session at the conference that the fastest growing market in books right now is genre fiction, particularly romance (the leader).

The most challenging task in publishing is getting the word out to people about a book. These days even authors of books produced by mainstream publishers have to do a lot (if not all) of their own marketing and publicity. Blockbuster authors regularly “give back” a substantial portion of their royalties to their publishers to contribute to the marketing budget for their books. Some, like Stephen King, return more than 50% of royalties to the publisher for marketing. Getting the word out about a book is expensive and time-consuming, and people will only buy a book if they know about it.

Over one million books are published in the U.S. every year. Over two-thirds of the books published in the U.S. are self-published books, reprints of public domain works, and/or print-on-demand books. Less than 2% of all books published sell more than 1,000 total copies in their lifetime (astonishing but true); less than 20% sell more than 100 total copies. (For the record, The Call to Shakabaz has sold almost 2000.) These days almost all books that are published are sold primarily to the author’s and the publisher’s extended communities combined. Not many books are able to break out and sell significantly to a larger audience. There is an old saying in the publishing biz:  “If you want to be a millionaire publisher, start out with $2 million.” It’s astonishing how many books a publisher has to sell just to break even on production and marketing expenses.

This was my parting advice to my fellow writers at the conference:  no matter which path to publishing you take, walk that path for love, not profit; and make it a point to enjoy the journey, wherever it takes you.

Early Response – Interesting Phenomena

Friends keep asking me how well Memories from Cherry Harvest is selling. Because it was only officially released a few weeks ago, it’s much too early to say. The exciting thing for me is that some of my friends who received advance copies have had a chance to read it and respond. This past week brought me a couple of noteworthy communications.

On Monday I received a phone call from Joan and Henry Stone, now in their 80s, friends of my parents. I grew up with their children. Their family joined with ours and two other families every year for a joint Passover Seder. We called ourselves the “seder family.” Joan and Henry are Holocaust survivors. Each of them fled as teenagers from Germany with their immediate families and witnessed the disintegration of their larger families and communities. Joan still has the yellow star she was forced to wear pinned to her coat before her family fled Europe. They called to tell me how much the book means to them. It preserved and portrayed many of the experiences of themselves and others they knew during the war. As they said, it encompassed the Jewish experience on many levels and in many places, America, Israel, Eastern Europe. Since our conversation, Joan has been sending me the names and contact information for Holocaust survivor organizations throughout the country. What an amazing resource she is! As I recall, I inscribed the copy of the book that I sent to them with the words “we will always remember.”  

On Tuesday I began corresponding via email with my friend Rajni who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. She had just completed the book. She read it while vacationing in France, which she swiftly realized was particularly apropos since much of the first section of the book takes place in France. She wanted to tell me that the book had prompted her to phone her father to ask for more information about her own family history. Rajni is my age, in fact we have the same birthday. She was born in Nakodar (in the Punjab) the day I was born in Schenectady. Her family emigrated to Scotland when she was about four years old. Her father is probably close to 90, and still has all his wits about him. Rajni said that in the course of their conversation (prompted by the book) she discovered for the first time that her great-great grandmother was from Afghanistan. One of the things that I strive to do as a writer is to make a difference in people’s lives with my writing, so I’m gratified that the book opened a conversation for Rajni with her father that provided revelations about her ancestry.

On Wednesday I checked on Goodreads to see if anyone had posted a new review of the book. I have received wonderful positive reviews from complete strangers writing on Goodreads. Sure enough, more reviews had appeared, all of them good, all of them written by women, and a pattern was emerging. Women are reading the book and then passing it along to their daughters or mothers, granddaughters or grandmothers. Women are discussing the book across generations. The book lends itself well to discussion. I hope the reader often wants to jump into the conversation with the characters and make a contribution. That seems true of the book. So it’s a good book for people to read together, excellent for book groups. I love this phenomenon of people sharing the book across generations. And also that the book serves as a doorway to valuable, often revelatory conversations about family.

I look forward to hearing more in the future about how Memories from Cherry Harvest has touched people’s lives.