Motherhood has never been something I’ve dreamt about. On no account have I had romantic notions of a darling baby cooing while we gently sway in a rocking chair. Writing has always been my inspiration-the alchemy of raw thoughts into golden prose.
Since I was little I loved scribbling down my rudimentary thoughts. First it was silly poems, which turned into award-winning poetry. Then the poems transformed into essays that soon evolved into award-winning literary works. And now, here I am, about to give birth to my first baby. A real-life going-to-be-published-by-a-respected-publisher book!
It took longer than 9 months to birth her. Actually, it took years of traveling, and then years of building a company, then years of going through draft after draft of book ideas. And alas, she is born! She is 684 pages and around 4 inches high! Of course, this in not how she will look when she grows up, once she is on the shelves, she will be trim and beautiful. So, here’s a picture of her moments after birth. She is still awkward and immature, but over the next few months, she will blossom into a real beauty. Thanks for coming on this journey with me! Isn’t it fun?!
682 pages, 50 chapters, seven months, many glasses of champagne in foreign cities, rewrite after rewrite, and here I am. I have finished my great opus. For the next few days I’ll be going through and checking for mistakes and inconsistencies. I have to admit that I kinda lost track of the 50 places. I can’t name them all yet, because they are still very fresh and have not yet settled in my psyche. Plus Stephanie took over 6 of the chapters because I have yet to visit those exotic places she’s been.
I can’t believe I’m done with that part–the hardest part of the book. The rest of it will feel like a cakewalk. I’ll have the manuscript over to Penguin by next Wednesday, and between now then I need to take a day or two off and not look at it. You know when you stare at something so long it starts to get blurry. That is what’s happening, it’s all just a big blur on 682 pages.
Maybe I’ll go on a road trip tomorrow and leave my computer at home. Perhaps a night in Monterey or Carmel? A day at the spa, basking in the fact that I have written a book. Albeit with a team of stellar women. It takes village to raise a child and it takes a roomful of incredible people to get a spark of passion transformed into a book. Mental alchemy – the transformation of raw ideas into gold.
I apologize if I’m rambling. For once I don’t care if I end a sentence in a freaking preposition or if my modifier is dangling! Lucky for my modifier, I wish I could dangle sometimes!
All is well, and I am so happy I’m done with the writing part of the book, now onto the exciting parts¬–choosing pictures for each chapter, writing the dedication and acknowledgment pages, working with the publisher’s public relations department, and getting my press shot for the cover of the book. WOW!
An unseasonably sunny, seventy-degree day dawned on the priveleged players of the annual AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am golf tournament- the one where stars are the ‘am’ in Pro-Am, as in, "Am I dreaming or is that Justin Timberlake??" The fact that pro golfers whom you may not have heard of team up with Hollywood stars who you’ve definitely heard of make this a great event even for the non golfer.
This year’s attendees included said former ‘N Sync singer as well as Bill Murray, Mark Wahlberg, Samuel L. Jackson, Donald Trump, Ray Romano, Dennis Quaid and Andy Garcia, to name a few hotties and notties. What a great reason to spend the weekend in Carmel!
You’ll walk the hallowed greens of Pebble Beach golf course and fight the urge to shout, "I want to have your baby!" to Andy Garcia as he lines up his shot. And if you can take your eyes off leading men as well as football greats like Tom Brady and Emmitt Smith (the only big name to qualify for the final round), you’ll notice that the Pacific Ocean tumbles on the horizon.
After the perfect day on the green, enjoy the apres golf scene in darling downtown Carmel-by-the-Sea, a great place to putter around. Get it?
For this perfect weekend, you can plan in advance and book your hotel right in the heart of Carmel, or you can do what I did (I was such a naughty last-minute planner) and stay in nearby magnificent Monterey and take shuttles back and forth to Carmel. Monterey is where all the action is at night anyways, at least that’s what a little birdie told me.
(photo info: this is the iconic Lone Cypress tree of Pebble Beach) For more info, check out www.attpbgolf.com.
My dad John- who travels to Paris, France every year – reports quite happily that as of February1st the public toilets in Paris are FREE!. Previously one had to pay uisng coins. Dad quips the local McDonalds will be very happy – as the line for the toilets were always knee deep so to speak. In looking for a photo of such a toilet – I found this detailed paris toilets report on SlowTravel France. www.slowtrav.com/france/ paris/rl_restrooms.htm.
I went grocery shopping on Saturday and picked up a half case of Veuve Clicquot in anticipation of my completion. I already have it planned out in my head: on Tuesday, February 28, I will spend the day at Kinkos printing out the 500 plus pages of the manuscript, making sure everything is properly numbered and indexed, the manuscript will be in the mail by 5:00 pm to make “next day priority.” At 5:05 I will head home, by 6:00 pm, the first of many bottles of champagne will be opened. I can clearly see my success; I have choreographed it to the minute. I can taste the champagne. This has been the hardest thing I have accomplished. Learning how to fly and soloing out of John Wayne Airport was the second-hardest thing.
My editor called today to tell me that the book will be published in February 2007. I asked if we could have pictures of different women at the start of each chapter, she said it was a great idea, so starting in March we are going to have a picture contest. If your picture is chosen (and you sign the publisher’s release form) your travel picture will be in my book. How exciting is that!! So, sign up as a Tango Diva and you will be notified when the contest starts. I think for the best travel picture, we are going to give away a trip somewhere fabulous – of course!
I spent the night trying to keep the oxygen mask on my wonderful aunt Virginia until the early morning. She would pull it off every 7 minutes, then she would try to pull out her dialysis IVs next, and then her heart monitor lines. I would tell her, “Tia Cha Cha, if you want to go to Niagara Falls, you can’t keep pulling on things.” Like me, she is filled with wanderlust. She really wants to go to Niagara Falls and she spends a few weeks a year at our family ranch in Mexico. She is the oldest of 16 children on my dad’s side. Of all my nine aunts, we are the most alike. She is strong and feisty, did not get married until she was 35 years old, and has no children. She has a shoe fetish, and until she lost her sight, she was an avid reader. She taught me how to fight and how to love. Now, her kidneys have failed and my beloved Tia Cha Cha is in ICU and I am scared.
All night, I kept trying to keep her from pulling stuff out of her weak body and every time, she would give me the “evil eye,” as if I just took her favorite pair of shoes. It was like she was saying, “Enough!” And then I was thinking, “When is enough too much?” Sometimes we spend so much time trying to help others, guide them and give them what we think they need. But maybe that’s not what we are supposed to do. Maybe we should not offer any help unless they asked. Even though we watch them die in front of us–of kidney failure, heartbreak, obesity, whatever. As hard as it is to say, maybe my Tia Cha Cha doesn’t want to be here anymore, her wanderlust has really kicked in and she has more important places to go. Maybe she doesn’t want any more oxygen, maybe she is sick of dialysis, and maybe she just wants to be left alone so she can visit more exciting places like heaven or Mars, or her personal paradise.
After my time at the hospital, I realize that I can’t help anyone who doesn’t want help. And I have no right to try and force my beliefs onto to others. In other words, I can’t be a light on a hill for you, unless you are looking for light. My Tia Cha Cha? If she wants an “oxygen mask nazi,” she knows where to find me, but I think she has more interesting things to do and places to go.
Of course – here comes my e-fare shopping list and Santa Barbara for $111 RT is on it! But, here in SF – Spring has sprung – it’s so warm and clear- so breathtaking beautiful – that traveling is not an option. Instead Sonoma calls when the weather is like this. Eliana – my friend from Lima, Peru arrived today – and like a true diva – has hit Union Square with some real resolve. She had to pick up 6 bags at Nine West alone! The city is so clean after the rains and the buildings are so striking against the blue skies. Time to show off the city I love and live in! Any hints on favorite spots?
PS love this photo of SF homes under Twin peaks by Thomas Hawk
At a private party in Vegas watching my favorite part of the Superbowl- the commercials of course- I started hearing the voice of my feminist mother: Violence and objectification of women, uh-uh, honey. Now I know the Superbowl isn’t any kind of academic decathlon, but why does the mass appeal have to aim so low? I mean, which came first- the pitiful median maturity level of bowl viewers (you didn’t hear me say mostly male) or the dumbing down of commercials to appeal to them?
But even worse than being dumb (as long as they’re pretty) is that they keep playing out played themes, thus further institutionalizing them: boys will be boys, a boy and his beer are not soon parted, women must have cleavage to count, and monkeys are funny to exploit. They are the ones making monkeys out of us!
I mean I guess I shouldn’t be shocked- aren’t I desensitized yet?? But really, what’s the broader cultural legacy of the United States, the four and five blade razor wars? Kermit the Frog embodied everything that was right with our country, until he started selling Fords. It may not be easy being green, but now I’m just straight-up blue.
Yes, another Superbowl has come and gone, and men of steel overcame a mythical bird, but instead of a wardrobe malfunction I think there’s a serious cultural malfunction. Can’t we evolve, even just a little?
It ultimately takes a powerful soap company to stand up to the status quo- Dove is not soft on the issue of girls’ self esteem. Did you see the ad for its Self-Esteem Fund? The one with darling freckly faced girls thinking they were too fat or hated their freckles? Check out Dove’s overall Campaign for Real Beauty (www.dove.ca/doveselfesteemfund/). Which I believe is a Canadian consortium? One can only hope that this message was heard loud and clear above the din of beers and boobs.
The past few months have been rough. I’ve had two close friends pass away, and you all know about my computer. Then my cell phone died and again I lost all my phone numbers, and I just got a call from my mother that my beloved aunt is in intensive care. I’ll be driving to Sacramento tomorrow to spend the night at the hospital. Did anyone bother to tell the universe that I have a book deadline looming?
All this loss got me thinking: what do we gain from loss? And that is a tough question to answer. For me, I have gained lots of patience (I always need more) and I got a good sense of what life would be like if I just lost my identity. I really did not mind that part, except that I have a big publisher in New York who expects me to find my identity and finish a 50-chapter book by March 1.
The other thing that I gained was my ability to be more honest with people. I’m sure many of my friends would disagree, but I have a tendency of not telling people how I really feel about the situations they are in. I tend to gloss over it, even if I might have a great solution. One of the epiphanies I had was pretty powerful. I have been struggling about why some people are in my life and why they have the same problems over and over again. I keep trying to figure out the lesson that I am supposed to learn from them. Then it dawned on me–at a funeral or during a call to tech support–that it was not I that was going to receive the lesson – I was the one that was going to give it! That changed everything!
I don’t talk much about my personal healing work, because I believe that everyone needs to find a way to happiness and self-respect, but what if I found that way? I have struggled with every issue in the book-from self esteem to relationships to letting go of the past and moving forward. Perhaps I am the one who is supposed to help others find a better way of living. Instead of hiding my light, I should let it shine.
Okay, two BIG metaphors here: 1. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the light.” And he also said we were all sons of God. So maybe we are all “the truth, the way, and the light” for someone who needs us. The second is about letting your light shine. We are all cities on a hill that can guide others to a higher ground. Maybe now I am that light and I need to guide others to a higher place of existence?
Oh, and it was not just Jesus who said this stuff about light and way and truth – all the great teachers throughout the century say pretty much the same thing.
Did that all make sense, or am I becoming one of those crazy writers?
Motherhood has never been something I’ve dreamt about. On no account have I had romantic notions of a darling baby cooing while we gently sway in a rocking chair. Writing has always been my inspiration-the alchemy of raw thoughts into golden prose. 
