Rachel Simon's Blog

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Yes, I did.

For the first three books of my career – the books that preceded my first bestseller, Riding The Bus With My Sister – I wore fun, whimsical costumes to do author readings in bookstores. In fact, during these early years of my career, from my first book, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams (1990), through my second book, The Magic Touch (1994), to my third book, The Writer’s Survival Guide (1997), some people came to my readings just to see my latest costumes. I often worked with props and actors as well, creating what I called “literary performance art.”

I retired the costumes in 2002, when Riding The Bus With My Sister came out. By coincidence, I began doing professional speaking then instead. I’ve continued dressing like a regular old author ever since, and have also continued to do professional speaking – most recently for my first New York Times bestseller, The Story of Beautiful Girl. I wrote about all of this in my last blog post, which you can read here.

But I have many fond memories of my days in costume. So when my friend Cecily asked me to guest blog for her at Uppercasewoman.com today, I decided to share one of the most prominent.

It’s about the paper dress. It’s also about how I met Cecily, way back in 1994, and we became friends.

Please go to Cecily’s blog to read about it. You can also see photos of some of my other costumes, as well as how I look in the paper dress now. (Well, last week.) Here’s the link.

And if you’d like to learn more about my first books – all of which were well received and critically acclaimed, but none of which led to national recognition or stayed in print – please go to the Books page on my website.

So how’s it been going?

How’s it been going in the six days since Grand Central Publishing published The Story of Beautiful Girl?

That’s what people keep asking me – though they phrase the question in one of these three ways:

1. What’s been going on?
2. How are you feeling?
3. How are sales going?

I’ll start by answering #1 and #2 together, and will get to #3 shortly.

To provide a little context, those of you who’ve been following this blog know that The Story of Beautiful Girl generated so much pre-publication interest, Grand Central sent me on a ten-city pre-sale tour across the U.S. and into Canada. Independent booksellers gave the book the #1 spot on the Indie Next List. B.J.’s Wholesale Club selected it for their May Book Club. Literary Guild, Mystery Guild, QPB and Doubleday book clubs made it a selection, too. USA Today named it one of the Ten Books To Watch For this May.

It’s also a book that, as some of you might have already discovered, makes some people cry. This doesn’t seem to be limited to women; several male readers – a scientist, a CEO, and a bus driver – reported that they cried their eyes out. This happened in houses, hotel rooms, and even airports, where concerned strangers asked if the person reading was okay, and all each person could muster was, “Yes. I’m just reading this book!”

So hopes have been high among pretty much everyone I know, from friends to publishing people to fans to my sister Beth – who, as you might also know, brought her copy of The Story of Beautiful Girl onto the bus so she could get the drivers to sign it. Last I knew she had 31 signatures, but that was already a few weeks ago.

So, since publication day last Wednesday, what’s been happening and how am I feeling?

Let’s start with the night before. That evening, I stumbled downstairs to dinner after many bleary-eyed hours of putting together – with the assistance of my friend Marilyn – the mass announcement about the release of the book that I’d be sending out the next day. My husband Hal, who has been indefatigably giving and loving throughout these last weeks, had already set dinner on the table. He’d turned the lights low. He’d put on calming music. I sat down with a thud, and just as I was about to take my first bite of dinner, I happened to notice the latest New Yorker sitting on the edge of the table. I’d been so consumed by my work with Marilyn that I hadn’t even known the mail had arrived. “What’s in this issue?” I asked, and flipped open to the table of contents.

And there it was. My book. Featured in my first-ever advertisement in a national magazine. The May 9th issue of the New Yorker, on page 4, the table of contents page. (And reproduced here at the start of this blog. Just click on the image to enlarge and see all the details.)

A wave of excitement washed away my bleariness, and for the rest of the night, I was invigorated.

I also wasn’t able to sleep. Excitement battled with exhaustion battled with hope battled with worry. Would the next day prove to be a major milestone in my life?

In truth, I doubted it. I’d already lived through five other publication days since my first book came out in 1990, and all had turned out to be days that came and went with no fireworks except the ones I created for myself – by visiting bookstores to snap photos, by going out to dinner with friends, by throwing parties. Every publication day was fun, to be sure, but even my most successful book so far, Riding The Bus With My Sister, had come out to little attention from the outside world. Yes, in the first few weeks there were a few TV and radio interviews and some reviews, but none on publication day itself, and in fact the word of mouth that made Riding The Bus With My Sister a success (years before the extra push from the movie) took a few months to gather momentum.

The build-up to the release of Beautiful Girl had gone far, far beyond anything I’d experienced before, so I certainly had faith that this book would have a very different trajectory than the others. Still, I already knew that publication day itself would not be a day of running from the Today Show to Terry Gross. They’d not called, so I’d still be regular old Rachel, at home with Zeebee the cat (yes, this is a picture of Zeebee), and, once he got home from work, Hal. But what else might actually happen?

I decided that I might as well stay busy.

So on the morning of publication day, I scheduled my mass email to send itself just before lunchtime. Then I helped a few friends in need, took care of some household chores, and went out to visit the Alzheimer’s facility where I do my hospice volunteering.

While several thousand people across the country received my message, I helped the activities coordinators celebrate Cinco De Mayo, shaking maracas and dancing to Latin tunes with the residents. It was a joyous start to the day, and all the more so when I got to spend one-on-one time with a resident who’d just woken up, and to talk with her about spring and gardens and the pleasures of taking naps on rainy days. Then, with a hug for her, I returned, through the spring rain, to my desk.

There, waiting for me, were a hundred fifty online messages from the array of electronic media I now engage in. The day then disappeared into electronic correspondence, phone calls, and wonderful snail mail cards from well-wishers. Some were old friends and long-term fans whose names I was delighted to see. Others were new to my life. Several had already gotten their hands on the book and devoured it in a day or two (or, in a number of cases, a night or two). Some were already posting blog reviews and Facebook items. Others relayed tales of going to the store that day. One even changed her Facebook profile photo to my book cover. Another posted a picture of herself holding my newly-purchased book. The emails, Tweets, and Facebook updates came thick and fast, and I’m pleased to say that every one was congratulatory, friendly, warm, and happy. Heightening the pleasure was my observing that in the online world, a community of supporters had formed; not only were they responding to my posts, but to each others, and some had formed significant friendships.

After responding to as many messages as I could manage, I was exhausted, but I was also deeply touched by everyone’s support.

There were no visits from Oprah or calls from movie stars or NPR producers. No sparkling moment of feeling I’d transitioned from regular Rachel to New York Times Bestselling Rachel. But sometime in the afternoon, I received a profoundly moving gift. The Manda Group, which had interviewed me when I was in Toronto for the pre-sale tour, sent me links to the final video. This was probably the most emotional interview I’ve given so far for The Story of Beautiful Girl, and it was so powerful that I mentioned it it in my blog about that trip. (This photo is of me with the interviewer at the Manda Group, Allen Zuk.)

I set aside everything else and fell into the video, and it brought all the emotions back. This was true for the four-minute excerpt, where I discussed God Knows His Name, by Dave Bakke, the book which helped inspire me to create the character of Number Forty-Two. And it was true for the full twenty-six minute interview, where I covered issues like spirituality and what I’ve learned as a sibling.

I went to bed that first night feeling as worn out as if I’d walked for many miles along gorgeous terrain, enjoying every moment but relieved to be going to sleep.

Or at least trying to. Because again that night, as every night since, my head churned with so many To-Do’s that sleep came only in patches, and always with subtitles and voice-overs and commercial breaks for Next Week and Don’t Forget That Email Tomorrow and What If It’s A Huge Hit and What If It Fizzles After Today and How Could I Have Forgotten To Do That and I Must Thank Her, Too.

The next few days were similar. I was delighted by the correspondence, Facebook posts, and Tweets, that kept arriving, and the reviews and blogs that kept appearing. Like the absolutely wonderful posts by Janice Phelps Williams on her blog Appalachian Morning, Kristin at Dragondreamer’s Lair, and Idgie Atthedew at Dew On the Kudzu Book Reviews. And the fabulous online reviews by January Magazine and Bookreporter.com – which named it one of their Books We’re Betting You’ll Love.

I was also excited, as good news kept arriving. The audiobook side of the Hachette Book Group (of which Grand Central is an imprint) approached my agent about making the long-desired-but-never-made audio version of Riding the Bus With My Sister, possibly with me reading. A Chinese publisher bought the rights to publish Beautiful Girl in Mainland China. More ads appeared, this time in the iPad edition of the New Yorker. (The ad to the left of this paragraph was one of two that ran on the iPad.)

At the same time, I was overwhelmed. In addition to kind comments, the waterfall of online communication – and phone calls – included many people with whom I had to iron out details for my upcoming appearances, many online updates I had to take care of for my own website and places like Goodreads, and many unexpected but necessary tasks for my publisher, both in the U.S. and the UK, where the book comes out in early June. (Among the things we worked on were the Reading Guide, which you can see on their website. I’m posting the UK cover below.)

But what about sales? you’re probably asking. How is the book selling?

Well, I learned something when I put out my first book. Unless the publisher contacts you to give figures, most authors have no idea how many copies their book has sold, and might have only the most general sense of how it’s doing. And most publishers have better things to do than call authors every five minutes after a book launch to deliver this information – if they even know it, which, back before online sales, when books were trucked into stores and word of mouth needed to spread, they might not have known for a while. In fact, I’ve never had a publisher call me ever, at any point in the life of any of my books, to give me sales figures; I’ve found out only by way of the twice-yearly royalty statements.

Once I realized all this, which was instantly upon the publication of my first book (Little Nightmares, Little Dreams), I decided that I wouldn’t call the publisher to ask about sales. Aside from my risking looking impatient, insecure, fixated, or, worst of all, needy, I just concluded that if and when they had something to tell me, they’d let me know, and otherwise I should just go about my business.

I didn’t change this practice when, at the launch of my fourth book (Riding The Bus With My Sister), Amazon became a major bookseller and began posting up their sales ranks. For one thing, I realized those rankings fluctuated by the moment, and reflected competition with books whose audiences would be unlikely to overlap with mine. More importantly, I was told by many authors that they’d gotten so obsessed with checking their ranking throughout the day that they came to feel as if they’d been taken over by a form of madness. Seeing no point in worsening the anxiety of putting out a book, I decided not to check my Amazon rank, nor ask others to do it for me. Instead, I would gauge a book’s success by the quality and quantity of the comments people sent me.

(And, I should add, most other authors I know do the same, so if you’re inclined to ask an author about their book, I hope you’ll skip the “How’s it selling” question and just say, “I’ve heard so many good things about your book! I’m going to buy and read it right now!” And then, please, do.)

So in those first few days, I did not look at my sales ranking on Amazon.com. At one point someone did tweet that my ranking was ridiculously impressive, and later on someone who will go unnamed (but who answers to “Dad”) told me it was even higher. But, as with my other books, I’m waiting until Grand Central decides to tell me whatever it is they want to tell me.

This doesn’t mean I’m not hoping the book does indeed sell fabulously well. It doesn’t mean that I’m not wondering – yes, hoping – that The Story of Beautiful Girl gets to the dream milestone that every writer hopes for: The New York Times Bestseller list. It means that, in the interest of staying as calm as possible in a time when hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of people are learning about me and my book, and I’m feeling, as I’ve said, excited and exhausted and hopeful and worried – in short, vulnerable – I’m just going to focus on the readers who reach out to me, and remain patient about everything else.

Throughout Thursday’s crush of emails and calls and Tweets and posts and To Do lists and hellos and Will you do this’s and Hey, look at that’s, Hal kept calling from work and asking how I was holding up. By the end of the day I was so overextended that I said, “I’m almost out of my mind.” The next thing I knew, he was arriving home with Indian take-out and saying, “I think my role right now is to tell you when you’re doing too much, and make sure you stop.”

I almost melted with relief. Trying to live in the moment so I wouldn’t project into the future of this book’s life had made me lose sight of my own well-being. I realized my neck was hurting, my head was throbbing, and my eyes almost felt swollen. “And I’m taking tomorrow off,” he said.

The next day, Friday, the electronic messages kept pouring coming in. And reviews from Entertainment Weekly (“truly stirring”) and the Boston Globe (“Its protagonists’ quest for freedom and dignity will tug at the most stubborn of heartstrings”) appeared as well.

But in the afternoon, Hal, who had decided to rename himself Dr. No, told me it was time to say No to my work.

So we just shut everything down, and Hal took me out into the spring. The Wilmington Flower Market was underway, a three-day festival of plants and amusement park rides and crafts and happy toddlers and live music. It was a cool, sunny day, and we walked around, hand in hand, forgetting the future just as much as I’d been doing, but this time without the busyness of the endless To Do list. We bought flowers and vegetables that he later planted. We went for a walk in a nearby neighborhood. When I grew distracted by thoughts of this or that person reading certain scenes in the book, Hal reeled me back with his silly skits and facility for puns.

Saturday I left the desk entirely, and drove up to the Main Line in Pennsylvania. There I met with the warm and thorough folks at JEVS Human Services, a fine organization that provides services for people with disabilities (among others). They’ll be be hosting my first public event for the book, held at the Main Line Arts Center this Thursday, 5/12. We met at the Main Line Arts Center and walked through all the details for the event, and I realized that the venue couldn’t be more appropriate, given that the character of Beautiful Girl communicates through her artwork. What could be better than an event in the middle of an art gallery?

Then I had a hurried and late lunch with a bookseller friend, and after that I taught a class to one of my private students. It was a day of 100% regular old Rachel.

Still, all the while I was concerned about the work I wasn’t keeping up with. To my relief, I saw, when I got home, that the “work” consisted mostly of people who’d read the book, and were writing me about how deeply it had affected them.

After all this, you’d think I could sleep Saturday night. But no. I knew that the next morning, the New York Times would be running an ad (yes, yet another one) in their Book Review. This is the kind of attention writers dream about and I’ve never had, so I burst out of bed early and ran to the front door.

It didn’t matter that the ad was similar to the others. It was still there, big and eye-catching, taking up almost a third of page 5. (On this blog, it’s to the left of this paragraph; again, you can enlarge it by clicking on the image). And I did a little dance around the kitchen.

Then Dr. No said, Now, let’s turn everything off again, and take some time to enjoy the day. So that morning, we went out into the sunshine, ventured into the park near our house, and walked slowly and happily, pausing for pictures, listening to the birds, saying hi to neighbors, making jokes.

I am writing this blog Monday evening. Monday was much like the days that preceded it, though I was told at the end of the day that The Story of Beautiful Girl was already one of the top 100 books on bn.com (Barnes & Noble). (And yes, I did learn the sale ranking, which was, as of Monday afternoon, #90.) I was also told, soon after dusk fell, that Amazon was down to its final two copies.

And I will not lie. That is truly thrilling news.

But so was this: that the number of friends and strangers sending me messages – friends and strangers who had already read and fallen in love with my book, and wanted me to know they were telling everyone they knew about it – was increasing by the day.

I don’t know what the next several days might bring. I do know that I will embrace whatever it is, and whoever is a part of it. And I’m thankful that, whether or not the book gets within landing distance of the New York Times Bestseller List, I will still have a loving husband who will remind me of joys of Indian take-out. I will still have wonderful friends and supporters who will cry over my book in airports. And I will still, if I stay conscious about it, have my perspective: when you want to forget the future, just pick up some maracas, give a ninety-five-year-old a hug, and walk in the sun or dance around the kitchen or take a long nap in the rain.

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I hate to admit this, but I’m not a vacation person.

I understand the attractions of vacation: getting away from routines, obligations, and the familiar. Seeing new landscapes, visiting old friends, returning to beloved terrain. Spending private, leisurely time having serendipitous adventures with my wonderful husband Hal.

All of these things have a great appeal to me. But because, as a writer, I tend to thrive when I adhere to solitude, silence, a slow pace, and discipline, I feel I have to rediscover a social and spontaneous self when I jaunt about on a vacation. That’s not always difficult, and sometimes I quite welcome the shift. However, the backlog of emails and the build-up of obligations, along with a renewed delight in the world of real, rather than imagined, people and experiences, mean I need many more days than I care to admit to return to the quiet place in my mind where I do my work.

Also, for years now I’ve traveled a fair amount to do talks, so I’ve seen all the new landscapes, old friends, and even beloved terrain I might desire- and my hosts pay my way. But vacations cost money – sometimes a lot more money than I feel comfortable spending.

And, on top of all that, sometimes things go wrong. Then there you are, far from home, and paying for the privilege of getting the flu, suffering through car trouble, hiding out from bad weather, losing a favorite possession – or coping with the likes of something you never even dreamed you might deal with.

But the one compelling reason for me to set all these concerns aside is that Hal likes to get away now and then, and, as I mentioned, when we’re away together, we allow ourselves to wander around back streets, engage in lengthy conversations with gregarious strangers, poke around in quirky shops and museums, and open our minds, and hearts, to so much we don’t usually see.

This past summer, Hal proposed that we make a trip to Charlottesville, VA. He went to college at the University of Virginia, and since he took off five years in the middle of his undergraduate career, during which time he lived in town and managed the pre-eminent record store of that era, Back Alley Disks, he still has friends in the area, as well as the type of fondness we all have for the place that bestowed a bounty of pleasing memories in our youth. My affection for Charlottesville is more subdued, though I do find its historic buildings attractive and its rolling hills restorative. I also happen to have an emotional tie there: a close friend from seventh grade moved to Charlottesville after high school.

But nothing beats visiting a place where your spouse gushes loving memories every few feet, catches up with people who’ve been dear to him for decades, and feels a sense of peace simply by breathing the air.

So every few years we take a trip to Charlottesville, and this summer was one of those years.

In May, Hal asked me when I’d be free during the summer. I told him the few dates when I had speaking commitments but otherwise the calendar was open. He then narrowed it down by seeing what interfered least with his responsibilities at work. Finally we picked the dates of Aug. 12 to 17. Hal filled out the forms at work to get official approval. We booked the hotel. We emailed our friends and scheduled our visits.

And then something happened that I never could have dreamed of. Three weeks before we were to leave, the person who handles my speaking engagements called. We’d just received an invitation for me to come to Casper, Wyoming to speak to special education teachers. “When,” I asked. “August.” “What’s the date?” I said, getting nervous. “August 16th.”

Oh no! Could Hal’s work responsibilities allow for us to change the dates?

No.

Did the folks in Casper have the flexibility to change the date?

No.

Should we just give up on our vacation?

Definitely no.

So we decided to compress our tiny, long-awaited, five-day vacation into a mini, two-day vacation. We’d wedge in as much vacation pleasure as we could, and then I’d hop on a plane – or, really, three planes, starting in the little airport in Charlottesville and landing in the little airport in Casper – to do my talk. And although we wouldn’t be together for the second half of our truncated vacation, we would continue the same spirit of adventure and openness.

Yes, something had gone wrong. But like many people who’ve had things go wrong on vacations – and, at some point, doesn’t that include all of us? – we decided to have wonderful experiences anyway.

And so we did.

When I was a kid, I got tired of the one question clueless adults always seemed to ask little kids: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Perhaps I’d have felt differently if I’d been born into a world where women had the range of opportunities available now. But in the mid-1960s, when I was entering elementary school, and got pelted with this question entirely too often, the options for girls appeared to be: teacher, nurse, mommy, ballerina. I knew these were the right answers, yet I couldn’t bring myself to say them.

So one day, while my mother insisted that I lie beside her on the sofa while she napped, I came up with an answer that I could live with. I would become a writer.

This response didn’t only put that irritating question to rest, it also gave me a goal. Yes, I would be a writer. From then on, I just worked toward that goal, and nothing ever since has had nearly as much appeal to me.

At the time, though, I didn’t know that writers might have choices, too. Certainly I knew about newspapers, magazines, television, and commercials, though I’m sure I knew nothing about the distinctions between reporter, commentator, advice columnist, feature writer, script writer, copy writer, editor, and all the other possibilities that interest people with writerly inclinations.

The only kind of writing that even crossed my mind was book writing. Perhaps this was because we went to the library every few days, and, in fact, my mother was studying for a Masters in Library Science. Perhaps it was because, while there were newspapers and magazines strewn about the house, they were far outnumbered by books. Or perhaps it was because something in me just knew that the long form matched something in my spirit.

Once the idea took hold, it never left.

As I grew into my teens, I did try poetry and plays, but I always returned to book writing. I wrote several novels, or, to be more accurate, novellas. Even short stories seemed more appealing when I pulled several together to make a collection. I simply preferred to settle into my ideas and stay with them for months at a time.

I’m not sure why. I just enjoyed the slow, steady pace of long works.

The years passed. I became an adult and I published several books. I also tried my hand at shorter forms, and for a while I wrote commentary for The Philadelphia Inquirer. I enjoyed the quick bursts of ideas and energy that those pieces required, and they did keep me going between books, but I couldn’t wait to get back. It was like the difference between speed dating and marriage. The novelty and rapidity of the former brought sparkle to the few hours I needed for each piece. But the contemplative comforts of the latter brought new depths to my soul.

Then came the blog.

It was a new kind of short form. It didn’t have to be commentary – or reporting, or advice, or anything in particular. The only requirement was brevity. Which is a tricky proposition for someone who favors length.

I resisted starting a blog for a long time. In fact, it was so long that by the time friends, acquaintances, and publishers had convinced me to start one, the form had almost been left in the dust by an even shorter form, Twitter. Oddly, I took to the miniature quality of Tweets more easily than the comparatively gargantuan blogs. But I needed to have a blog, people said. And, despite feeling constrained, I found that if I wrote them as if they were personal essays, I loved producing them – even if some ended up being longer than people expect for a blog.

“I really liked your last blog,” came a typical email from a relative who will go unnamed, but whose birthdays I’ve acknowledged every year I’ve been alive. “But I read it when I’m at work, and I just can’t put in that kind of time. Can’t you write shorter?”

“I’ll try,” I wrote back. And I did. But the next entry would be even longer.

“I’m just doomed to be a book writer,” I’d bemoan to my husband Hal.

“So what?”

“But there are so many people – like my [intentionally left blank] who want me to write more succinctly than I seem able to do.”

“Do it the way you want.”

“And also, to do them justice, they’re taking me hours. Well, actually days.”

“I know. I see it happening.”

“And I don’t know that I can keep taking that time.”

“So take a break,” he said. “Don’t keep up with your blog. Think of it as a writer’s vacation.”

Coincidentally, this conversation occurred right at the start of this summer. I’d just begun to sink into a new long writing project, and didn’t want to interrupt it to answer emails, much less craft a meaningful blog.

Before I knew it, a month had passed.

Two months.

I did a lot of travel. Hal and I had some unexpected adventures.

Three months.

Finally I decided that for the time being, I would shift my blog from being modeled on the personal essay to being more like a photo essay. So this entry is both a confession of my struggle to adhere to the requirements of this form – and an introduction to the next several posts, which will will take you through my summer in the form of brief photo narratives.

So Unnamed Relative and the many friends who’ve asked why I haven’t posted anything, you can consider this switch being for you.

But it is also for the little girl I was back that day when my mother was asleep and I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. At the time, that little girl read lots of books. They all had words – but they also all had pictures.

And here were some of my favorites.

I worry that I’ll get lost, but she is at my side, guiding me, saying, “Around this corner, down this hall.” I put my trust in her, and we walk forward.

I am a hospice volunteer. Usually that means I visit terminally ill patients in their homes, which might be actual houses, though they might be Alzheimer’s facilities. When I see my patients, I ask what they would like me to do. Sometimes I sit quietly across the room while they sleep. Sometimes I engage them in conversation. Maybe we sit on their patio, window-shopping past their memories.

My role is to serve them. My goal is to love.

People ask why I do it. When they too volunteer in some capacity, I can skip the part of the answer that involves words like “giving”, “setting myself aside”, and “doing unto others”, and move directly to the chain of losses that nudged me toward this specific form of giving. But when the idea of volunteering is foreign to them, either because they have too many other commitments or find the very notion baffling (as one person said to me, “Why would I do anything for a stranger—for free?”), I get stuck in what is only a prefix to the real answer.

I suppose if I had to boil it down, I’d answer this: “Because everyone deserves to die with a caring person beside them.”

“Now,” my own guide says, pausing at the elevator, “up to the sixth floor.”

The hospice movement began in the 1960s, when a British medical social worker, Dame Cicely Saunders, started giving lectures about how she was inspired by a dying patient to think about options besides medical settings where patients could go to die. Then Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross published her famous “On Death And Dying,” which brought the process of dying out of the shadows. Soon a philosophy formed that said dying patients have the right to palliative, emotional, and spiritual care, and to focus on quality of life over cure.

Most people think of hospice as being in its own building, and in some cases that’s still true, though a substantial portion of patients are served in their homes. The agency for whom I volunteer, Compassionate Care Hospice, in northern Delaware, didn’t even have a separate building for many years. But recently, St. Francis, a local hospital here in Wilmington, DE, found itself with an unoccupied floor, and an arrangement was made. And so today, led by Anne, the staff person who trained me in giving, I am visiting this in-patient unit for the first time.

The elevator doors open.

To my surprise, Anne and I step out into a space with carpets and plants, upholstered furniture and sunlight. The effect is more homey hotel than austere hospital, a place not of cure but of kindness. My confusion about our way here begins to recede, a process hastened by my meeting the receptionist, with her gentle smile.

The nurses, too, sense my disorientation. They say hello, and their looks are rich with acceptance. I can be lost, I think, as I shake their hands and learn their names, but they’ll be here with me, letting me feel whatever might feel, being understanding if I should need a helping hand.

Anne takes me through my tour.

The facility has fourteen beds, each in its own room, each decorated with patchwork quilts, living room-style chairs that open into beds for family sleepovers, old-fashioned blinds, earth tones. There is a family room where relatives can watch television, sit quietly, or talk to each other, while their parent, spouse, sibling, or child sleeps. One side of the family room has been specially set up for children, with a small table, chairs, and coloring books.

The families also have access to a full kitchen – complete with cookies and other treats brought in by the staff.

There is even what Anne calls a quiet room, which looks like a nondenominational chapel (hospice is for people of any faith, including no faith at all). “Families can come in here,” she says, “when they need to be alone, or to pray, or to cry.”

But I do not see tears today.

There is only one patient in the unit, and I see him only fleetingly, when his door happens to be open and we walk by. A gray-haired woman is with him—his wife, maybe—and she smiles at us, and waves.

And as we continue on, and I walk past the empty rooms which, someday soon, will be occupied by the kind of people who led me, as Anne is leading me now, to hospice, I remember so much more than tears.

There, flashing quickly before me in an empty room, is Angelo, the father of my best friend from fifth grade. A bank teller, jazz drummer, and man of wit and folk wisdom, he had opinions on just about everything—and an open mind if challenged. I think of him before the cancer, at his kitchen table, he in his late sixties, I in my thirties. He is holding up a carton of milk, pontificating about the appalling way most people open the spouts by pushing their fingers inside the folds of the lid. Then I remember his daughter, still my good friend, on the day of the funeral. She is saying to me, “Those people in hospice were amazing.” That is the first time I hear about hospice, and immediately I want to know more.

There, in the next room, I see my best memory of Kenny. A friend who was the bookkeeper at my food cooperative, he told me, soon after we first met, that he could eat whatever he wanted, because he was HIV-positive, and someday he’d be getting too thin. I was in my mid-twenties, he in his mid-thirties, and the closer I got to him, the more I worried. When I learned, a few years later, that he’d come down with pneumonia, I worried harder. When I learned, a few months later, that he’d caught it again, I knew. He left the food cooperative and settled into bed at home. I said, “I’ll come to see you every week,” and for the better part of the next two years, as his partner John tended to him, I did. I hadn’t yet heard about hospice, but, as I later learned, I was practicing it. When I came, John was able to take a break, and Kenny was able to have company. I sat on his bed, listening to his stories about his life, his sadness over the life he wouldn’t have, his happiness about all the love he’d come to know. We never cried. We laughed, especially when he sang along to his favorite Bette Midler video. He had a big booming laugh, and that is what I envision now: his head back, his mouth open, our hearts open wide to the world.

I see others in my memory as we proceed down the halls. The ones killed by accidents, brain hemorrhages, undiagnosed heart conditions, who went too fast to know they were going. What their families would have given for the pause before it was over, for the opportunity to hug, or listen, or assure them someone was there. For what each of their losses taught me was the luxury of hospice.

And then I imagine the patient I have been visiting for the last several months. We also do not cry. With her Alzheimer’s, I’m not even sure she knows she’s going. Sometimes she’s distressed because she’s convinced her mother—dead for decades—is expecting her, but she can’t find the door out. Sometimes she thinks the floor is a cliff and she’s going to fall off. I touch her hands and speak to her. I ask her to tell me about her mother. I suggest we look up from the floor to watch a video of Lawrence Welk. And on warm days, I offer to wheel her outside. She loves the sun, and we sit on the patio, getting warm. I ask her if she wants to sing, and she always does. That is what I see now: us sitting on the patio, singing “America The Beautiful” or “When You Wish Upon A Star.” Singing is good for the memory, I’m told. But as I know from Kenny, it’s just as good for the soul.

“Why do you do it?” people ask.

I think about this question again, as Anne and I say goodbye to the nurses.

She leads me back down the labyrinth of hospital corridors, away from this place of loss and love, where I will spend so much time in the months to come, and where many lives will change, including, in ways I cannot predict but know I will cherish, my own. And as we reach the ground floor, and step out into the light of everyday life, I realize I have a better answer than any of the ones I’ve been giving.

I do it because everyone deserves to be heard.

I do it because everyone deserves to pontificate about milk, or sing along to Bette, or sit in the sun on the patio.

And I do it because everyone deserves to reach out for another hand. Even though nobody knows exactly what lies ahead, with hands intertwined we will walk there together, side by side, for as long and as far as we can.

We’re in a time when the bad news just won’t stop gushing. So what can we do to resist hopelessness, despair, and grouchiness about the state of the world?

Celebrate babies!

That was the idea dreamed up by two of my neighbors, Lyn Doto and Bill Montgomery, when they realized that our already fabulous neighborhood – Midtown Brandywine, in Wilmington, Delaware – was in the midst of a baby boom. I don’t know why I hadn’t realized it until their invitation slid through our mail slot, but it’s true; the last few months have brought us almost a dozen babies and pregnancies. So last weekend, Lyn and Bill threw a party to welcome all these giggling, squirming, thumb-sucking, wide-eyed, and sleeping new individuals to our community. The main guest of honor was a six-week-old, Ethan (along with daddy Bob and mommy Amie), but as we all poured into Lyn and Bill’s house, we delighted in everyone there.

And almost everyone in our neighborhood was there! How incredible is that, given that the party was at ten a.m. on a Sunday?

But I live in an extraordinary neighborhood. People hang out on porches, have long conversations on the street, help each other shovel snow in the winter, watch movies projected onto walls in the summer, and throw parties all year round. Most of the houses are over a hundred years old, most of the trees are leafy and tall, most of the sidewalks are brick. Many of the residents are involved in the arts; our neighbors paint, work in theatre, do photography, make animation, write lively blogs, produce television shows, work on films – you name it. We also have community leaders, with some involved in their churches, others in city government. Others are marathon runners, long-distance bicyclists, lawyers, engineers, postal workers – and, of course, front porch pontificators.

It’s such a great neighborhood, it was recently the subject of a feature article in Delaware’s premiere newspaper, The News Journal. It’s also why, when I got married and was unenthusiastic about the house my husband had bought in this neighborhood, we decided to fix it up and stay. In fact, the friendliness of our neighborhood led me to write my most recent book, The House On Teacher’s Lane, which is about how we repaired and rejuvenated our house – and our relationship – so we could stay right here.

As I wrote in that book when speaking about my neighbors: “We know all their names. We have spoken with them in shorts and bad hair, in down coats and good spirits, with groceries in our hands and worries on their minds, in front of the mural a resident artist painted on his wall and beside the toy truck the little boy plays with across the street. Newcomers or old-timers, black or white, gay or straight, corporate or Bohemian, they are talkative and open….We live…right in the middle of the very characteristic that everyone seeks but that’s never a parameter on real estate Websites: an actual community.”

I know, in our world of bad news – and people living isolated lives, wondering how to connect face-to-face with even one person whose company they enjoy – this is hard to believe.

But it’s true.

So please join us at our party. And I hope that, by the end of this photo montage of the event, you’ll come to believe in community again – and feel buoyed by the power of babies.

I cut my engine in the church parking lot and looked around. Most of the spaces were taken, and I was glad. It was the one heartening detail I could imagine on this otherwise disheartening day.

I am not a very experienced funeral attendee. In fact, I’ve gone to fewer than a dozen funerals in my fifty years. But my impression has always been that, of the many ways we can count the measure of a life, one of the most obvious is the fullness of the church when the world is bidding us goodbye.

There are certainly exceptions, like when my step-grandfather died, and everyone he’d loved, aside from his family, had already passed away. But the woman whose funeral I’m here for was only forty-one, in the prime of her life, and until the cancer grew too debilitating, she had worked at a bank, supported a dance organization, enjoyed the company of family, spent time with her friends. I’d wondered if she’d meant as much to them as my colleagues, family, and friends meant to me, and I could see, as I got out of the car, that they had.

This was welcome news, because I had not known her. I was here because of my friendship with her father. He was an artist, and since I’d met him seven years ago, he’d been struggling to cope with the death of the youngest of his five children. Today he’d be burying the oldest.

I held up the obituary I’d printed from the newspaper. The picture at the top was the first I’d seen of her, and since she wasn’t smiling when it was taken, and the text included only a succinct resume of her life, I hadn’t gotten a sense of her personality. I am a reader of obituaries, so I know they often convey such praiseworthy traits as religious devotion, strong work ethic, or affection for golfing, but rarely does the sum of the self become apparent, and this time was no exception.

So it was meaningful to see that the lot was full. Every person I saw walking toward the church doors was another clue to the daughter I would never meet. There were the women with the lithe bodies of dancers, the woman in medical scrubs, the young couples. If only I could speak to each of them, I could come to know her better.

But I knew I would not disturb their private grieving. Everyone was young, their lives lying ahead. I remembered how I felt myself, when a college friend died when we were twenty. Just about every funeral is hard, but the funerals of the young are harder.

Especially for the parents. And especially for already-grieving parents.

When my friend called to tell me that his daughter was gone, his voice seemed dizzy with suffering. He’d lost the youngest child, a son, suddenly, in an act of violence by a stranger. I met my friend a few years later, when he read a book I wrote about my sister and, seeing in it a long struggle giving way to hope, asked if he could paint her portrait. In the months that followed, he worked from photographs, sent me sketches of his ideas, and finally invited me to meet him at an art opening. When I got there, he showed me a portrait of a handsome young man—his son, he told me—and then he explained the terrible circumstances of the boy’s death. Ever since, I stayed in touch, visiting my friend in his studio, meeting for coffee, writing letters. I met two of his remaining sons, though not his only daughter. There seemed to be no hurry. Lightning can’t strike twice, right?

Many people mill about the lobby of the church. I spot one of the sons I’ve met, and go over to him. Like his brothers, who I will see over the next hour, he is composed, soft-spoken, gently in charge, and acting in unison with his brothers. He greets me, then guides me through a series of framed photographs that are propped up on a table, introducing me to his family. Most faces are from long ago, with all five children smiling. I recognize the young faces of the two sons I know. My heart thumps at the faces of the two children who are gone.

Lightning, of course, can strike many times. My friend was himself diagnosed with cancer shortly before his daughter. They underwent treatment at the same time, the three sons taking time off from their jobs to shuttle father and sister to the doctors. The father recovered. The daughter did not.

When I learned that she had died, I called my husband. The funeral was a few hours away; I’d lose a day or two of work if I went. “Should I go?” I asked him. He said, “You know the pro’s. What are the con’s?” “There aren’t any con’s,” I said, and there was my answer.

You can shake your fists at the sky and ask how such things can happen. But as I lifted my eyes from the photos, I saw another son, with his wife. They were speaking to other guests, and the wife was very pregnant. “When’s the baby due?” the guests asked. “Today,” the wife answered.

I made my way to the chapel where the viewing was being held. My friend was there, and his face brightened when he saw me. We hugged and talked about his daughter and his health, as I’d expected. But he also told me he hadn’t been able to paint for weeks. He was afraid his pain was so great, he’d never be able to reach inside himself to find art again.

I didn’t tell him, “Of course you will.” I didn’t know that. I’m an artist, too, so I’m well aware of the elusiveness of creativity. I just held his hand and listened.

I sat alone through the service, wondering if he was finding comfort in the hymns and prayers, in the thoughts of everlasting life. I hoped he was, and tried to remember what he’d once told me he felt about religion. We’d discussed it over coffee—I could even remember the booth we were sitting in — but no matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to call up what he’d said about God, about faith, about what became of the soul after the last breath. He’d shared all that, yes, but at the time there seemed to be no hurry to commit his thoughts to memory.

So instead I looked around the church, and was struck, as I’d been in the parking lot, by how many people had come. And again, I thought about the measure of a life. If it can be counted by any number, then that might well be the number of people who care enough to see us off. But it might also be the number of dances danced, or times we laughed with friends. From what I could see, by any of these measures, this young woman had lived a rich life.

Maybe my friend would see this, and it would give him some comfort on this hardest of days.

Yet as the service drew to a close, and the pall bearers surrounded the casket to bear it down the aisle, I knew that comfort in this moment would do little to ease my friend’s suffering. I knew too that the number of people who were in this church meant less to him than the number of days his children had lived on this earth. I wished I could reverse everything that had happened, and give him the hundreds—the thousands—of days that hadn’t been given to them.

When the guests filed outside, and I saw him standing on the curb near the hearse, looking bewildered and fragile, I came up to him. The sun was beaming down onto us, and I gave him a huge hug. Behind him, I could see his three sons, who would, I knew, go through the rest of their lives with a bond that no one would break. Along with them was the pregnant wife, who would soon—maybe even later that same day—give birth to my friend’s first grandchild.

I closed my eyes, and as we tightened our hug, I thought about how, when the skies darken and the worries uproot everything in sight and lightning shoots down from the sky, none of us has the power to stand in the way of the bolt, catch it in our hands, and hurl it away. All we can do is stay together through the storm, holding each other’s hands, and hoping the sun will return.

How do we measure a life? I wondered this as my friend and I let go in the bright light of the April morning. Is it the number of people whose lives we’ve touched? I’d thought that, when I pulled into the lot. But now, as I looked into my friend’s face, I thought, The measure of a life cannot be counted with any numbers. We measure a life by the depth, the strength, the endurance of the love we give to others. It doesn’t have to be a whole lot of others, either. It can be the love we give to just one other, at a time when he really needs someone there.

I walked back out to the parking lot, looking at the other guests getting into their cars. Her life was short. But maybe she touched just one of these people at just the right moment. Even if her days were far too few, maybe her love was complete.

When my three siblings and I were kids, living with our mother, there were only a few activities we did outside the house as a family. We saw movies (usually at drive-ins), got ice-cream (usually at a local family restaurant), and went bowling.

We were champion commentators throughout a movie. Hence, the merits of drive-ins. (Being able to take the dog was a plus, too.)

We were champion devourers of ice-cream, as long as we each got our favorite flavors, which ranged from chocolate to coffee to black raspberry. Hence, that one local family restaurant.

But when it came to bowling, we were clods. The balls were heavy. We dropped them. They careened into the foul lanes. Occasionally we did hit pins, though only when guided by the hand of luck. Skill sat off on the sidelines.

I remember scores of 27. Once, one of us bowled a 1.

Not surprisingly, when we grew up, although we continued seeing movies (in theaters) and eating ice-cream (or less calorie-loaded cousins like sherbet), we left bowling behind. We were oafs. We were so inept that bowling was sheer comedy, an opportunity to laugh at ourselves as a family.

Many years after I had last fit my fingers into a bowling ball, I read the groundbreaking, data-packed book Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam. You’ve probably heard of it, or its premise: American were once avidly involved in social groups, from organized gatherings like Rotary and bowling leagues to informal visits with friends. But increasingly we don’t join groups and don’t see friends. In other words, we figuratively, and sometimes literally, bowl alone.

Putnam provides many reasons for this decline, most of which we could name: more solitary attractions like TV and computers, changes in family structure and work commitments that ask more of our time, a suburban environment where large lawns separate neighbors and cars are required to reach nearby stores.

Bowling Alone made me think about why I don’t belong to any organized groups. Pretty much all the reasons Putnam gave applied to me at that time. In addition to living in car-oriented suburbs, I was single, childless, lived alone, and had multiple part-time jobs. I supported organizations with donations, but lacked the time—and maybe the necessary level of passion—to give them my presence. I did better with friends, but wondered if I’d ever become someone who joined.

I felt guilty. Here I was, a voting, law-abiding citizen who always returned library books on time, held doors for strangers, and was consciously trying to be the good I wanted to see in the world. Yet for the most part, I was a lone bowler. Actually, I wasn’t a bowler. The thought of bowling gave me such feelings of incompetence that joining a league was out of the question.

The same, in its own way, applied to most other organized gatherings I could think of. I’d try to envision myself as an attendee and I’d imagine myself feeling socially clumsy. I was part of the problem, and I’d just have to accept that.

Then in 2001, I got married. My husband lived in an old, artsy, urban neighborhood in Wilmington, Delaware. It had narrow streets, generous porches, and a mix of ethnicities, ages, and sexual orientations, and pretty much everyone agreed that we were an actual community. Dog walkers, porch sitters, backyard gardeners would pause to chat, trading the news of their lives, commenting on the news of the day. Neighbors would help neighbors shovel snow and rake leaves. We would attend each other’s art openings, admire each other’s porch gardens. And the parties! Block parties, progressive dinners, backyard celebrations of seasons. I learned what it was like to belong.

And I realized that part of why I had, figuratively speaking, bowled alone was I hadn’t naturally found myself in a group that suited me. In this neighborhood, I could chat at the curb or drift into my house, attend parties or stay at home, make dear friends or keep it to acquaintances. I could do as much or as little as I wanted, the way I wanted. And so could everyone else. If our balls went into the gutter, no one cared.

It was luck, again, that guided my hand. Or may be it was something a little wiser than luck, because it gave me what I needed, and what would make me be the good I wanted in the world, without my even needing to try.

If you’d like to read about how this sense of community changed the course of my life, go to my most recent memoir. In hardback, it’s titled Building A Home With My Husband, and in the paperback, which comes out in May 2010, it’s titled The House On Teacher’s Lane. (Yes, it’s the same book, but with a different title and cover.)

You can also see my neighborhood in these two videos, both made by our neighborhood videographer, Tom Davis, whose professional name is TCDavis. The first one is from our block party this fall, and the second from the blizzard this winter. Both videos are about four minutes long, and give a good feel for the architecture, friendliness, and diversity of our community.