Dog Stories: Good and Evil

Perhaps it is appropriate to discuss this right after Kate George's post about the deaths of animals in fiction--but the stories I'm discussing are true, and one of them will infuriate you.

Last night I finally watched MARLEY AND ME.  I had avoided this movie for a long time because I didn't want to watch the ending, which I knew simply from the movie buzz was going to be sad.  My husband and I enjoyed the movie, though, and the irresistible cuteness of all of the Labradors who played Marley over the years.  By the end, even my fairly stoic husband was in tears, to the point that he had to remove his glasses and sop up the moisture with several tissues.  Why?  Because all people love dogs, right?  And this movie (along with the book by John Grogan, detailing the life he shared with his real dog, Marley) highlights the bonds people form with their animals.

While we watched, our gaze occasionally strayed to our Beagle, who slept in his basket next to the television.  He occasionally let out a huge sigh, sometimes sliding his snout over the side of his bed until he resembled a crocodile.  Aside from some aging front legs that cause him to limp now and then, he's a pretty happy pup.  It was a very dog-friendly evening.

I woke today to see the headline that 30 dogs have gone missing since November in the region of Twin Falls, Idaho, and five dogs have been found brutally murdered in the same area.  I fear for the missing dogs, and worry over what may have befallen them.  I wondered at the sort of person that could perpetuate this sort of sadism.  If the person (or people) are caught, I wondered, would they face felony charges for such venal crimes--perhaps a multitude of them?

Probably not. I was distressed to learn that Idaho makes animal killing a felony only if someone has two prior  offenses.  So even the murder of many dogs--what seems to be a cruel and ritualistic murder perpetrated by at least one twisted mind--would not necessarily send the killer to jail.  Might the killer be aware of this?  Or does someone who commits acts like these really not contemplate potential consequences at all?

I hope that Twin Falls is using significant resources to find and prosecute this murderer, and that they will look at this case as justification for more extreme laws against animal cruelty.

Why is it so important for us to know these dog stories, good and bad? Dogs are fun to read about in fiction, but it's even more pleasant, perhaps, to read about real dogs who have good lives. So, rather than leave you with the sad story above, I'll reference a third non-fiction account of dogs, written by one of the best animal tale writers of all time: James Herriott.

In his compilation of stories called Dog Stories, Herriott reflected on dogs he knew over a lifetime in private practice. Herriott understood, as a Dalesman and a veterinarian, that if animals are put here for our pleasure, then we have the obligation to be loving and compassionate caretakers.

If only everyone could embrace that philosophy.

If you wrote a book about a dog, who would be the star of your story?

Breaking the Taboo

by Kate George

 There is somewhat of an unwritten law in writing about kids and animals. It goes something like "No Harm Shall Come to Children or Pets."

I’ve heard a number of variations of that rule through the years, and I pretty much stuck to it. That is, until I went to a writing seminar with writer/agent Donald Maass. 

Donald spent some time researching best-selling novels and discovered that one of the things they had in common was a high level of emotion. I learned a lot from Donald Maass but the most surprising thing was that bestsellers didn’t necessarily follow the rule about kids and animals.

Forgive me for messing up this quote, Don, but here’s what I heard: “Don’t just kill the kitten, make the kitten save the child’s life and then have it die.” In other words, elevate the pet to the level of a hero and then when the reader is as attached as she can be, kill the sucker flat. 

Yikes. “Really?” I asked. “Even in books with a lot of humor?”

Yes, even when books are meant to be funny.

I wasn’t sure I subscribed to that theory. The “no harm” rule had been hammered into me pretty firmly. I’m not really brave enough to break big taboos. And yet I did.

I got to the point in Crazy Little Thing Called Dead where something drastic had to happen. Something that would push my protagonist into acting against her own nature. She had to be reduced to a flaming ball of murderous rage. Actually Bree was more like a frozen ball of icy rage, but you get the drift. Something had to happen that was horrific. I suppose I could have had the antagonist kill one of her brothers, or her parents. But Bree’s family is not on the page much. Her fur-babies, however, are on the page quite often. They are her children, her companions, her joy in life. Her cat and three of her dogs die in a fire. Her beagle attempts to save her tabby before she dies.
 
Good lord, it’s awful. How could I have written that?

I knew there would be some fallout. Readers were bound to be upset. But I trusted Donald Maass when he said that the emotion would improve my books. I was not prepared for the level of hatred in the letters I received. I was called a murderer. I was told I should be blackballed. No one should let me comment on their blog. One woman who was particularly distraught told me that I am God in my stories and I could have saved the animals. They didn’t have to die. But that’s not how it seems to me. Stories unfold. They come to me. I don’t create them, at least not in a conscious way. I avoided the fire as long as I could, but it needed to be there.

Did you see Romancing the Stone? Do you remember how Laura Wilder cries while she’s writing her books, tissues everywhere? That was me. It didn’t help that we had recently lost a dog to cancer. I was a weeping mess.

The negative un-fan mail has been fairly intense; however, I am also getting a lot more positive comments. More readers telling me they like my books. Asking when the next Bree MacGowan mystery is coming out. I’m getting more “yes” mail than I’m getting “hell no” mail.

So what have I learned? Well, for one, Donald Maass was right when he said readers would become more invested. The readers that don’t like my books really don’t like them. Some would like to see me incarcerated for crimes committed. I haven’t pointed out to them that incarceration would give me more time to write. That might be insensitive. And frankly, I don’t want to give anyone any further reason to come looking for me. It’s scary how much some people hate me.

On the other hand the opposite is also true. It’s wonderful how much some fans like me. I get messages everyday telling me how much they like Bree.

Have my sales increased? Yes, but that may have happened anyway. The more you write, the more you sell. It’s kind of a rule. So the jury is out on the numbers.

Would I do it again? Kill pets? I don’t know. I do know I will push my characters out of their comfort zone. I will create situations that push them into doing things they wouldn’t normally do. Because that’s the stuff that compelling stories are made of. I’m not making any promises. I will write what I need to write for the stories. Whatever I write, not everyone will be happy, and that’s okay. My readers will be happy, and they’re the only people I have to please.

Do I recommend breaking the “no harm” rule? I can’t tell you what to write, but I can advise you to grow some pretty thick skin before you try it.

Kate George is the author of the popular Bree MacGowan mystery series. She lives in an old farmhouse in the backwoods of Vermont with her husband, four kids, and three rescue dogs. Visit her at www.kategeorge.com, or contact her at kate@kategeorge.com.

Watching the Birds

by Sheila Connolly

When we lived in Pennsylvania, for a time we had a resident mockingbird.  I don't know that I ever saw it (or would recognize it if I did), but one year it decided to serenade us regularly at midnight, just as we were trying to fall asleep.  Like clockwork, it would start its repertory and run through a series of different calls, clearly and precisely, repeating each one twice—no more, no less.  I think I actually counted them, and went though about eighteen before he started over.

I was reminded of this when earlier this week I was awakened before six a.m. by some other brave "early bird" (sorry, I couldn't resist).  No, it wasn't a mockingbird.  I have no idea what it was.  I apologize for my great ignorance to all dedicated birders out there who are reading this.  Anyway, as I listened to this morning mystery bird, I found myself thinking, how would I describe that on paper?

Which of course led me to think of David Allen Sibley's Field Guide to Birds of Eastern North America. I have a copy that I keep on my kitchen table, next to the window from which I can see my two birdfeeders.  I live close to the center of a small town, and my lot is small (and there are a number of neighborhood cats that roam freely), so the birds that appear are few in variety.  There's an extended family of cardinals that live nearby and visit regularly for the sunflower seeds I put out.  There are the ubiquitous sparrows.  In the spring I see the occasional cedar waxwing.  This week I waved to a passing goldfinch, but they're rare here.  In short, nothing particularly extraordinary visits, but I do enjoy watching whatever appears.

But to get back to the point, I love reading Sibley's book because he makes a valiant attempt to transliterate (is that the word I want?) the calls of each and every bird.  And the results crack me up.

Who knew that the golden eagle makes high yelping calls, while the bald eagle (we do have a nesting pair not far from here, the location of their nest carefully not made public) makes weak, flat chirping whistles?  The Great Horned Owl (which I did hear occasionally back in Pennsylvania, although I never saw one) makes "a deep muffled hooting in rhythmic series ho hoo hoo hoododo hooooo hoo." The courting female is said to respond with a "nasal barking guwaay." (Did Sibley notice that looks a lot like "go away"?)

Open the book to any random page and you find all sorts of entertaining descriptions.  Take, for example, the Dickcissel (I don't know that I've ever met one, although Sibley tells me they like to hang out with House Sparrows, and I have plenty of them).  Here's how a Dickcissel sounds, per Sibley:  "song a series of short notes skee-dlees chis chis chis with dry, insect-like quality.  Call a dry husky chek. Flight call a distinctive, low, electric buzz fpppt."

You have to admire the man, who must have spent untold hours just listening, and then trying to capture the sounds in writing, making each one distinct.  There's a lesson somewhere in here for writers.  If you're describing your protagonist sitting outside on a nice summer morning with a cup of coffee, do you write "she could hear birds chirping," or do you say something like, "she could pick out the hard sharp tik tik of the cardinals gathered at her bird feeder"? It makes a difference.

Aunt Hilda Turns 101

Elizabeth Zelvin

My Aunt Hilda, my mother’s youngest sister, turns 101 today. Born in New York the day before the Titanic sank, she worked in publishing, fought for social justice, had a happy marriage, raised two sons, earned a master’s degree that led to a new career in vocational counseling, lost her husband, took up tennis, moved to Seattle to a retirement community, and still has plenty of mental acuity. I’m glad she was willing to answer my questions on the phone, even though, as she pointed out, she hadn’t yet had her morning coffee.

What was it like being the child of immigrant parents in New York a hundred years ago?
I don’t think it was anything that pulled me down. I didn’t think of it that way. I was a happy child. We were poor, but I never thought about it. I was always very good at school, and I had a lot of friends. The only bad thing I experienced was anti-Semitism. It was always there.

What bad experiences did you have?
When I graduated from elementary school, I had been at the top of my class the whole way. I was supposed to get the scholarship medal. But we had a new principal who had a reputation for being anti-Semitic, and I didn’t get the medal. When they announced it, they said, “The medal goes to—” There was a hesitation, and the whole audience said my name. But I didn’t get it. That’s stayed with me my whole life.

When did your concern with social justice start?
That didn’t begin till I was a teenager. My father died when I was twelve, my mother was always away giving piano lessons, and I had a hard time separating from my older sister (Note: Liz’s mother), who took on all the responsibility for the family. She was very aware of being Jewish and believed that you didn’t stick your neck out. It was just plain luck that I met friends with different values who helped me break away.

What are you most proud of having done in your life?
My stellar years were the period of being a community organizer, an activist. We worked for Social Security and Medicare. I was full of all kinds of ideals. I thought you could change the world. I thought that’s what my grandchildren would remember me for.

What do you think of the world now?
It’s not the kind of world I thought we would have. It’s a lousy world today. It’s a capitalist world, so what can you expect?

If you could change one thing about the world, what would you change?
More equality. Less poverty. I’m disappointed in how the world has become.

Is there anything you regret doing or not doing?
I know I have several regrets, but I can’t think of what they are.

What is your life like today?
My life is good. I have a good support system. My residence has an unusual bunch of people. Many of them were academics who have achieved a lot. Even the food is good: we have a wonderful chef. Nobody ever says, “You look like hell.” The man in my life is a wonderful friend. I’m crazy about him. We’re lucky to have found each other. And my son, who lives close by and picked this place for me, is not just a wonderful son, he’s also a great friend.

Do you still play tennis?
We play outdoors, so I haven’t played since September. I have a very strong right arm. I can still hit! I fell into tennis when my husband died and my job ended at age 70. I was looking for something to do where I wouldn’t have to think, but I really came to love it. Nowadays I’m afraid of falling, so I’ve probably said goodbye to it. It ain’t easy, getting older!

You said a couple of years ago that resilience is the quality people need the most as they get older. What other qualities do you value in yourself?
My sense of humor keeps me going. I’ve been lucky!

The Smoking... E-book?

by Sandra Parshall

If traditional publishing dies, a lot of crime fiction readers will be standing over its lifeless form with smoking e-books in hand. Digital novels made up half of all mystery/detective sales in the final quarter of 2012, beating back print formats to take the lead in the genre for the first time.

According to Bowker Market Research (as reported in Publishers Weekly), e-book sales for the entire year averaged out to 35% of mystery units sold, with a big increase in the fourth quarter. In the same quarter of 2011, e-books accounted for only 38% of the genre’s sales.

As digital sales rose, the numbers for most print formats declined. In the last quarter of 2011, hardcovers made up 27% of the mystery market; in the same period of 2012, hardcovers declined to 19%. Trade paperbacks dropped from 15% to 13%.

The only print format holding its own in the mystery market was mass market paperback, remaining steady at 16% from 2011 to 2012 -- although the category across all genres has suffered a drastic decline since e-books began their relentless climb to dominance. Publishers Weekly points out that the second highest print sales for a mystery/detective novel reported to BookScan in 2012 were for a mass market paperback: Lee’s Child’s The Affair. Four other mass market paperbacks, all by major authors in the genre, also made the top 10 list for the year. Two trade paperbacks came in eighth and ninth, and only two hardcovers made the list: Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich at number one and 11th Hour by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro at number four.

Other aspects of the Bowker study of mystery sales show that the profile of the most avid book-buyers remains the same: women account for 75% of sales, and 65% of all buyers are over the age of 55. Only 12% of buyers are between 30 and 44, and 16% are between 45 and 54. Readers with incomes between $50,000 and $74,999 bought 26% of the books. People at the top of the income scale, making more than $150,000 a year, bought the fewest books, accounting for only 9% of sales. (Too busy making money to find time for reading?)

Another interesting new survey, done by the Book Industry Study Group, shows that multi-function tablets have surpassed dedicated e-readers like the Kindle in popularity among e-book buyers. So it’s not surprising that Amazon’s share of the e-book market is decreasing.

A couple (or three) questions for readers: 
What percentage of the books you buy is digital? 
Are you buying and reading more since acquiring an e-book reader? 
Do you have a dedicated e-reader or a multi-function tablet? Or both?

 

What sustains writers?

Sharon Wildwind

I’m half-way through writing my next book. In many ways, this is the equivalent of trekking Mt Kilimanjaro in bunny slippers while holding tightly to my teddy bear. The bunny slippers because I feel woefully under equipped for this expedition. I always feel woefully unequipped to write a book. Most writers do. The teddy bear because being a writer is a scary place and I need soft and cuddly reassurances that this book, too, will eventually end successfully.

Part of the challenge is the sheer physicality of the task.  Over the years I’ve learned a lot about  how quickly I can write a book.

I usually aim for a final draft of about 90,000 words.

First draft will be 3 x 90,000 = 270,000 words. For every word I keep, I’ll write two more words that I either discard or which were never intended to appear in the text. This includes research, character sketches, plotting notes, and the like.

Second draft will be 1/10 x 90,000 = 9,000 words. For every word I’ve kept in the first draft, one out of ten will need to be replaced, deleted, rearranged, spelled correctly, etc. Fortunately, these words often come in bunches. When I decide that Chapter 14 is hogwash and completely rewrite it, that will account for about 2,000 of those 9,000 words. Second drafts are easier than they sound.

Third (I hope final) draft will be another 1/10 x 90,000 or a final 9,000 words. That’s a whopping total of 288,000 words, plus the final meticulous spelling and grammar checks before I try to sell it. 

In a perfect world I’d spend two hours a day, every day, focused strictly on writing. At that rate, I could knock out a book in about 5 months. The world is not perfect, and neither am I.

In a gloriously spectacular week I’ll write two hours every day for six days. Most weeks I achieve considerably less. Life happens. That means I rarely achieve a book in less than a year.

The late Darwin Smith was for many years the Chief Executive Officer of the paper products company Kimberly-Clark. At one time he simultaneously faced serious health and business issues. This difficult time in his life led him to examine how passion, talent, and economic opportunity come together. He devised, then answered, three questions for himself.

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What activities do you feel just made to do?
3. What makes economic sense?

For me as a writer, the third question is easy. What makes economic sense? Absolutely nothing. It may take up to three years from the day I start a book until I see any economic gain from it. What sustains me, what I think sustains most writers is passion, pleasure, and persistence. Oh yes, and hugging teddy bears frequently.

-------------

Quote for the week

It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

~ Edgar Lawrence (E. L.) Doctorow, American writer, editor, and teacher

Spelling--A Link to Meaning and Logic

by Julia  Buckley

I teach English, and I understand that not every student (nor every adult) is good at spelling. I acknowledge that English is an arbitrary language with all sorts of weird spelling rules, and if you don't love learning about it, spelling can be viewed as an annoyance.

And yet, as I found many times this year, spelling isn't just mandatory for the sake of a clean manuscript.  Proper spelling is often the difference between what we mean and what the reader thinks we mean.  This disconnect can be funny or potentially tragic.

The students like the sentence that's been floating around the Internet to show the importance of punctuation:

Let's eat Grandpa.

versus

Let's eat, Grandpa.

Clearly that comma is important, at least for Grandpa's peace of mind.

In the same way, a properly spelled word can convey something clearly--or otherwise.  Here are a few recent examples.

1.  One student, in examining the psyche of Shakespeare's Ophelia, suggested that "Ophelia was considered mad due to her increasingly erotic behavior."  I suggested that, while Ophelia's level of eroticism is a subject for some debate, the word she probably wanted there was erratic, since that implied that her behavior was unpredictable rather than ever-more-sexual.

When I have this sort of discussion with a student, I often get a bleary-eyed response, almost as if they're saying "I came close enough."

But consider this one:

2. A girl who had written a beautiful essay about her summer at camp and her first dance with a boy, wrote "He put his hands around my waste and we started to glide around the floor."  I wrote "unfortunate misspelling" in the margin.  I waited, when she read the comments, for her to turn red and look mortified, but she merely shrugged.

3. I know that many students do take pride in their work, and when I asked on a class survey what they had learned in a recent writing class, one student wrote: "I've learned to express myself in a more sophisticated manor."

Sometimes I yearn to express myself in a sophisticated manor, too, but at this point in life I can't afford it.  :)

4. Another Hamlet fan complained of the injustice of Hamlet having to "give the thrown to Fortinbras."

5. A recent spate of class essays had one student reflecting on a dialogue with a friend not providing "the answer I saute."  I went on a little Englishy rant, suggesting that "sauté" was a word one might use about frying something in butter or oil, while "sought" was the past tense of the work "seek."

But guess what?  One of the biggest reasons (that I've determined, as a test-prep teacher) that standardized test scores are going down is that schools don't seem to make a big deal of grammar anymore, including the list of verbs, regular and irregular; students feel far less confident writing things in past as opposed to past perfect tense, and they are more likely to make errors or not recognize errors that should be corrected.

The other big reason?  Students don't recognize the spelling of words like "sought" because they don't see them in books.  Because many of them are not reading books.

I'm not sure what percentage of my vocabulary I got from my well-spoken parents and what percentage I can attribute to a childhood of reading, but I know that by the time I reached high school, I had a very large vocabulary.  Now when I see students write "I would of given you a ride if you'd asked me" on a paper, I know that the error is rooted in the fact that they've never READ the contraction "would've."  They've only heard it in conversation.  Translation: Would of.  Should of.  Could of.

I'm not suggesting that reading is dead in young people.  I just invited a YA author to speak at our school, and 52 students crammed into our small library to hear her speak.  Many of them had read the book in advance.

But when I see errors in student writing, I can always see the ones that are rooted in a lack of reading.

For example, the boy who wrote that his mother kept her possessions in her Omwa. I stared at that one for a good five minutes before I figured out what he meant: Armoire.

One student wrote, in her final paper, that she didn't really like hanging around with big groups of students, and that "I'm really a loan shark kind of a person."

Here again, I had to use context clues to determine that she meant "lone wolf."  Since the two idioms are significantly different, the spelling of "lone" was significant here.

I realize that decoding student spelling has always been a part of a teacher's job, and in fact spelling mistakes have never been linked to a lack of intelligence.

But they can be linked to misunderstandings and a loss of meaning, which is why I encourage my students to care about spelling.

Building Suspense

Dorothy H. Hayes (Guest Blogger)

Although a murder may be committed at the beginning of a mystery, the reader most likely won’t know who the murderer is until the end of the book.

How do we keep a reader interested until that moment?

In a character driven mystery, one with an interesting amateur sleuth, or a savvy kind of hard-boiled Sam Spade character, the protagonist and his backstory will entice the reader. He’s not only solving a crime, but he has a family; a father he doesn’t get along with, or he’s just recently divorced, or has health problems. All the above describe Inspector Kurt Wallander, Henning Mankell’s very popular police detective. While Wallander is working on the case, he’ struggling with his own personal problems.

With regards to the unsolved crime, the secret of holding the interest of the reader is to continue to build suspense.

Lee Child said in an article in The New York Times (December 9, 2012): “As novelists, we should ask or imply a question at the beginning of the story, and then we should delay the answer. Readers are humans and humans seemed programed to wait for the answers to questions they witnessed being asked.”

He goes on, “In my latest Jack Reacher novel, A Wanted Man, it’s clear on the first page that a mysterious person has been murdered. Who was he? Why was he killed? He has appeared so early that the reader has no emotional investment in him. He doesn’t even have a name. Even so, the questions nag, and they aren’t completely answered until the last page.”

In Murder at the P&Z, I attempted to make the reader care by introducing the protagonist in the first chapter along with the murder victim. Although, as Child stated, “humans” want the answers to the original questions even if they don’t know the victim, a different curiosity takes hold when the reader learns the name of the victim, meets her family, knows about her job.

Carol Rossi is on the job, as a local reporter covering the Wilton, Connecticut Planning and Zoning Department, in the first chapter. Then she’s sent out, on a dangerously cold December night, because a dead body was found on School Road, in the second chapter. When she realizes that it’s a murder scene, and the body is that of the secretary to the town planner, she’s horrified and promises to find the killer.

With a sense of helplessness I watched Maddy’s body disappear into the hearse. She’d be taken to Farmington to the medical examiner’s office for a mandatory autopsy.... The coroner promised a full report the next morning. Her body would be delivered to Johnson’s Funeral Home in twenty-four hours. As the coroner offered his observations to the detectives, I stood off to the side. With an awkward grip on my pen from frozen fingers, I took down every word.

With each shaky letter I inscribed on my yellow legal pad, I found myself promising Maddy that the truth would prevail. I vowed that we would find the person who had stolen her life.

The trauma to Rossi is made believable by the preceding chapter that showed the relationship between her and the victim. This made all the difference. In my original manuscript, the two chapters were switched. The book began with the discovery of the body. The reader hadn’t meet the victim. The story failed to flow as well. Rossi was left trying to explain her relationship with the victim to the reader for almost the rest of the book.

Now, the reader believes that Rossi will find the killer. But she’s not a detective, so how will she do it? Will she be endangered?

Another technique to captivate the reader is the raising of the ante. For instance, in Mankell’s One Step Behind, three teens are shot. Yet, we learn that another teenage girl may be in danger. Will Kurt Wallander apprehend the murderer before he strikes again? Mankell has raised the ante. For the curious, Wallander fails. But it wasn’t for the lack of trying, so we feel only sympathy for him as he condemns himself for not saving the girl’s life. Again, the attachment to the protagonist keeps us reading.

Getting back to raising the ante, usually the amateur sleuth is forced into attempting to solve the crime. In Murder at the P&Z, when the detectives on the case refuse to consider Rossi’s theory of the crime, she turns amateur sleuth and starts her own investigation. With every bit of information she uncovers, the threat to her life heightens. Soon she’s being stalked, and she realizes that she’s in over her head.

At this point, the ante is raised because another life, the life of the protagonist, is in danger. The reader is fully invested and must read to the end.

So as the readers turn the pages of a mystery book, they are waiting for the answers to the original questions, as Lee Child explained, but they must wait until the end. Yet each sentence, is a step closer to the answer.

Child summed it up this way: “The basic narrative fuel is the slow unveiling of the final answer.”

Dorothy H. Hayes taught Language Arts in Connecticut schools, was a staff writer for the Wilton Bulletin and The Hour, and received an award for her in-depth series on Vietnam veterans from the Society of Professional Journalists. She also worked as a staff writer for a national animal protection corporation. Her mystery, Murder at the P&Z, appears this spring from Mainly Murder Press. She blogs for womenofmystery.net and criminalelement.com.

A Brand New Bag

by Sheila Connolly

The black hole. See my problem?

This past week I purchased a new purse. I have one that is serviceable, although items like my keys tend to disappear into the black depths, requiring much embarrassing scrabbling in public and/or small nervous crises.  But this is a special purchase:  I need a new bag for a trip to Italy.

When I first started traveling, as a young woman, I was warned to hang on to my bag (which held my passport and money, if not much else—I didn't have a credit card for years).  Conventional wisdom said: Keep it tucked under your arm at all times; don't set it down on a counter while haggling with a vendor; never flash what cash you had. Pickpockets and purse snatcher abounded, especially in Italy.

I did have my purse stolen once, but that was in London—by someone who had to climb across the façade of a building on a busy street to come in through my third floor window while I was taking a bath down the hall.  I didn't see that one coming.  That necessitated making a police report (a lovely sympathetic bobby came to the B&B and talked to me in the kitchen over the classic cup of tea), finding the US Embassy and getting a new passport, and after I'd moved on to France with my new passport, wheedling a rental car company into letting me have a car despite the fact I had no driver's license.  The French were very accommodating, and I didn't even have to bribe anyone.

I have also been accosted by gypsies in France, including one small grubby boy who kept saying "donnez moi un sou" and was rather annoyed when I didn't.  For your information, the sou hasn't been currency in France for quite a while, and it never was worth much.  It had devolved into a stock phrase for panhandlers. Anyway, I didn't open my purse.

Back to the bag.  The first thing I wanted was a shoulder strap, a long one so that I could wear it across my body, thus keeping my hands free.  Funny—there aren't that many bags with functional shoulder straps available these days, although there are some with very decorative shorter straps.

I also wanted pockets that zipped—and I got that with a vengeance.  The new purse has six outside zippered pockets and one interior zippered pocket, plus two open pockets, one for the ubiquitous cell phone.  And (drumroll, please) it has its own umbrella, which lives in its own little inside pocket that snaps shut.  Once I saw that I was sold.

The best part is that all the pockets and the interior are lined with a bright, cheerful print fabric—not like my current black pit of a purse.  I might even be able to find something (and will take along one of my mini LED flashlights in case I do need to search)!

The thing should also be indestructible, because it's not real leather—it's a believable fake.  My grandmother would be appalled:  in her world, ladies carried leather bags and wore leather shoes, preferably matching.  She was a woman who had more than one real alligator handbag (it was a long time ago, and I didn't keep them). But this handy (and inexpensive) fake leather bag is something I don't have to worry about.  I can drag it through puddles and carry it in the rain and it will probably fare better than I will.

But it needs to be sturdy, because my bags usually average about eight to ten pounds in weight.  What's in there?  Wallet (ID, credit cards, health insurance card), small notebook (hey, I'm a writer!), usually a camera, cell phone, keys, cash (the coins to fall to the bottom and get forgotten), about a dozen pens, Tylenol, antacids, tissues, often a book to read, in case I have to wait somewhere, now and then a tablet computer…the list goes on.  I think I'm permanently tilted from carrying this accumulation on my left shoulder for decades. But I'd bet that if I walloped somebody in the head with it (especially with that nice long strap), the guy would drop in his tracks!

Sometimes I envy men:  they stick a wallet in their back pocket and go.  I don't know how they do it.

Roots and Branches

Elizabeth Zelvin

I remember how I laughed the first time I heard someone computer-savvy talk about digitizing a word-processed (or typed, as we called it back then) manuscript to “put it in a usable form.” I also remember how the audience at New York’s Shakespeare in the Park laughed in 1967 when it was announced that “Hair, a tribal love-rock musical,” would be opening in the fall. How quickly, and how radically, the world changes!

I too have come to see digital material as “usable form”—though I’ve also learned the hard way that if I want materials to be accessible ten or fifteen years later, I’d better keep paper copies as well, because technology changes fast. Anyhow, I’ve recently started the long-term project of scanning my pre-digital family photos into the computer. Especially important are the few remaining “ancestor pictures” I possess, faded and crumbling but irreplaceable: my parents, aunts, and uncles in their youth, my grandparents, and even one set of great-grandparents who never made it out of Europe.

I marvel when I meet Americans who can trace their ancestry many generations back. My blog sister Sheila Connolly here on PDD is one of them. I know a guy who has framed a five-generation series of pictures: himself, his dad, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, all looking much like him. More recent immigrants, especially Jewish families like mine, can’t do the same. A number of years ago I came in contact with a genealogist with the same last name as my maiden name, ie my father’s family name. She had grown up in Dublin and currently lived in South Africa, part of the modern-day diaspora that reduced the Irish Jewish population from 800,000, if I remember her figures correctly, to 15,000 (or was it 1500?) families. She was systematically tracing everyone with that last name and eager to hear what I knew about my family’s past.

Her research turned up far more people than expected. Like me, she’d started out thinking the name was quite unusual. She even turned up folks who were not originally related to anyone of that name: emigrants to Israel who changed their name to ours because they perceived it as “more Jewish” and followers of a “rebbe” (a Chasidic Jewish leader) who changed their original names to his. It’s not clear whether even those with a genetic right to the name are all related. There’s a mention of the name in the Old Testament, so it can hardly be traced all the way back. But even in the last two or three generations, even with people all over the world contributing what they know and the genealogist and her colleagues checking tombstones and written records, there are gaps.

The twin reasons for these gaps are emigration and the Holocaust. The precious handful of old photos I’m now preserving on my computer include those my grandparents carried with them: my paternal grandparents from the Ukraine via Liverpool in 1905 and my maternal grandparents from Hungary via Bremen in 1906. (My parents, both young children at the time, came with them.) I’m still moved when I think of my maternal grandmother (Gran), who lived to 92 and whom I loved dearly, saying goodbye to her mother at the age of 29 and never seeing or speaking to her again. During the Nazi era, not only Jewish records but whole families and whole villages were destroyed. Many of those connections are lost forever.

Here are some of the pictures that I’ve got.

Gran and her daughters, my mother at the wheel

My maternal grandparents

My dad (in suit) and his siblings

My paternal grandfather

My paternal grandmother

Gran's parents

My mother's sister (looks like me)