You’ve all heard of James Frey, right? You know, the “Million Little Pieces” author who LIED to Oprah (gasp!) about the essential truth of his memoir. I was never able to work up much indignation; I liked the quirky weird writing of the book, was carried along by the story, and didn’t believe a word of it even before he was revealed to be a liar.  To me, it was not such a big shock.  Writers lie.  They just do.

Now he’s written a new book, and Janet Maslin’s New York Times review is so clever that I want to rush right out and buy it.  Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t.  But the review was brilliant.

I wish I had something fabulous to report on the writing front, but I am just slogging along, trying to fit it all into the nooks and crannies of my life.  Not many items have been crossed off my “To Do” list this week, despite my having been very very busy all week!  So let’s see, what can I report for ‘Fess Up Friday?

Blogging: Yup.  I finished telling the saga of the snake.  Blogged almost every day except yesterday when I was waylaid at Panera and coerced into having coffee with some parents from school instead of using my free hour before work to write.  Which is fine, but I must remember:  “Do Not Make Eye Contact.”

Reading:  Almost finished “A Free Life.”  I have to admit that I am finding it slow going and not as compelling as Jin’s other works.  There is something emotionally detached about the narrative.  While there are a lot of interesting insights into the Chinese immigrant life in America, somehow the characters feel a bit flat and there’s not enough tension to keep me interested.

Writing:  Started writing the story based on last week’s voting.  Working title: “Tuna.”  Cleaned out office closet (yes, this is relevant!) and found a printout of the article that initially prompted my novel idea.  This led to several research threads and some very promising sources!  Woo!  As for actual writing…not so much… but the good news is that it’s very much in the forefront on my mind and I have been planning our summer activities to free up time for writing.

Head over to fellow ‘Fess Up Friday-er Dark Orpheus’ blog to read some great writing tips from Neil Gaiman, including this one:

As for thinking time versus writing time, well, that’s up to you. But — and I wish it were otherwise — books don’t get written by thinking about them, they get written by writing them. And that’s when you make discoveries about what you’re writing. That’s when you get the happy accidents.

So think all you like, but don’t mistake the thinking for the writing.

I took my lovely bike out for a ride this morning.  I rode for about half an hour, marveling at how insignificant hills seem when you’re in a car. Clearly I have been lying to myself about the aerobic benefits of ashtanga yoga!  Lungs don’t lie; I’m out of shape.  A young lady on a snazzy racing bike left me in her dust as I cranked my way uphill.  I made a tactical error in going for the shorter, yet steeper route home, which left me wheezing my way up the last hill into my neighborhood.  First asthma attack in years; next time I have to remember to take an inhaler in my fanny pack!

OMG I feel like such an OLD lady, wheeeeeeze, cough, hack!  The good thing is that I KNOW it gets easier the more you do it, and it’s so lovely being out there in the sunshine!

Later my friend S. (who needs a blog nickname!) is coming over to practice yoga which I hope will loosen up any muscles I may have tightened on my bike ride.

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve–
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Over the past week, since seeing these mating snakes that found their way into my backyard, I have heard numerous stories about snakes.  I have read about snake mythology in various cultures.  I have been thinking, and dreaming, of snakes.  Maybe if I thought hard enough, maybe if I asked enough questions, I would be able to figure out What It All Means.

I don’t think I will ever know What It All Means.  But I do know two things:  I believe the snake sightings are connected with my dad’s death on March 31.  And I believe I know an answer to one of my questions:  Why snakes?  (I mean, why not owls, or bunnies, or something else?)  All I can do is tell you what happened and what I think I am supposed to learn from it.

About ten days after my dad died, my mom saw a black snake in her backyard.  In twenty years of living in that house, in the Arizona desert, she had never seen a snake in her yard.  Two friends were visiting with their three-year old granddaughter, and the man, in his haste, killed the snake.  My mom said, “I wish he hadn’t killed it.  I just wanted him to take it out of the yard.”

Two weeks after that, I saw three snakes mating in my yard. I had never seen snakes in my yard before.  I will admit, my initial reaction was fear and revulsion; that was my mom’s friend’s reaction as well.  And that, my friends, is what we call samskaras in yoga philosophy — our conditioned, habitual responses to experiences and events, our unexamined reactions.  My response was pure samskara:  Snakes bad! Snakes scary! Must get rid of snakes! Honestly, my main thought upon seeing those snakes was I want them OUT of my yard and I want to SEE them go, so that I absolutely know they are gone.

After I wrote about it here, and got some responses that confirmed my initial reaction and some that urged me to look deeper, I decided that seeing the snakes had actually been an auspicious event, something I should have paid more attention to at the time.  I was actually sad that my neighbor chased the last snake off, as it was obviously fearful.

Yesterday our family went for a hike in a local canyon.  It was a gorgeous day, and the trail was full of families hiking and biking and enjoying the clear, warm weather.  About ten minutes into our hike, an Indian man, walking alone, said, “There’s a rattler over there, on the right side.”  I looked, but didn’t see a rattler; honestly I doubted that he’d seen a rattler.  We kept going, up the trail, along the river, and back downhill. As we finished up our hike and approached the parking lot, we saw something:  a gorgeous three-foot snake with the same markings as the ones in my yard, making its way across the trail, dodging bicycles and pedestrians.  It moved with such grace, and everyone stopped to watch it pass and slither its way into the protective underbrush.  My kids were thrilled. We talked about how beautiful it was, and how amazing it is to watch snakes move.  I told them, finally, about the snakes in the yard and they wished they had seen them too.  And then FreckleBoy said something that blew me away, something that brought it all together: “That’s like the snake on my rock!  The one I got in Arizona!”

I paused. “What rock?”

“The rock I bought in the airport when we were on the way to visit Grandpa.  I bought one with a cactus on it and gave it to Grandma, and I kept the snake one.”

“Did Grandpa see it?”

“I think so. I think I showed it to him.”

Well, that is where I stopped in my tracks, in the middle of the trail, and started to cry.  I told FreckleBoy that the snake rock (an airport tchotcke, a flat round stone with a black snake etched into it) is a very lucky rock, and that he should hold onto it.  After the tears, I felt like everything was okay, that I had finally gotten the message of the snake.  The snake sightings had paralleled my grief:  denial (killing the snake), anger (I want those trespassing snakes GONE!) and finally acceptance (seeing the snake for what it is, something beautiful and natural).  Someone could probably write a fullblown essay about that, bringing in all sorts of mythology and imagery from different cultures and traditions.  I am not going to.  This is enough for me.

So why snakes?  Of course Dad, as an anthropologist, was familiar with snake myths in many cultures, especially native American ones.  And yes, Dad saw the snake rock and so that is an image that would have been present in his mind during his last days.  But honestly, I think that the reason is even simpler than that: because when you see a snake, you pay attention.  A snake makes you pause, verify (is it poisonous?), and think in a way that seeing many other animals does not. I can’t tell you if Dad sent the snakes. I can tell you that the message I took from them was this: Stop. Pay attention. Look beyond your initial reaction.  And see if somehow, you can incorporate the beautiful, graceful, pulsating energy of the snake into your own life.

My Mother’s Day featured not only our traditional family hike (complete with kids whining and asking “How much faaaaarther?” and also a SNAKE SIGHTING which I will write about tomorrow) but also a bike ride, thanks to this awesome present:

We bought the kids new bikes for their birthdays a couple of weeks ago, and my husband and I were also in the market for bikes, so we stopped at the bike store after our hike.  My husband found a bike he loves but is waiting to see if a connection of his can bring the price down.  I tried out a functional but ugly bike there as well, but honestly, I wanted a cute bike which I know is sooooo immature of me.  So we stopped at another store across the street where I saw and fell in love with this adorable hybrid bike.  I rode it around the parking lot, declared “This is the bike I’ve wanted all my life,” and we brought it home.

After a short ride with FreckleBoy, reality set in.  The hills in this neighborhood are STEEP!  I had to collapse on the couch for a couple of hours.  I guess doing yoga doesn’t make me as fit as I thought it did.  But I am so psyched to cruise around on my new bike with the kids, as soon as we can convince FrogGirl she wants to learn to ride her new two-wheeler (any tips on teaching kids to ride bikes??)….

And in full disclosure of how absolutely spoiled rotten I was this Mother’s Day, I should tell you that my husband got me one of these:

That is a Kindle; he gave it to me a couple of weeks early as he was afraid (quite rightly) that I would buy several books in the meantime that I could have bought on the Kindle.  I have never been on board with the notion of ebooks, but I think I may be a convert.  I love this thing!  At the very least, it will be worth it not to have to lug 30 pounds of of books along when I visit my in-laws in Spain this summer.

And now, a very spoiled, very grateful and very tired Yogamum is going to take a very bubbly warm bath…

I hope you all had a very happy Mother’s Day as well!

Woman:  Hi, is (YM’s husband) available?
Me: Well, no, he’s married.  I’m his wife.
Woman: Uh….
Me: Oh, did you mean is he here?  No, he’s not.
Woman: Okay, thank you. (Hangs up)
Me: Heh heh.

(It should be noted that thanks to Caller ID, I knew it was a solicitor calling. And because we are on the national Do Not Call registry, I reported the call as a violation.  Take that, phone people!!)

All right, my dear readers, I am offering you the opportunity to tell me what to do! But before I let you do that, I am dutifully checking in with my LIterate Kitten-inspired writing accountability report for the week. Let’s see, getting this one out of the way as soon as possible: DID NOT work on my novel. However, I did accomplish a few other writing-related tasks.

• I wrote something for my blog every day.
• I finished reading Three Cups of Tea, and began A Free Life by Ha Jin. Also began reading Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth. The first story in the collection brought me to tears, and I will have to write more about this book after I’ve finished reading it.
• Did several writing exercises.
• Met with a couple of my writer friends to chat over coffee and share our writing exercises.
• Thought about snakes, became obsessed with reading about snake symbology, working on a piece about my snake experiences.

So, not too bad, all in all. And now, here’s your chance. Below, I’ve posted four story beginnings that I wrote the other day in response to this exercise:

Today’s exercise is this: in five minutes, write as many beginnings as you can that have to do with food. Write one, two, eleven, whatever you can do. Again, by a “beginning” I mean anything from a sentence fragment to three full sentences, but no more than that per beginning.

For our next meeting, my writer friends and I are going to finish something we’ve started.  I figure, why not just finish one of the stories that I wrote beginning lines for.  And why not let you all vote on which one I should finish?  So, below are my four beginnings.  Leave a comment saying which one you’d like me to develop into a story, and the one that gets the most votes wins!  After I finish the story, I’ll post it on my blog, no matter how bad it is! Yes, I am offering to share my bad writing with you!

Okay, here are the choices:

1. Even with the Feds hot on his tail, Antonio always made it a point to stop in at Maude’s for a slice of cherry pie.

2. Why Ricky decided we needed to hunt and eat a squirrel, I’ll never know. But that was when all the trouble started.

3. How many love affairs have begun with strawberries and champagne, and ended with tuna scraped out of a can, while standing over the kitchen sink?

4. Some moms are all love and chocolate cake and warm noodle casseroles. Mine was more half-rotten apples and stale saltine crackers.

I am now completely and totally obsessed with my snake sighting the other day, and I have a post brewing in my head about What It All Means, a post that connects snakes in my backyard, samskaras, yoga, and my internal journey.  Doesn’t that sound profound?  Unfortunately you are going to have to wait until tomorrow (I hope), as I only have a few minutes to write while I sit here at Panera, using the free wi-fi and drinking a mocha before I head off to teach Spanish to the kiddos.

Teaching Spanish is probably the most fun job I’ve ever had.  Sure, it’s tiring to deal with 100+ kids ages 4-14 all in one day but it’s also great to be around all that kid energy.  The little ones give me hugs and call me Mrs. Señora and demand to know the word for “poop” in Spanish.  A couple of the eighth graders blow me away with their enthusiasm and ambition; they are trying to get as far as they can in the textbook so they can be placed into second-year Spanish when they head off to high school next year.  It also helps that my co-teacher is fantastic to work with and lets me do a lot of the fun stuff!

The funny thing is, this is not the sort of job I would ever have sought out.  First of all, I would have thought I wasn’t qualified; I don’t have an teaching certificate (FreckleBoy: “MOM! Are you teaching without a LICENSE???”) or a degree in Spanish.  Second of all, the one thing I always swore I would never, ever do, was teach kids under the age of 18.  But when the opportunity arose and I was asked to do this job, what came into my mind was this:  “When you are offered the opportunity to do something you love, something that is in line with some of your strongest values, and to do it with people you respect, the only thing to say is YES.”

And on that note, I’m off to school!

I have decided that it was indeed pretty cool to see snakes mating in my yard.  I suppose it is a fairly rare sight and now that I’ve recovered from my abject terror, I can see the beauty of it.  And I know these snakes are beneficial, keeping the rodent population under control.

However, I think once was enough and I am proposing this deal with the snakes:  I won’t go out and mate in their habitat, if they don’t come and mate in mine.

Also, it is a rather weird coincidence that since my dad died about five weeks ago, my mom and I have both seen snakes in our backyards for the first time ever.  Anyone have any theories about that?