While we say goodbye to 2012, I wanted to share a story about choosing joy in the midst of sadness and suffering. I didn’t think it could be done until I watched my friend and next door neighbor, Trudi, die last November. Trudi was Swiss and determined. Instead of a funeral, she chose a party for her closest friends and family.

Everyone who knew Trudi knows generosity of spirit was one of her greatest traits, and her choice to squeeze joy out of her final days is a constant reminder of how I’d like to be in this new year full of uncertainty for so many of us.

Uncertainty? Trudi would  probably give me a quick shrug and smile if I asked her. What’s so uncertain about the present? I need to remember this and that presence is a great gift.

During a bedside visit in her final three weeks, Trudi told me about her last trip to the hospital. She tore off her heart monitor and IV, lay them neatly on the sheets and requested to call her daughter. At 88, she was through with the sirens and surgeries, the poking and prodding, the panicked and too frequent rescues from the paramedics. October 28 would be Trudi’s last ambulance ride. She had led an active and independent life. She wanted to come home to die with her family and friends surrounding her.

The doctors gave her three days. She gave herself three weeks. Trudi was ready to depart but not that ready. She had a plan— a beautiful, methodical, mystical plan to wake us up to joy with her death.

First Impressions

The morning after my husband and I moved into our house five years ago—newly engaged, we opened the front porch to find a huge basket filled with tomatoes, cucumbers, shiny green peppers, and a hand-written note from Trudi welcoming us. I was struck not just by Trudi’s sincerity and how beautiful the vegetables looked in the light of that September morning, but by the kindness of our new neighbor: the tiny Swiss woman with the sparkle in her blue eyes.

When I reached down to pick up the basket, I remember seeing yet another surprise: a small bundle of roses, freshly picked and de-thorned, wrapped in a wet paper towel and tinfoil. The kind of roses that smack you sideways with their sweet scent and pure beauty.

I love roses but what I loved even more about Trudi’s roses particularly was that their arrival on our doorstep had just turned our first house as a couple into a “home.” In no time, Trudi had already touched us with her kindness and generosity of spirit.

When I learned how much Trudi loved to read, I immediately set about reciprocating her welcome basket by delivering books to her as often as I could. I didn’t know how fast she read, but soon found the books returned to me in brand-new Zip-Loc baggies with more hand-written notes: little Post-Its with Trudi’s brief but poignant book reviews.

“Oh, I loved it. I didn’t want it to end,” she would write, then often read the books again.

She devoured books so much that we have not had to buy many ZipLoc bags in the last five years. I honestly don’t know anyone, other than her granddaughter, who read as much as Trudi.

A Friendship Through Books

We started to spend time talking about books, what she liked—a good escape, she said, something with mystery but not so intense that it kept her up all night reading, even though it did. From our bathroom, I often saw the light in her room at night and smiled, thinking how happy the author would be knowing his or her words were being savored in those late hours.

Sometimes she didn’t savor every word. Once, I found her at the door with Hilary Clinton’s tome. It looked like it weighed a million pounds, and there Trudi was holding it with one hand, pumped by something I rarely saw in her: anger. She caught my eye when I swept over the title and she pronounced in her Swiss accent, “He was a little shit.”

I’d never heard Trudi swear before and stood there pleasantly stunned. I loved that Trudi could get so into a book, no matter what she was reading, that she literally embodied the storyline. It was the first time I’d seen a bit of her feistiness and it made me love her even more. As her husband Clorimondo always said, “She’s the boss.” To which she always smiled.

Whenever we visited, time always slowed down in a good way, and I appreciated this silent reminder to live a life more deliberately, with less emphasis on acquiring anything and more on just being. Trudi showed me that a good book and a healthy garden were all she needed to be happy. I don’t think she ever wanted anything new. She just wanted more experiences: a Sunday morning at Rodeo Beach, an afternoon walk down the lane, and time with her family. There was a constant joy and spirited pulse to the rhythm of Trudi’s life, and it seemed to ground my husband and I when we started our own family.

Over the last five years, Trudi had delivered more than vegetables and roses in our life. She provided constant cheerleading and encouragement in whatever stage I had found myself, professionally and personally. She had become my friend.

One Last Gift

She gave her final and greatest gift of generosity in the last three weeks of her life. While I did not see her every day, my husband and I kept a watchful eye—in case we could do anything to help—even though we knew Trudi didn’t much like to be helped. She wanted to be the helper, and of course it was Trudi’s grace that helped us to accept the reality of her situation. She allowed us a glimpse of what it means to live and die with dignity.

During one bedside visit, she looked through her and her daughter’s wedding album, reliving the details, the backyard redwood tree that grounded and sanctified her daughter’s ceremony. The roses scattered on the patio bricks. The black and white photo of the ‘cowboy’ who walked her down the aisle and gave her away (she was from Switzerland and had no family here).

During another visit, she pointed to the can on her tray. I first thought it was sardines. Who knew, Trudi loved sardines? I thought she was a vegetarian, who only on occasion drank a cup of chicken bouillon. Trudi read the confusion on my face and picked up the can. “Someone brought me Swiss air,” she said and laughed. “So I could breathe it for my last breath.” The can was already opened, the aluminum curled back. She shrugged, smiled and laughed again. “Oh well,” she said. Oh, well? That was so very Trudi.

Poised. Positive. Present and strong. Accepting what is and what shall be. May we all be as lucky as Trudi to have our loved ones with us in our final days, to have the kind of closure on our lives, to look back without regrets, to savor the details we remember about the most significant moments of our days. Like Trudi, may we experience joy in the midst of our suffering and uncertainty. I wish everyone a bright, joyful new year. Wherever it may lead you on your journey, may it lead you back to your heart.

Published by Tin House, Friday, October 19, 2012

March 28, 1979. They told us to line up single file, wait for the buses on a bell-less afternoon. They told us there was something in the air. “Do not play outside today,” boomed the principal’s voice, as loud as East Coast thunder. We left the words on the board, left our desks, scribbled on the Etch a Sketch on the ride home, ran our fingers along the plastic piping on the green bus seats stuck with chewing gum and Silly Putty.

Nobody talked much. We looked out the windows, confused. The roads had become a sea of yellow. Schools were closing everywhere that day. “TMI melted down,” we heard the bus driver mumble. Our neighbor, Mr. Kauffman, was corralling all his cattle into the barn and shutting the door.

We were urged to stay inside, but my brothers ignored the principal, and the governor, and headed to the baseball field. I stayed home and played with my Barbies, drank Tang and watched the TV while my mom paced the house, wondering if we should evacuate. She called my father at work. “I don’t know if we’re downwind. Are we downwind?”

News anchors relayed Governor Thornburg’s latest updates. Pregnant mothers and preschool children should leave the area. The NRC had released 150,000 liters of radioactive material into the Susquehanna River, where, only a few years later we would spend whole weekends water skiing, as if the meltdown had dissolved its own memories.

My mom called my father again, “She’s in first grade. That’s almost pre-school. I think we should go to Baltimore for a few days.” 140,000 women and children had already left the area. The governor had extended the evacuation radius from three miles to 20 within two days. We stayed inside while farm animals huddled under cover and ate stored feed.

Years later, reports denied the spike in infant mortality rates within the area. Apparently only a few more people died of cancer. One rode the sea of yellow buses with me. A girl whose once awkward features would be the envy of high school whores who did not know better than to dismiss her beauty until she became a model. Cheekbones like split pears, rubbed by a weary hand that held her up on her last days—when she told me how she dreamed of water skiing one more time, joking once, “Maybe I’ll glow some day.”

Holly Lynn Payne is an internationally published novelist whose work has been translated into seven languages. She is a Discover Great New Writers author for her debut novel, The Virgin’s Knot. Her novel, Kingdom of  Simplicity won the Benjamin Franklin Award. She is the founder of Skywriter Books, a writing coaching and publishing consultancy. Her forthcoming novel is about a girl who meets Rumi and discovers mysticism in the 13th century.  She lives in Mill Valley, California with her daughter and husband.

Missy Franklin makes me smile—and want to write. She motivated me to get up early this morning and dive into a pool for a mere 2,200 meter swim. She’s the darling of the 2012 Olympics for every right reason. She’s positive. She’s strong. She owns her gifts and shares her gratitude and enthusiasm in abundance. I just read that she’s thrilled she gets to bring the bed comforter from the Olympic village apartment home with her. She’s the kind of girl we love.

Even as I type this, Missy Franklin is preparing for her 200 meter freestyle race today. But it’s not the medals this teenager is expected to win that’s got me watching her. It’s her grace and indomitable spirit. Her authenticity and her will. And she’s cute lip-synching on a plane.

What you see is what you get. Hard work, big dreams realized, and a refreshing refusal to sell out. I wonder if spending so much time in a pool, surrounded by water, incubates and nurtures a spirit as big and bright as ‘our’ Missile Missy. Her biggest strengths, perhaps, are her versatility, integrity and endurance.

When we watch Missy swim four lengths of a 50 meter pool (eight laps in a normal 25 meter pool), we’re actually seeing the result of 5,000 meters per day for weeks, months, years. On the low end, that’s swimming approximately100,000 meters per month or one million meters per year (astonishingly, half of most elite swimmers!), given a 10-month swimming schedule and a few weeks of recovery. That’s a lot of laps for just four that count, at least in the Olympics.

Or maybe that’s the point.

Every lap counts. Every stroke matters. It’s Missy’s effort that astonishes and delights us, not just the result—Olympic medals. Even Hollywood has finally caught on. We, the audience, respond most to obstacles overcome in a story, not just happy endings. I suspect Missy Franklin isn’t thinking about gold when she races. Best case scenario, she’s not thinking at all. Instead, she’s being fully in herself, connecting to the source of her greatest strength with every stroke.

And this is what makes me see the connection between Missy and the many writers I’ve been watching go for their own gold. Two weeks ago, we met in the fabled Rocky Mountain meadows and peaks of Crested Butte, Colorado for the annual Skywriter Ranch writing retreat. I tried to prepare everyone for their adventure with a packing list—noting the affects of high altitude, the aberrant weather conditions, the rustic accommodations and the inevitability of seeing wildlife.

Creator of whimsy, Laura Perry, works on a romantic comedy screenplay at Skywriter Ranch.

Missy Franklin would have fit right in at Skywriter Ranch (in her native Colorado), cheering for her teammates. I’m also certain she could score a Mason jar or cow skull from the cabins as a souvenir. The Skywriter group this year arrived with paradoxes: highly successful professionals carrying a large degree of uncertainty and ambivalence about their creativity and how they might manifest it in the story they felt compelled to write. In Missy speak, they had been in pool for a long time but didn’t realize they could actually swim well. They needed a large, clean mirror and a few mountains to conquer.

Getting grounded at 9,000 feet: Skywriter Ranch writing retreat 2012 participants climb to Judd Falls above Gothic Mountain, Crested Butte, Colorado to learn cause and effect in story structure.

More than overcoming the initial inertia that strangely seems to happen once inspiration strikes (Obstacle 1), these writers had plenty of other challenges. One had been very recently re-diagnosed with breast cancer. Another had just lost her 15-year-old nephew to a rare bacteria. They all recognized that life can easily and almost always get in the way of their creativity—and all our dreams, but they refused to ignore their impulse to write and arrived with laptops at 9,000 feet, ready to “climb mountains” (I think they thought this was a metaphor), even though two had never set foot on one and one writer admitted she had never done any exercise.

Not one complained of the task: seven days living in a mountain cabin to reclaim their creativity. Though they weren’t racing against a clock, they were fighting to hold onto the solitude—that deep, relaxing pool where the incubation and nurturing happen for most writers. I emphasized that this cabin-in-the-woods scenario was the biggest fiction they’d ever experience, and that their greatest task would begin the day they went home and applied everything to their real life.

Skywriter, Peter Chandonnet, Bay Area life coach and yoga instructor, receives inspiration.

Still, they grounded themselves and dove into the dirt, finding the value of their creativity and their stories. We started each day with a different hike to our outdoor classroom­—by the banks of a river, by a lake, on top of a mountain and one day, a huge boulder. I prayed for sun. The Hopi’s knew all about the importance of connecting with the earth’s energy first: the sky begins with the feet, and so I encouraged them to take off their shoes and soak up the goods.

They did. The inspiration trickled in like little rivulets and brought a sparkle to their eyes. They engaged each other at meal times like old friends. They swapped war stories of being in the trenches of writing their novels and screenplays, and in one unique case, realizing the dream to start a high-quality wellness and fitness center in San Francisco.  All of it required writing.

By the end of the week, our little tribe had climbed up and down 4,000 feet in elevation, tripled their pace, supported each others need to recover each afternoon and write with the spirit of endurance athletes. Though they called me the ‘Biscuit Burner,’ they discovered not just what they wanted to write and made a plan to do so, they actually wrote, laughed a lot and changed.

Former pilot, Debbie Shearer, takes flight on her forthcoming novel at Skywriter Ranch.

Seven days honoring their creativity produced more buoyancy, brightness and confidence than they knew they possessed before they arrived. They would all agree that writing, like swimming, is an endurance event and that the goal of gold (in this case publication or a produced movie), while honorable, isn’t nearly as fulfilling as the process itself. When Missy Franklin lights up the world with her next gold medal, we all can’t wait for her to dive back into the pool and thrive.

If the Olympics periodically remind us of the strength of our bodies and the will of our spirits, endeavoring to write well and share our stories (of loss and love and everything else) is as Kim Addonizo says of poetry, “not a means to an end, but a continuing engagement with being alive.”

Going for the gold: Skywriters reclaim their creativity in Crested Butte—and their breath after hiking up and down mountains, some for the first time in their lives. Congratulations all of you!

Today is a good day to be mobile, especially because 18 years ago I could not walk. A drunk driver had shattered my left femur and broke my hip and pelvis with his truck.

Despite the seeming tragedy of it all, June 6th is always more sweet than bitter. While the memory of the accident still haunts me, I anticipate the anniversary as a celebration of second chances. To move. To breathe. To live again, and hopefully thrive.

I like to do two simple things on June 6: one for myself and one for others. First, honor my mobility by doing something physical. Either a hike or a bike ride, but because it’s a weekday and work beckons, I hiked my favorite loop in the Marin Headlands and passed a bobcat, wild turkey, and horses along trails fringed with lupine, paintbrush and poppies. The views overlook Mt. Tamalpais, the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge, glowing orange as the sun arced over the bay.

Not a bad hour to sweat uphill simply because I can.

Second, I like to do something for others. It’s a way to remember the kindness of strangers in Crested Butte, Colorado who put me back together and brought me comfort when I was so far from home — while I was creating a new one there. I began last night by cooking a special dinner for my husband and this morning, brought my officemates the chocolate cupcakes I baked to remind them of the sweetness of life. A secular Seder in June.

The gesture is so small as to seem insignificant, but I know the intention is everything; one of my office mates received a clean bill of health after a month of white-knuckle medical tests and biopsies suspicious of breast cancer. She has a husband and a son. She has a second chance, too. Maybe she’ll pick up her bass guitar in her own private party.

Another friend is watching Parkinson’s too quickly ravage his father, who was an avid outdoorsman, a fly fisherman and mountain biker. My friend and his family have convinced their Dad that they can overcome his mobility and move him to Lake Tahoe and keep him comfortable for a weekend so he can enjoy a change of scenery, a breath of mountain air.

Take a walk. Move your body. Celebrate the life force inside you. Dance. You don’t know what might happen. You really don’t. Take a moment to appreciate your mobility and life.

I remember June 6th so vividly as if it were today – the catering job I got that morning for backcountry weddings, the ‘last hike’ I went on that night, the video of Patriot Games I had left at home and wanted to return so that I didn’t have to pay the fine, and on the way back, the decision to stop my car to give two mountain bikers a flashlight because I didn’t want them to get hit by a car. Then after we were all struck, thinking they were dead.

I kept hearing a voice, ‘it’s only broken bones’ over and over, and to this day, do not who was speaking to me from that winding road where I lay and stared up at a mountain. All I knew is that broken bones, like most things we endure, can eventually heal. What I didn’t know and what I’m still learning, is that the shattering might even help us to evolve.

It’s been 18 years and these memories play again and again, like some theme song to remind me of the path I’ve chosen, how I got from that dark night to such brightness. I’m living my dream life and yet it has its many challenges, of course. Finances, raising a toddler, marriage itself. But I’ll take them and the lessons as the price for being alive.

When we shatter, we lose parts of ourselves, some of them forever. When we break, we break open and the pieces that remain sometimes contain gifts hidden deep inside the pain.

Yesterday, I swam 2500 meters in 50 minutes with no pain in the shoulder that was torn out that night. Today I hiked in comfort with no limp and a cadaver’s bone aiding each step. My daughter kisses my scar whenever I wear shorts and calls it my ‘boo boo.’ She has yet to learn the story of June 6, but she knows the sweetness of a chocolate cupcake. And maybe that’s enough?

I usually don’t write about writing or motherhood. But lately, life is asking me to do a lot of what I thought I’d never do: change my course whether I want to or not.

I share all this from the perspective of an endurance athlete, because I’ve come to understand that the requirements for writing and motherhood demand just that — a deep reservoir of patience and stamina that I had little understanding of prior to the birth of my daughter. But my body, my spirit, and my entire brain have undergone intense rewiring ever since, and it’s taken me a full 24 months to adjust to, and accept, the more permanent changes within.

One thing that has changed is my awareness of the need to let go in the presence of my child. If only my mind could fully cooperate. Remember to email so-and-so about such-and-such. Take out this from the scene in chapter X. Get new sponges. Finish business plan. Thaw fish. And the zinger: organize baby clothes. Uh, when? I’m nowhere near mastering this kind of presence and don’t know if I ever will, but singing “Wheels on the Bus” between meals certainly helps deter the whirring To-Do list.

Here’s what I haven’t yet done since my daughter was born: put the baby photos in an album. It’s been two years and I still haven’t stopped to fill a photo album, even though the Shutterfly box with all 700 of them calls to me every day. I also haven’t made a baby scrap book yet, but I have a box of things she’ll no doubt love to see some day. I haven’t even made her handprints or footprints, but it’s too late for that. At two, she would rather hold a worm than plunge her fingers into paint, so maybe she’ll gently let me off the hook for this.

While raising my daughter, I have also been working on a new book, and this year, working on the rewrite.  When I first heard Paul Simon’s song, “Rewrite” from the album So Beautiful or So What, I busted up laughing. My husband had introduced it to me on his I-Pod and told me he loved the ‘swing’ in the song:

“I’ve been working on my rewrite, that’s right
I’m gonna change the ending
Gonna throw away my title
And toss it in the trash
Every minute after midnight
All the time I’m spending
It’s just for working on my rewrite
Gonna turn it into cash”

I loved the lyrics. Here I’d found a companion for the silent suffer fest I’d begun last November when I made my first round of submissions to agents.

What’s it like during submission season? A little scary and unnerving. All the courage required to write a book often seems to collapse the very moment we “submit” it. Why? Rejection is an inevitable reality. This is when singing “Wheels on the Bus” definitely helps to keep things in perspective, because it often feels like the wheels have come off the bus and that is being driven by a pigeon.

It can take weeks for one agent to respond to a manuscript. This radio silence often seems to amplify the chatter in my head. Did they like it? Do they want it? Will they find the right editor and the wildly enthusiastic and supportive publisher? Or conversely, when they reject it. What can I decipher from this cryptic rejection that I can apply to another revision? Because writing is rewriting. And submitting is learning to dance with rejection and let go.

I was fortunate to receive a workable note, which in short translated to: your novel is obese. I had already cut 80 pages, but after meeting with a former student, I realized I needed to cut two sections that substantially bogged down the pace. I had done the very thing that I had advised my student not to do, and she rightfully enjoyed telling me. I listened to her and decided to see if I could cut another 100 pages while I was at it.

So I set about the rewrite with an appetite for change and letting go I did not know I possessed. And something strange happened. In less than two weeks, I had cut more than 100 pages of my novel (190 total from the original draft), shrinking it down to a mere 373 pages, a much leaner and more agent-friendly version.

From 7:30 – 1:30, I did nothing but read and delete, and in the rarest cases, write any more. Almost simultaneously, my daughter slept for two and a half hours each afternoon. It was as if she knew I was working on the rewrite and had gifted me more time, so that when she was awake, we could roll Play Dough then cruise the sidewalk in the red wagon. Even stranger, I had the need to commit to meal planning to reduce the frig forage each night.

Something was shifting. I was letting go of the parts of my book that didn’t serve it, while serving my family more. I don’t know if this was a mere coincidence or just an underlying phenomena of the season itself, but the spring of 2012 has been a clearing out like no other. Got junk? Rewrite your life.

Writers are waiting for the stars to align, for a perfect match, for ‘the one’ to fall in love with the book and hopefully with them. We’re waiting for the ultimate validation — that our time at our desks, chewing pens and gum balls, deepening the furrows between our brows, adds up somehow. That whatever it is we were ‘asked’ to write or rewrite actually matters to someone else. That for some, splitting time between our careers and our children, is a healthy and wise choice in the 21st century.

I admire full-time working moms as much as I admire full-time moms. I am neither but a little bit of both, and each job further reveals my strengths and weaknesses. Sure, I’d like to write the perfect book and be the perfect mom, but I know she is the ultimate fiction. With imperfection comes wonderful opportunities to let go and grow, to lighten the load.

Hopefully, by the time Gracelyn is old enough to read these stories, she’ll forgive my shortcomings. That while I wasn’t focused on creating the perfect baby scrapbook, I did compile its elements. And that while her curly hair was often unkempt and her clothes encrusted with Cheerios, she’ll remember the nightly hula dancing with dish towels, the morning read-a-thons in bed, the eggs she learned to crack, the cookies she helped to bake, and the moments she spent in the garden learning to love plants and flowers, birds and bees. Hopefully, somewhere in her memory of being a baby will be a loop of laughter and love that rewrote her mother’s To Do List one spring and made it into a To Be List—one that even Paul Simon might approve.

Few churches have offered me comfort and most have intimidated me. I have sought solace and connection elsewhere, in nature, anywhere there is water and rocks, mountains and lakes. However, this winter I discovered something completely unexpected inside a church, art — modern and bold in the form of performances, video installations, paintings and mixed media.

My journey into the confluence of art and spirituality began in New York City’s church of St. John the Divine, the world’s largest cathedral, measuring 121,000 square feet, 601 feet long and 124 feet high. That alone would inspire awe, but I honestly would have never prioritized seeing a cathedral when I went to Manhattan for work in late January. I arrived two days early with visions of lingering all day at the MET, free of diapers and deadlines. However, my friend and colleague, Diana Cohn, raved about “Water,” an exhibit in the cathedral of St. John the Divine.

“My friend works there. You have to go and meet her,” she said. So I did because nothing that Diana Cohn recommends falls on deaf ears. I knew this was an opportunity that I had to seize. Amazing is just one way to describe what I witnessed that cold but bright morning in January.

Immediately after I stepped through the huge bronze doors, I looked up to see three high-wire artists soaring beneath the flying buttresses like some kind of Biblical birds. My guide, Lisa A. Schubert, Vice President of Cathedral Events, Marketing and Communications, grabbed my arm and pointed. “You have no idea how lucky you are to see this,” she said with the delight of a child. “Just a few moments ago, a little boy on his tricycle pedaled down the aisle. Now this!”

We stood gasping, watching these three artists plummet from a hundred feet and stop a few feet short of the stone floor. My heart was in my throat, but I wanted to see more. I felt like I had travelled on a bazillion subways to walk into a laboratory for testing human potential.

God meets Cirque de Soleil, I thought, wondering how on earth I managed to witness this.

It was a rare series of events for what was supposed to be “a normal Friday” morning in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights. It got better, actually surreal. “Come on,” Lisa said, motioning for me to follow her down the center aisle to a group of people clustered in the front pews.

“Elizabeth Streb is here,” she said and I followed her gaze to the woman who stood directing the high wire artists, “rehearsing for the opening show of the Summer Olympics in London.”

Wait, I thought. Elizabeth Streb? The choreographer Streb? The human phenomena Streb? Lisa read my face and nodded to confirm that yes, we were seeing the work of the most renowned action choreographer in the world. When Lisa made the introduction and Streb reached out and shook my hand, the only words that came were, “Thank you.” Elizabeth Streb simply smiled with the kind of cool, quiet composure that possess both confidence and graciousness.

What nobody knew in that moment was that Elizabeth Streb’s vision had brought to life a scene I had written in my most recent novel that takes places in a monastery and involves a character who has the ability to fly. I have a belief that all artists receive inspiration from the same source, and I was delighted that my imagination had strangely but surely crossed paths with hers. Now I was able to be in her presence and thank her for her creativity — in a church.

As much as I wanted to sit and watch Streb’s incredible athletes soar through the air, I also wanted to see “Water” so Lisa left me alone to wander. I walked back to where I started by the door, suddenly aware that I had almost missed a crucial corner of the Wonder Church: the one dedicated to the most influential writers of our times, The American Poets Corner, apparently inspired by the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. My eyes lit up reading the quotes etched into the stones bearing the names of Emily Dickinson, Eudora Welty, Langston Hughes, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and many more famous writers.

I had to sit down. Of all the churches I have visited, from Chartres to the Hagia Sofia and the temples of Luang Prabang, I have never been so affected by the space inside the cathedral of St. John the Divine. Apparently, the church was built using sacred geometry. Whatever that meant was affecting me and I knew I could not possibly take in everything I was seeing in one morning.

Here was a church, a church, on a mission to cultivate a conversation about the truth of the human experience — a conversation that inevitably transcends religion, politics, and culture.

My god, I thought. I finally found my church and it’s on the other side of the country.

“It may well be that the most accurate account of who we are as a people, as a nation, is the American Poets’ Corner in the Cathedral. The writers remember here engaged in the social set-ups, sentiments, and uncertainties of their times in deeply personal ways, and their bodies of work provide an historic record, and at the same time a living witness, to the relentless ongoing investigation of what it means to be human,” states a pamphlet about the Poets Corner. “Their words endure as examples of how the literary arts chronicle our life and times.”

I had to pause and breathe. Where am /, I said to myself, dazed by the fortuitous timing. What were the chances of arranging to meet Lisa that very morning, that very day. Lisa told me she wouldn’t have been there at all had I not arranged with her to see “Water,” thanks to Diana, an experience which was no less impressive than watching flying humans. I spent another hour absorbing the installments, marveling at a 250 meter river made of fabric, several paintings including three works by Mark Rothko, a fountain made of water bottles, etchings inspired by hurricane Katrina, and watched a video in the Baptistery by Bill Viola, “Isolde’s Asscension,” that left me breathless, as if I’d just witnessed a full cycle of life, death and rebirth in 14 minutes.

The “Water” exhibit alone would have made an impression, but it will forever be framed by watching Elizabeth Strebs’ dancers defying gravity via high wires. It’s not that they were doing flips in the air or that they even had the strength to flip while they were being hoisted upward, testing every fiber in their core strength. It’s that they were doing all of this inside a cathedral that not only made their creativity holy, but infused it into the body of its congregation.

It’s hard to believe there was a moment in history when it was thought that God did not approve of such human expressions, let alone have them performed in “His” house. I had crossed into a conversation about creativity and grace, about art as a bridge to all that exists, about the sacredness of the mundane, and the power of the imagination to transform.

When my daughter asks me what is sacred space, I will tell her it is where she is free to explore the vastness of her imagination. I will tell her it is anywhere she is permitted and permits herself to create. I will tell her that God’s stage knows no boundaries and brings people together in rapture and repose, and that if she has any belief in the divine, it is that art expresses the holy. And there, I will tell her, where the waters of spirituality and art converge, she will know grace.

I turned forty on Christmas Eve and as much as I’d like to regale my friends with tales of a blowout celebration, Jesus’ birth pretty much trumps my own each year — no matter what milestone I’ve hit. I know of only one other person (besides Nostradamus) who shares my birthday and we call each other first thing each December 24th just in case our other friends forget. She’s three years younger and won’t share crossing into the fabulous forties with me, but we did share a pregnancy (almost to the due date) and I feel I owe it to her and my younger friends to forge ahead into my forties with clarity, focus, ease and grace.

This has nothing to do with shoes, or makeovers, or finding new ways of defying gravity. What’s saggy is saggy. Deal with it and laugh. As my late grandmother always said, “Holly, you can’t turn a turd into a rose.” Thanks, Mrs. Egge. She loved Wild Turkey and died one week before her 92nd birthday. There’s longevity in both sides of my family so I’ve vowed to age with grace…and a little help from some mineral cosmetics, yes, but mostly my attitude. It’s all I have left that won’t sag, jiggle, darken with liver spots, break, rupture, split or explode. Maybe a little Wild Turkey will help keep my health, too. Who knows?

I found myself in the days and months leading up to Christmas Eve 2011 reflecting on the last ten years, and subsequently thinking a lot about every year that’s brought me to here. I didn’t bemoan this birthday. In fact, I was as excited about turning 40 as I was about turning 30. And I don’t really think about my age. I never did. Maybe I should. I still feel like I did in college. Sure, a few things have changed. I’ve got lines. A lot. Stretch marks from my baby, some battle scars, sun spots. My heart’s broken open since and a few of my bones have been rearranged, some aren’t even mine but a cadaver’s thanks to modern science that put me back together the summer of 1994. This is all on the surface, but on the inside, I feel like things are getting refined and I like that prospect about turning forty. I’m still working out several rough spots — aren’t we all, and am hopeful I’ve got time to work out the kinks and wear my age years from now as if it’s a diamond necklace.

I didn’t need a big party to acknowledge this milestone because every day of the last year, I’ve thought about other women my age who haven’t lived this long. I am only forty and some of my friends have already died, mostly women, and all from breast cancer. Some have been recently diagnosed. Others buried. Never easy news during the holidays. That’s why I wanted to write about my friend Renee Harcourt — a mother who survived. It’s also why I haven’t written about Laura Marquez (another mother) until now, because the timing wasn’t right. She was on the battlefield too often and any narration felt exploitative, even if it was well-intentioned.

Everything changed December 24, when I checked Facebook to see the smiling faces of friends near and far, grateful for their “big 4-0″ birthday wishes. I was about to close my email when something caught my eye, a letter from my friend and former colleague, Dan Christian, whose wife, Laura Marquez received some news about her breast cancer, which completely re-framed my fortieth birthday. I wasn’t just sharing it with Jesus. I was also sharing it with my friend Laura.

Anyone who knows Laura Marquez knows that sharing her company in anything is just about the best gift a friend can get. She’s a born giver. She’s hosted Oscar Parties at her house during her treatments. She connects good people, and where Laura goes many gather. My daughter has been fortunate to inherit her daughter’s wardrobe and even in the midst of Laura’s grueling treatments, she managed to clean out her garage and invite me on numerous occasions “to come up and shop.” She once told me that her friends often joked about her high level of organization during cancer, “You’re making us feel lazy.”

The only thing I could give Laura during her treatments was pizza and pasta, the only foods she could stomach at times, my presence, and a sense of humor. There were things I tried hard not to bring, my fear and my tears, which I fought every time I was about to see her. Still, what I could give her never seemed enough to me because I wanted to give her back her health. Along with a daily practice of gratitude, I asked for that every day of 2011.

Doing the dance of life: Laura Marquez and Daniel Christian at my wedding in 2008.

Laura continued to give to me and others throughout her battle with cancer. This time, inspiration. During her stage four diagnosis in 2010, Laura dove into the pool and reported swimming twenty laps and playing two hours of tennis the day she started treatments. At that time, she was taking oral chemotherapy and kept her hair. She didn’t luck out on that one during stage stage 4 metastatic breast cancer (2011), meaning it was deemed ‘incurable’ and had spread beyond the original cancer site in the breast. Still, she found a way to stay positive and delight in the growth of her young daughter Tessa. Talk about living on the edge with grace.

Laura has seen a lot in her life. She’s achieved a lot too — an Emmy Award for her ABC World News coverage of the Lake Arrowhead fires. But what Laura Marquez has accomplished as a wife and mother of a toddler while undergoing brutal clinical trials (five days on, nine days off) for one full year in addition to the most recent chemotherapy is not just a testament to her attitude, strength and courage, but proof of the invisible forces that heal, call them God, spirit, faith, whatever. Something was at work, and something was answering my only wish every day this year: for my continued health and for the health of my friends battling breast cancer. Receiving Laura’s great news was the best part of my birthday.

I invite you to read her husband’s letter, reprinted with his permission, and see for yourself.

“The Unimaginable Becomes Real at Christmas Time”

I like Christmas. It is one of my most favorite times of the year. I like all the sentimentality and familiarity that is associated with the season.  But all too often we are taken over by singing chipmunks, dancing snowmen and frenzied shopping, and this leaves us asking or crying for a more meaningful and lasting Christmas experience. Like Charlie Brown we all desire Christmas to have greater transformational meaning in our life.  We long for more than expanded waistlines and January credit card bills.

Christmas as a spiritual experience is about opening our lives to the unimaginable becoming real.  Ponder this for a moment? A baby being born to a 14 year old virgin doesn’t add up, knowing everything we understand about human biology.  The Christmas story is by no means a biology lecture. Quiet the contrary.  Having faith in a deeper meaning of Christmas asks that we have an audacious belief that a God can bring new life or a new way of being when all the logic and evidence says otherwise.

My wife and I live this reality daily.  Seven out of the eight years of our marriage Laura has been battling breast cancer.  Advancements in chemotherapies, radiation and target therapy keeps her alive and thriving.  We live everyday of our life on the edge of modern medicine hoping and praying for the unimaginable to become real.  Audaciously believing that the unimaginable can become real is a daily ritual for all who walk the road of cancer.  With each devastating diagnosis that knocks us down and sends our minds spinning and our hearts sinking, we are lifted back up with unbelievable news that the tumors are gone.   Time and time again we are lifted back to our feet because doctors have no scientific explanation as to why she responds so well to treatments.

We stopped asking “why me” a long time ago. Because the answer from the best minds in cancer research remains the same, “ we don’t know.”  When we ask, “why does she get great results that other women do not get?” The answer is the same, “we don’t know, at least not yet”.

Laura’s recent scan before Thanksgiving revealed that in just 8 weeks her disease has “almost completely gone away”.  As the woman who heads UCSF’s clinical trials said, “ I’ve never seen this kind of response in any of my patients.”  It makes her cry, us too. The unimaginable has become our reality.

So I know a little about what it is like to receive some unimaginable news, news that doesn’t make sense, news that defies explanation from modern science.

Our life is spent living on the edge of medical mystery in the 21st century.  I have no problem reading scripture that turns human understanding upside down. In fact, I am restored by it. God can bring new life in ways that takes all that we know to be true and turns it topsy-turvy. This isn’t just Good News! It is Great News! Christmas is the audacious belief in a God that creates a path, when all logic and evidence indicates there is no path.   

Have a blessed Christmas My Friends,

Rev. Dan

The Reverend Daniel Christian
St. Luke Presbyterian Church

So it’s true. Miracles do happen, and not just at Christmas. I join thousands of people around this country who are grateful for Laura’s recovery as it challenges us to confront some of life’s greatest mysteries. Perhaps that is what turning forty is about for me: finally embodying the clarity, focus, ease and grace I have witnessed in Laura Marquez.

Clarity: Okay. I will never have all the answers; life is supposed to be a mystery.

Focus: I’m ready to experience major joy. Serious, unbelievable mind-altering joy that I witness in my daughter every day. I already know how to suffer. Been there. Done that. As Gracelyn says to all things she doesn’t particularly like — like garbage trucks, flies and leaf blowers, “Bye-bye” dis-ease. Hello ecstatic living and prosperity.

Ease: I’m ready to stop freaking out about the infinite things I have no control over.

Grace: If I can show up and love every day, the good times as much as the bad, I have a chance of dying a very happy, old but vital woman. And if I can have faith like Laura in something bigger than me, the universe, perhaps unnamed and unknown, I too, will come to understand the absolute truth in the miracle of my life and cherish every moment.

A few years ago, a friend of mine inspired me with a daily habit of gratitude that struck me as both profound and simple. He said the first thing he focuses on when he wakes up each day are five things he’s grateful for about his life. When he goes to bed, he gives thanks for five things about his day.

Simple, right? But I’m slow to change. It took me 35 years to adopt this practice. 

Though I have no way of truly measuring such change, I believe this habit of daily gratitude, which I’ve been doing now for the last five years, has changed my life and my brain. Even now, when my husband and I are embroiled in an argument (What? The parents of a toddler fighting?) we try to pause and remember to say, ‘”Name ten things you’re grateful for right now.” We then rattle off our list—at first, peppered with sarcasm (Me: I’m grateful that you’re no longer driving like a knucklehead. Him: I’m grateful that you’re no longer giving me directions about my driving). When we finally get serious, usually by number five, a curious thing happens. We slow down. We disconnect from the emotional fire and keep another war at bay.

By the time we complete our list of gratitudes, we’re in a completely different frame of mind. This really works. We need to do it more. Along with a good therapist, gratitude might be saving our marriage.

What are You Grateful For?

I love learning what people are most grateful for and was struck recently by the guiding life principles of William (Bill) Hughes, whose essay Chocolate Milkshake was published last week on This I Believe, and reprinted here with his permission.

Bill’s essay touched me in many ways. First, because I know Bill. He’s the father of Peter Hughes, a dear friend I met many moons ago when we were young and free to ride our bicycles a hundred miles or so each weekend. The was our life B.C., before children, but it’s because of our children that Bill wrote this essay based on a tradition he shares with his grandson, Zachary, Peter’s first son.

The relevance to Thanksgiving is two-fold, not only thematically, but also historically. One of the most special ‘orphan’ Thanksgivings I have ever spent on the West Coast was with Bill and his family at their friends’ ranch, Vanumanutagi, (apparently the former estate of Robert Louise Stevenson’s widow, Fannie). I will always be grateful for the way Bill and his wife Mary welcomed me and another dear friend Amy to the table there, and in later years at their Palo Alto home. I had no idea at the time that Bill had come from such humble beginnings and the more I’ve gotten to know him, I’m reminded to give thanks for all that I have, my family, my health and my life.

One Orange and A Chocolate Milkshake

Bill Hughes was born July 23, 1928 in Lafayette, Indiana, attended Catholic grade school and high school in West Lafayette, where he was named to an All-American baseball team. He attended Purdue University, joined the Marines, then studied again at University of Kentucky.

After college, he worked for Holiday Inn, headquartered in Memphis, then was offered a job with “a fledgling hotel company in California with an unusual name, Hyatt” where he spent 15 years, ending as senior vice president. He then became president of two companies, Round Table Pizza in Palo Alto, for two years and later at Oravisual, an audio-visual manufacturing company in St. Petersburg, Florida. In 1982, he founded Snoopy’s Ice Cream and Cookie Company with Charles Schulz, the cartoonist.

Bill Hughes’ life epitomizes the great American dream. His “rags to riches” story is as rife with triumph as it is tragedy. Bill’s mother was struck and killed by a car the day she crossed the street with a bag of oranges she had just bought for him, then 12, who was in the hospital with a ruptured appendix. Natives of rural Indiana, Bill’s family was poor (so poor they could not afford proper medical treatment which lead to Bill’s appendix bursting), and the orange became a symbol. As an parent, Bill began placing a single orange in the toe of his children’s Christmas stockings to remind them of all that they have and to remember the grandmother they never knew. Now adults, they have adopted the tradition and are teaching the story to their own children. The legacy of the orange continues, along with Bill Hughes’ newest ritual of the heart.

“Chocolate Milkshake” by William Hughes, Palo Alto, California as it appears on This I Believe November 14, 2011

I read where one of the big investment houses on Wall Street handed out billions in bonuses, and one fellow treated his cohorts to $1500 bottles of pinot at one of New York’s finest restaurants. He had a good day.

Today, I had a good day! I took my three year old grandson, Zachary, to the creamery for a chocolate milkshake. As the waitress served the silver metal canister brimming with vanilla ice cream mixed with thick chocolate sauce (the preferred recipe), with a dollop of whipped cream on top, his eyes grew bigger with anticipation. At 83, the latter is something I deal in often, at the expense of reality. But the actual in this case, a chocolate milkshake in hand, is simply the best. Seeing the pleasure on his dear little face, smeared with chocolate, beats pinot every time!

The realization of how precious and fleeting times like this are, turned to sadness for me because I will not be here to see him grow up; that I will not be able to assuage his hurts, to encourage after disappointments, and to bore him with homilies from an old warrior who has seen too much of life. In the meantime, when he falls off his bike, the best I can do is pick him up, exhort him to try again, and apply a little mercurochrome to a scratch.

And when he’s a little older, I want him to know about what it was like when his “papa” was a child, to know about things that were so much a part of my life to this day. I want him to know about horse drawn milk wagons with balloon tires, quarts of glass bottled milk with three inches of cream frozen at the top (best consumed by spoon before your mother catches you), sycamore trees, burning leaves, hollyhocks,lightning bugs, street cars, 10 cent stores and small town main street.

Zachary’s growing up will be “whiz bang” faster, with technology driven in ways impossible to imagine by my generation. But I shall remember this day at the creamery and the values learned in a simpler time, values I believe transcend all the things I don’t understand in this age.

A good day at The Creamery: Bill Hughes and his grandson, Zachary, enjoy chocolate milkshakes.

I asked Bill how much he believed gratitude factors into a person’s happiness. “I liken gratitude to kindness which translates to humility, in my opinion, the greatest of all virtues,” he wrote in an email last weekend. “If you are not a kind, caring person, you don’t understand what gratitude means because you do not have humility, and if you are not humble, you cannot be completely happy.”

Bill has obviously seen a lot in his life and I wondered what he might tell his grandchildren about the value of simplicity in regard to gratitude. “In 83 years, you would think that you’ve learned a lot, though number of years lived does not translate to prescience!” he commented. “I want my grandchildren to have awareness, to appreciate the bounty of wonderful things around them. I want them to know that for all that we feel we must achieve in life, it is often the little things that mean the most, things like a raisin cinnamon bagel on a Sunday morning or a chocolate milkshake.”

Last Saturday night, my husband and I had the pleasure of soaking up the Hughes’ hospitality again at a Friends Thanksgiving where 25 of us, most of whom share a decade-long friendship that began on a bike ride, gathered to acknowledge the value of these deep roots and give thanks. Perhaps we will tell Bill’s story to our own children each Thanksgiving and remind them of David Steindl-Rast’s poignant words, “it is not happiness that makes us grateful but gratefulness that makes us happy.”

Alexander Maksik's stunning debut novel was released this summer by Europa editions' imprint Tonga Books.

On a recent vacation in Sun Valley, Idaho, I stumbled upon Alexander Maksik’s debut novel, You Deserve Nothing, in a local bookstore, Iconoclast, read the first page and fell in love. This is going to be great,  I said. This guy knows what he’s doing. The previous summer, I taught a class at Stanford, Making the Great Debut, and wish I could have taught this book as an example of how great a debut novel should be: composed of an engaging world, compelling characters and stunning writing. Not easy, folks. This writer is a gifted artist.

I read the book in two days (it’s like a Camus-esque Catcher in the Rye meets “Dead Poets Society,” and I apologize if the hybridization offends the author or others, but I mean it as the highest compliment). The writing is exquisite and minimalist. The tension acute. You can’t help but fly through the book then want to read it again; that is if you can appreciate the author’s courage to explore some risqué territory. Some reviews have scoffed at this blend, deeming the plot derivative; but it’s hard work to make any character multi-dimensional—and memorable, long after the story ends. In this case, the author excels at telling the same story through three distinct and compelling view points, a teacher, his lover and his student.

I had the fortuitous experience of meeting the author at a reading in the public library later that week. I can tell you Alexander Maksik is a man blessed with eloquence on and off the page. He’s one of the rare authors who can read with the panache of an actor. He’s charming, self-effacing, and will make you laugh. But what I love most? Maksik is as real and authentic in person as the stories he writes. We can admire this debut novelist for his courage to stay true to himself and his work.

Maksik’s candid talk in Ketchum could inspire many writers to keep going despite the often harrowing road to publishing. His personal story around his first novel is one that reminds us that getting our books out there requires as much pavement pounding as it does faith. You have to believe in your work, despite the rejections.

Maksik was unavailable for a Q&A so I am cobbling together the story here with only the recollection of what he said at the Sun Valley library the evening of August 25, 2011. I will paraphrase and summarize to the best of my ability, and apologize to my readers for not having direct quotes. To read formal press coverage, click here.

Want to get published? Persevere.

Maksik, 38, the recipient of a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching/Writing fellowship from the Iowa Writers Workshop, clearly knows that the path to publishing takes perseverance. He mentioned enduring seventy-something rejections while he searched for an agent and a publisher. Most people would have given up much earlier. I don’t know what kept him going, but I suspect Maksik draws from some deep reservoir of faith in his work and refuses to allow the word ‘submission’ to have too much power over his process or his psyche.

Rejection after rejection, he continued to submit the manuscript, then just when he was riding a wave of depression, he received an email at the 11th hour. The kind of email that makes you blink and rub your eyes. Eric Simonoff, the highly respected literary agent with Pulitzer Prize winning clients, wanted to represent him.

He recalled the excitement and sheer disbelief of reading Simonoff’s offer. After all those rejections, he lands one of the most legendary agents in the industry. That was a good day. “I thought I was going to be the next Jonathan Franzen,” he said to an audience of adoring fans in his native Sun Valley, many of whom were friends with his parents, the co-founders of the annual Sun Valley Writers Conference. He then went on to joke how he imagined “buying an apartment in Paris” with the publishing advance; however, the advance did not come quickly. Maksik endured yet another round of rejections until he was discovered by Europa editions.

Unlike the fictional Parisian apartment depicted in his novel, he might just have the real deal some day. Last week, his book was favorably reviewed in the New York Times (9/13). A herculean feat for a debut novel first released in paperback. His publisher Tonga Books, curated by Alice Sebold, is part of Europa editions and what appears to be a wise team who are changing the game in publishing. Europa clearly made a wise decision to release this in paperback—no way around it, it’s a book club book and most book clubs don’t purchase hardcover books. Even more are buying e-books, which makes Maksik’s first book, as a paperback, the new norm.

It’s exciting. I wish I had been able to hear more about working with an author-curated publisher. Maksik did say, and has said in other interviews, how much he appreciated Alice Sebold’s (author of The Lovely Bones) encouragement. Apparently, she was adamant about keeping the ending of You Deserve Nothing. It’s not happy. It’s not sad. It’s the rare, real bittersweet ending that is so reflective of every day life. Even though the story is considered morally ambiguous by some critics, Maksik deftly manages to answer the bigger narrative questions he raises about the fate of each character. Each has a full and complete arc, which is perhaps more satisfying to most readers than pronouncing a judgement on the characters’ actions and behavior.

The book is about many things, but shaped around depression. Maksik remarked how he, too, suffered a bout of depression while he was immersed in the world of his novel and writing it in Paris.  I wanted to ask him if he believed writing was a way to heal, but I don’t have to ask. He manages to weave a narrative of three separate view points, all of which allude to varying degrees of depression, or simply the disappointments with what is expected and what is found in life. You can’t do that without understanding those disappointments first-hand. They are not imagined. They are deeply felt and the emotional intensity he creates is one of the experiences I loved about the book.

I wasn’t just reading internal monologues. I could feel the pain and longing of each character, which I imagine springs, in part, from the author’s own experience and keen observations about the human condition. Maksik has made it his business to expose the light and the dark. The good and bad. The complexities of being human and the consequence of power. He has a wonderful gift to share with us. May there be more. Much more, Mr. Maksik. And may it stay edgy and honest and beautiful.

Perhaps in the end, the teacher character, Will, would have responded less to Camus and more to Rumi who said, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” For any writer who’s been in the trenches of publishing a first novel, I hope you recall Alexander Maksik’s story and remember that like him, if you stay true to your story, and true to yourself, you deserve everything that comes to support you.

Salon97 offers classical music with attitude for the other 97% of people who don't yet listen to it— until they meet Cariwyl.

Cariwyl Hebert is putting the cool back into classical music and is changing the way people listen to it. If you’re lucky enough to attend Salon97, her monthly listening parties in San Francisco, she’ll give you a cupcake and a glass of wine. This month, she offered hot dogs and root beer floats, instead, for a special program dedicated to celebrating American composers.

Root beer floats and classical music? Yes. Salon97 is serious only in that it is seriously fun. Cariwyl encouraged “incessant flag-waving” for this particular event. I took her word and wore my most comfortable pair of blue jeans, frayed Lucky’s, and flip-flops. I could do patriotic. I like good hot dogs. I love root beer floats. But could I do classical music and stay comfortable?

One Rule: Fun beats Formality

Cariwyl Hebert, founder of Salon97: educating, entertaining and sharing her passion for classical music since 2008.

“Wine helps,” Cariwyl said about how she’s been helping to make this approachable to people like me, those of us intimidated by anything “classic” that isn’t referring to a John Hughes film.

I’d never been to a listening salon and found myself both nervous and eager to attend last week’s annual party in July. Why the focus on American composers? “Because American composers are amazing and too many people don’t know it yet,” Cariwyl explained.As much as Cariwyl assured me I didn’t need to know a thing about classical music to enjoy myself at Salon97, I wondered about the crowd and worried.

My mind ran amok. Do 97ers stand around stiffly discussing the choices of musical symbolism? Was it like a wine tasting where I’d be encouraged to identify Chopin-inspired ditties? Could I even use a word like ditty around classical music aficionados? Whoa, was all I could think.

Discussions Made Easy

So yes, of course, I was intimidated, even though I can honestly say I’m not the 97 percent of people who don’t yet listen to classical music. I actually love it. I listen to it a lot, most often in the car. It keeps me calm on the road, helps me focus when I’m cooking. I played it all the time when I was pregnant with the hope that my baby might be better than me at math, as if classical music has the power to trip genetics. Who knows? It ignited a love affair with Einaudi recently.

Classical music for the urban hipster? A drummer listens with rapt attention to Berkeley based composer John Adams' "Chairman Dances: Foxtrot for Orchestra."

Though I like classical music, I have zero confidence in my ability to discuss what I’m hearing. The closest articulation is about classical film soundtracks that actually help when I write, and I’ve looped a song for as long as eight hours to work on a particular scene. Surely I had the stamina to last through Cariwyl’s three selections—and stay through dessert.

The fact that I found parking across the street of the venue was an omen of good things. Cariwyl scored with her host, Murrey, a friend who generously offered her classic Victorian house to 26 strangers, all for the benefit of spreading the love of music neglected and misunderstood by the general population for too long. It was time to join Cariwyl’s mission, to listen up and take heart.

It's easy and even fun to listen to classical music with Cariwyl Hebert as your guide.

Diverse Audience & Musical Tastes

We crowded the chairs and floor of Murrey’s front parlor, an antique showcase, perfect for listening to the works of American composers John Adams, Virgil Thomson, and George Gershwin. The format was simple and straightforward: introduction, listening, discussion. Coughing was encouraged along with flag waving and breaks for more wine and cheese.

Cariwyl started the salon with “Chairman Dances, Foxtrot for Orchestra” performed by: San Francisco Symphony, directed by Edo de Waart, composed by John Adams, a Berkeley based musician. “John Adams gave me tendinitis!” Mike Williams confessed to the crowd. Apparently, he was a fabulous flutist who Cariwyl met at San Francisco Music Conservatory.

I was eager to hear John Adams’ piece, but terrified to discuss it now that someone among us was a professional musician. I cowered in the corner hoping nobody would call on me. I had mixed my patriotism with a big dose of paranoia. This was a party. Not a blue book exam. There would be no tests involved. Only taste tests.

I sat, listened and waited. Hands shot up. The crowd spoke. I took notes, astonished to hear words like “really fun”  “amazing” “spectacular” “purely American” “classical and melodic at the same time, with a lush melodic middle.” I was relieved. Someone had spoken about John Adams’ piece as if it was an ice cream sandwich. I could relate to that. I was feeling warmed up. My own internal commentary had included some of the same words. Could I actually participate here?

That's me, the author, overcoming my fear of classical music...and loving every minute!

Apparently Cariwyl had chosen the John Adams’ piece because she wanted to feature someone local. “It jumped out at me. I wanted someone who would grab your ear. This is sort of crowd-pleaser-ish,” she said and smiled with a glimmer in her eye that says, trust me, this is really fun.

Sharing the Love Nationwide

Cariwyl has brought Salon97 to backyard patios, museums and libraries in San Francisco, and July 26, she travels across the country to WQXR in New York City, the country’s largest classical music station. To say she is elated is a gross understatement. She knows what she’s doing. She knows how to please a crowd with classical music. Listen up South by Southwest. There’s room and reverence among the hip for classical music out there.

Adams grabbed my ear and pleased me. I was bouncing my flip flops along with the catchy music but the jury was out for my ability to articulate the experience. I’d get two more tries. Next up: “At the Beach” by Virgil Thomson performed by: Yvar Mikhashoff, piano; David Kuehn, trumpet.

Cariwyl’s introduction to Virgil Thomson peppered us with compelling trivia. Thomson’s film score for “Louisiana Story” was the only film score to win a Pulitzer Prize. “Makes you want to go out and see the film!” said someone sitting cross-legged on the floor. Yes, I was excited to update my Netflix queue, too, but my internal dialogue was processing the fact that there is a Pulitzer Prize for musical compositions. A Pulitzer? My God, was a complete rube or what?

Got a flag? Wave it. Grab a hot dog. Eat it. Kevin Smokler dispenses flags for patriotic listeners at Salon97. The only rule? Have fun.

Invitation to Discover

Apparently, Cariwyl was testing all of us and the discussion heated up. Some people laughed during Thomson’s piece. The music was funny and playful, but that’s about all I could safely say.

Some people found it odd that the piano and trumpet were paired together and not called jazz. A few zingers whizzed around the parlor, smacking us with sheer candidness. “Modern version of chamber music”  “boring and weird” “simple piece—not a lot of virtuosity” “what about the high note at the end?” (laughter) “felt like an adolescent boy with his music teacher” (referring to the “antagonist” trumpet and “protagonist” piano part). This was no ice cream sandwich.

Even Cariwyl freely admitted, “Would I wake up and say I’d listen to “At the Beach”? No.” But in her admission, I felt strangely at ease, both inspired and humbled by the impassioned discussion.

Here I was with a group of people who had never heard this music. We were suddenly related, each of us willing to push our comfort zones, engage with strangers and expand our minds.

Simply put, we were learning something new. And we were having fun doing it, hot dog in hand.

Someone even mentioned “counterpoint,” referring to how two more lines of music relate when played together. Examples cited were Bach and Gregorian chants. Apparently there was a lot of counterpoint going in Virgil Thomson’s piece and it stirred up the ranters in the room. Fun.

The last piece trigged the most frequent flag waving, toe tapping and you-know-what kind of grins. Talk about a crowd pleaser. Cariwyl wisely chose George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” performed by: Jon Nakamatsu, piano; Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, directed by Jeff Tyzik.

Passion meets Purpose

I had no idea that George Gershwin died so young, at 38 from a brain tumor. He had just arrived in Hollywood with his brother to score films. His whole life was in front of him and he had so much more music inside him. We listened with awe, reverence and joy. Cariwyl took a seat on the floor, beaming, completely absorbed in her element and sharing her greatest love.

Salon 97 celebrates American classical music composers every July with hot dogs, root beer floats and lots of flags.

You can guess the reaction of the crowd to “Rhapsody in Blue.” Unanimously positive. “Yay” “Such an iconic cornerstone piece.” “Fantasia image struck in my head.” “Damn United.” (referring to the airline’s musical theme) “Embodies New York.”  “Piano composer of all time.”

One person said it was the first time they had heard the piece in its entirety in years, as it was for most of the 97ers that night. He was visibly touched and that meant a lot to Cariwyl. “I love when I see the light bulb go off in listeners,” she told me weeks ago over lunch.

As we sat there and the music washed over us, as Gershwin’s pieces have the power to do, especially “Rhapsody in Blue,” it struck me how meditative listening to music can be, how much more I want to sit down and listen to music that I don’t normally put on my I-Pod. By the end of the night, I developed a relationship with each of these pieces and yes, I’d say it was intimate.

I swear my heart rate had dropped in the 90 minutes I’d been in that room. I felt calm, at ease, peaceful. Was this musical yoga? Something was happening at Salon97 to enrich the community. Cariwyl Hebert was bringing a little levity and happiness to others one classical piece at a time.

To learn more about Salon97 and maybe even participate, click here: Salon97.