We have one car that’s a champion in the snow but mice have crawled up inside the dashboard and nested in the airbag system. My warning light has been illuminated as reminder that when I fishtail and throw a 360 on slick, icy roads, I’m SOL save for a rodent family that might shoot out the steering wheel to cushion the impact. Considering the size, weight and non-absorbent make-up of the average mouse, I’ve decided to mostly stay home even though the lack of cleaning apparatus and chill of strained relations makes me want to crawl out of my itchy, winter-dry skin and flee to Florida where I hear it’s 80 and humid and there’s no such thing as chapped lips.

I suppose in this confinement, I should continue the job search I began a few days before the X-mas break wherein I write and re-write cover letters and resumes in order to send on-line responses to job listings in which I am only vaguely interested, those that appear on Monster and Craig’s List, knowing all the while that my ten years as a Landscape Designer don’t translate into value as a paralegal or administrative assistant or pharmaceutical representative but there’s always hope that some firm will see that the individual who ran her own company, wrote for a newspaper and also did time in the accounts department in an advertising firm, can and will learn this office stuff quickly and, in the interim, can probably manage the phones and tend to the ailing tropical plants suffering for light beneath the fluorescents.

I make it sound sort of optional, this employment thing but really it’s dire. In the last days of ‘08 we learned that MBH’s company would no longer be covering health insurance for dependents. So we have the expense of three on our plate in the New Year which makes for leaner times in our already skinny lives. And then there’s the latest confession – that neither of us can take one more day in the house together as a couple; working, sleeping, eating, pretending. And so we’re trying to find a way to swing rent. Some way to give ourselves some breathing room. It may, in the end, save us. Or it just may allow us to sever things in a civil manner. Either way, we see the expense as non-optional.

In order to clear the way for this added financial hit, I cancel newspaper subscriptions, I dial back the minutes on the cell phone, I cancel cable and stare meaningfully at the high-speed internet access bill wondering if we can survive on a dial-up. Wondering if the dial-up option still exists? We are wearing long underwear and turning down the thermostats. The dog shivers in her dog bed. The kids play hours of Wii and we let them, because school’s out and the wind blows negative temperatures and it’s free and we ignore their computer game dependence because their bug eyed attention to Madden ‘09 somehow assuages our guilt.

We have yet to break the news to the kids, this separation, which will confuse and disturb them even more than it does us (if that’s possible). And then there is the news to share that we are taking a leave of absence from the Country Club which really doesn’t affect their Winter lives but will completely rock their summer-time existence. I keep reminding myself that there are worse things to suffer than no swim team or tennis or golf but I feel really, really badly about this one. Possibly because we gaveth and now we taketh away. It’s one thing not to know what your missing, it’s another to miss something you once really, really enjoyed. They have friends there. They have known the sweet laze of sultry afternoons spent licking watermelon drips from their sticky arms and jumping in the chill pool to rinse their skin clean. They have known the smell of fresh mown grass on the fairway. They have known the distinct sound of tennis balls bouncing on a clay court. They have learned how to drag the brush and groom the court after play without filling their tennis shoes with clay granules. They have dressed in a sun dress and sandals and little boy khakis with a starched button-down to attend the awards ceremony at summer’s end where they receive recognition for sportsmanship and effort and achievement. They have known what it feels like to belong to this safe place, a place of well-to-do families and blue skies and a snack bar. I feel sad about a lot of things, but mostly I feel sad that I can’t continue to give them the things they have come to know as normal.

So here’s hoping that somehow, some of the next 364 days will find a way to be truly better than this one. Less uncertain and bleak and fearful and nostalgic. And here’s hoping your ‘09 is a good one, better than the last, even if your last wasn’t all that bad, because who doesn’t deserve even better?

If I’m being honest, periodically, in the past five months, I have wanted nothing more than a long and peaceful slumber, some break from the tortured meanderings of my mind. Some way out of all this effort we must expend trying to repair and remain. The idea of real ‘forward’ exhausts me, requires sooo much hard work, soooo much conviction and I can’t seem to find the certainty that real ‘forward’ requires. And so, sometimes, I confuse permanent avoidance with the concept of progress. At least it’s a solution of sorts rather than the absence of one.

Of course, each time it flits through my mind, I am profoundly startled and ashamed by this desperate though fleeting thought. I’m a mother of two, an intelligent attractive woman who should just exude self-esteem and yet I must admit to having considered, momentarily, checking out. How profoundly selfish and sad and altogether beside the point. There are women the world over suffering the loss of their children, their spouse, struggling with illness, poverty, addiction, natural disasters, and here I am feeling like everything I have is too much and not enough. It doesn’t make any sense at all.

And while our couples’ therapy continues, My Better Half and I persist in occupying the therapeutic frame in just the same way we started – each of us sunk into our own end of the long leather couch, facing a man who is supposed to save us, a stranger to whom we direct our most naked and dangerous thoughts about the other. My Better Half and I occupy that space without making eye contact; side by side, separated by throw pillows and years of resentment.

We are two people repeating ourselves week after week, framing the same problems, circling the same cracks in the foundation, defending the space that is not ‘forward’ or ‘better’ but stubbornly remains the same. We have contentious car rides full of shouting and accusation on the way to this bi-monthly meeting. This is a time when we feel safe unsheathing our claws. We know we will soon be sitting on the long leather couch of our collective unhappiness, spending 50 minutes licking the wounds we just inflicted.

We have mopey, quiet car rides home, forty minute journeys back to the reality of our lives – lived together under the same roof and, somehow, worlds apart, where we skirt conversations of import, dodging emotional landmines, saying little, sharing nothing, waiting until we are back in the therapeutic frame some ten, sometimes twenty days later, where we can, again, be candid and direct.

I soothe myself with Ron’s suggestion that, really, only the bare minimum is required at this stage in the game. After all, he has reminded me, my readership is non-existent now that I’ve been off the grid for so long. It doesn’t matter what the hell I write today or, ya know, EVER, because my following, while once an impressive 12 readers deep, is now down to 1 or 2 rubber-neckers who check in every now and again looking for an obituary notice. I think what he’s trying to say is that I’ve forced the bar on this blog thing very, very low. So here I am, back from the grave, at least today, can’t promise I’ll be here everyday, or the day after that, but today is a start.

So first a bit of business…Many of you have been kind enough to stop by and inquire about my return to life as a landscape designer. As my last post indicated I returned to design in May and, since then, have knocked out three design projects. It’s a bit like riding a bike, this design thing. Once you’re up and speeding down the hill, that hill could be in Zone 6 or Zone 11. It turns out that there’s not much difference once a person gets a handle on the twelve most important plants in the local landscape while cruising, break neck speed toward career-oriented disappointment.

After a few short weeks of careening down the hill of my new enterprise, feeling the surge of hope, the satisfaction of accomplishment, like wind in my hair, practically singing into the breeze of my own projected success, Weeeee, I can do this because I am good at this and people like me, I hit a rather imposing wall that I’ll refer to as the faltering economy but may, in fact, be more the stuff of bad luck intermingled with a few bad characters.

One project went smoothly, the design was well received, the contractor paid me for my time but the earth remains barren, not a plant has been installed. I’m thinking the homeowner is hoping that Spring will usher in the resurrection of his mutual fund but I’m just guessing. Another project, the one I did for free while hoping my generosity would lead the back door neighbor to cover up the chain link fence that went up around the enormous hole in the ground that they call a pool, well, that design and attendant plant list was completed in mid-June and I’m still looking at bare dirt and a long stretch of metal fencing along the western property line. I’m thinking it’s another garden laid victim to the volatility of the NYSE, but I’m just guessing.

And the third project has officially lurched off the tracks into train-wreck territory. The plans have long been finalized and delivered but I still haven’t been able to track down a check for the remaining design fee, a check which represents 50% of the design costs, my entire month of September, not to mention a few tense weeks in October. So small claims court here I come.

There’s no bit of comfort I can take away from this triptych of disappointment, no successful project or happy homeowner waiting to be my first success story as a landscape designer in the Northeast. There is only a long, ominous stretch of nothingness, a total void of landscape design jobs now that it’s almost November and the snow will soon begin to fall and most people are intensely focused on continuing to pay the mortgage and the heating bill while watching their stock portfolio bottom out a few weeks before Christmas.

Enough with the bleak landscapes and the obscured horizons, I’ll sign off wishing a Happy Day to all who have ventured over to Madmarriage after such a pregnant pause. And if any of y’all happen across a landscape contractor who calls himself Jim and speaks with a lisp and fancies himself a black belt in karate and apparently signs contracts without reading them, do me a favor and swerve in his direction. Just once, this once, I think the Gods might forgive a hit-and-run. I know, I know, this Jim character will get his, someday, somewhere, but I’d just like to be close-by in order to to bear witness.

This is my first landscape design project since leaving Florida. I have enjoyed an almost three year sabbatical and now it is time to put on the big girl panties and get back to work despite the fact that there are chinks in the armor, holes in the lingerie. Because I have studied and practiced in a subtropical climate, I am, decidedly, no expert on Zone 6. I am faking my way through this first endeavor and so far it proves to be no different than the barely managed chaos of the projects I’ve been used to.

Today the excavation crew hit the water main and took out service to my house and the neighbor’s to the South of us. After service was restored we had chunks of copper and mud clogging our hot water tank and our toilets and the water ran brown from the taps and into the washer. We spent the entire day clearing lines and blowing out faucets after which we have clean running water again and I have that “Oh yeah, that’s why I quit landscape design and installation back in 2005″ feeling. Same shit. Different state. ‘Tis the nature of the beast and all those other platitudes I could throw at the thing. I have, in hand, large format reproductions of the property next door and I am tired already.

“Okay, are you satisfied NOW that you’ll never get paid to write? Because it’s good time to give up that pipe dream and go get yourself a real job that starts at 9 and ends at 2 and allows for teacher-work days and sick-kid days and whole weeks off while I travel to glamorous places like Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and gives you the summers free so we don’t have to pay for childcare and of course offers dental and benefits because, after all, such a job that pays more than $9 an hour must exist, you just haven’t looked hard enough, in fact you haven’t looked at all.”

From her defensive crouch, she shot back,

“Right, sorry, I must have been too busy preparing meals and supervising homework and completing Ben Franklin projects and schlepping our kids to piano and baseball and tennis and coaching soccer and making sure there’s food in the fridge and paying all the bills on time and shoveling the back porch and mowing the lawn and stripping wallpaper and painting the interior of the entire fucking house and posting five days a week on my blog and writing a novel and volunteering in the each child’s classroom and helping Gladys pay her rent to have properly looked for a job that could fit nicely into the 15 minutes of me-time I enjoy on the couch each night post-8 p.m. when the kids have been bathed and read to and tucked in multiple times and the cat has finished vomiting up a hairball on the carpet and the five loads of daily laundry are folded and put away because that’s exactly when I feel like kicking it into high gear and getting off my lazy ass to go out and earn myself a living because all this other stuff is just joy and sunshine, hardly a day at all.”

She can tell that today is going to require some serious house cleaning therapy. The Windex is out, the murky glass just asking for a good spring shining. Did she mention that all of her friends, neighbors and acquaintances pay $300 twice a year to have their windows cleaned? She’ll let that fact speak for itself.

After the age of two, O’s focus turned from cooler spelunking to waste management. There was not a garbage can in the house that the kid did not overturn, pilfering through the contents at least a dozen times before noon each day. And then, as he grew older and wiser, he developed a keen affinity for the grappling truck. Each week an enormous vehicle equipped with a crane and hook would drive the streets of our hometown picking up yard clippings and trash and old appliances that otherwise civilized residents would discard in trash-pits on the front lawn. The sheer size of the thing was captivating with the stilted, blundering movements of the hook fishing for curbside debris. O insisted he was going to be grapple hook-truck driver one day. I smiled patiently and secretly willed it to be otherwise. Navy Seal – dangerous but respectable. Garbage truck driver – I’ve got nothing.

With G, it’s been a harder read. She’s difficult to pin down. She’s sort of passingly interested in a whole variety of things – art, candy, soccer, making candy, The Red Sox, eating candy, finding vending machines with candy, searching for loose pieces of candy in purses and in street gutters along parade routes. Perhaps she’ll be a chocolatier or purveyor of rare and unusual jelly beans. Suits me fine. I’m a candyoholic myself though I would never stoop to sample old candy strewn on sidewalks and in parking lots (really, I wouldn’t).

But just the other night, G discovered a new talent that, quite like candy hunting, is frighteningly addictive. It was Friday night, game night and the four of us gathered around to play Yahtzee, the game of dice, roll ‘em and weep and so on. There’ s a lot of trash talking during our family game-athons and I was feeling lucky until little G began throwing the bones. She just couldn’t miss. She’d be rolling for a full house and a full house it would be. She’d gun for a large straight and the dice would fall obligingly. I could tell she was really getting her groove on when she shouted, “This game makes me feel OUTRAGEOUS!” She actually threw two Yahtzees that night (one Yahtzee being the Holy Grail, two Yahtzees being astonishingly, statistic-defyingly HOLY SHIT SHE’S THROWN ANOTHER YAHTZEE AND GET THAT CHILD A SCRATCH AND WIN TICKET KIND OF LUCKY!!!!) G has found her calling. She is a gambler. She blows on the dice. She taps her left shoulder twice, chants a little lucky song and chucks a fist full of dice for the win. All the while she wears the grin of someone supremely above the law of averages. This weekend we’ll begin our poker training and come spring – it’s Vegas.

They have waste management opportunities in Vegas, right? Because O will need something to do while G holds forth at the Bellagio.

In tennis for instance, I enjoy the workings of the game, the serves, the cross court returns and the half court volleys, but the reason I go back week after week is not because of the process, it is because I am driven to improve, I am obsessed with winning. I work to become THE tennis player. It’s an end game of sorts. It’s ridiculous now that I am 34 and my chances of winning a Grand Slam title are nil. But I’m driven there, towards some sort of completed tennis product.

The same can be said of every task I set out to do. That’s why I enjoy cleaning and cooking. The goal of cleanliness or a delicious meal is easily attained. It’s an hour or two of exertions and I’ve achieved a finished product. I like that these domestic tasks are tidy and controlled and doable.

But when it comes to writing, this is where the whole thing breaks down for me. If I sit in front of the computer everyday and strive to complete a novel, then everyday is a disappointment. If I look too hard for the purpose in blogging, for a reason to continue to read and write about daily meanderings, then, again, everyday can be considered a failure. But why do I need to feel that I am doing something useful, achieving something? The process of writing should be good enough, why do I need a destination?

For the past few months I have been revealing to family and friends that I am working on a novel. I thought it would help to say it out loud. I thought I needed to have people to hold me accountable. I have declared a destination and people I see on a daily basis might ask me from time to time about how it’s going on the road toward completion. And until By Jane’s post I couldn’t understand why, ever since I opened my big mouth about working on a book, I haven’t completed even a page of writing toward that end. I see now that it’s too big, too expectant, too impossible a task. It’s something I can’t complete today so I put off for tomorrow. What dangles before me is not the carrot but the stick. I need to let go and rediscover the process. So what if I don’t complete that novel? What if I wake up tomorrow and begin revisions and decide the whole thing is absolute shit and cast it aside to write one more blog entry about my children or my marriage or, god forbid, tennis? What if, what if, what if? I’m saying it here because By Jane has inspired me to do so. Who the hell cares if I finish that novel this year, next year, never? If I feel inspired to write about the bag of frozen meatballs I bought yesterday on my way home from the kids’ piano lesson then there is reason enough in that.

I have read that writing is a whole lifetime and a lot of practice. It is less urgent than just necessary. I’ll share a passage from a book for writers called, “Writing Down the Bones” by Natalie Goldberg. If this doesn’t give us bloggers a reason to be than I don’t know what will,

“Our lives are at once ordinary and mythical. We live and die, age beautifully or full of wrinkles. We wake in the morning, buy yellow cheese and hope we have enough money to pay for it. At the same time we have these magnificent hearts that pump through all the sorrow and all the winters we are alive on the earth. We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with the pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings, this is how we lived. Let it be known the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn’t matter.”

Today I am writing for writing’s sake. Today I accept what is and put down it’s truth. And hopefully, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, I will remember to do this too.

I am struggling with the task of writing a second personal statement. First there’s the issue of a title. Should I call it my Very Personal Statement? Maybe last year’s essay, titled just Personal Statement, was not revealing enough?

This whole follow-up application thing feels a bit like appearing before the American Idol judges for the second year in a row. I am the contestant who wore a Statue of Liberty costume and sang New York, New York the first time around. Now I can see that the gimmick was a mistake and have chosen a Dianne Van Furstenberg dress and knee high boots for this year’s audition. Surely, last year, it was the outfit and not the talent that inspired rejection. I will sing something by Mary J. Blige. Maybe Gonna Breakthrough. Mary J. – she’s a survivor, no stranger to adversity and the occasional kick in the pants.

And then there’s the issue of new writing samples. It’s hard to call what I’ve been working towards in the last year ‘new’. It’s more revision and continuation, a long slog towards novel completion, a bundling together of two story ideas into one that matters and makes sense and allows the writing to roll on. Reasonable Doubt is a double-helix, a braid, a marriage of Habeas Corpus and The Weight of Two. Words on the page have accumulated and it now reads 90 pages long.

In truth, after last year’s rejection, I stopped writing for awhile. I cast the whole habit aside.

Leslie Epstein’s kindly written and complimentary rejection arrived in April and, immediately after its receipt, I found myself feeling a little lazy about the mail. Days and days went by between visits to the box. The mailman patiently crammed in bills and catalogs until the whole thing was so completely backed up with unwanted correspondence that he was forced to drive the postal jeep up to the back door. He would toss fliers and tax forms and digital photography catalogs into the mudroom.

But it was the second rejection letter that really sent me into the ditch. Just when I began recovering from the first No Thank You,, I received another. One day in May, when I trudged to the street to unclog the box, I found a slim little envelope from BU’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, a sliver of hope there among Friday and Saturday and Monday’s mail. My heart leaped. I was overcome with a great jolt of adrenaline. I dropped the stack of mail on the driveway and tore open the slender letter. Could it be a correction to the previous rejection? Perhaps a notice that some other applicant had died? An invitation to to take their spot in next year’s graduate class. I slid trembling fingers beneath the envelope flap, all the while, practicing the joyful tone with which I would deliver the good news to my unsuspecting family, who had all grown weary of my lamenting the rejection.

But, I found no enclosed correction, no change of mind, instead I found another rejection letter. This time, the denial came from the head of the graduate school of Arts and Sciences. I guess Patricia Schiavoni, in her infinite wisdom as admissions personnel, decided that the rejection letter I received from the Creative Writing Department was not sufficient negative correspondence. Perhaps she likes to get a slam in whenever possible, following up all department-rejections with her own general dis. “Ya da ya da ya da…careful review… sorry to inform you… must deny admissions to even highly qualified candidates… regret that the decision was not favorable…”

I could have shouted, “Thanks for the echo, Patricia. It didn’t feel like REAL rejection until you followed up with your own official word on the situation.”

As if all this rejection weren’t bad enough, my e-mail delivered the cruelest blow. Just one day after receiving my second BU rejection, I found this little gem of an offer in my Inbox,

Dear CCE and her lovely and intelligent business partner,

Blaine from our Knoxville office forwarded me your info.
We are currently casting hosts for a new home improvement series for WEtv and are looking for a hip, attractive, accessible, charismatic, credible GARDENDER/LANDSCAPER. Production will take place in Miami/Ft. Lauderdale, FL in Spring/Summer/Fall 2007. Are you interested in being considered?

If you could get me video footage and pics and bios for each of you by the end of this week, that would be ideal.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Thank you,
Very Powerful Producer in New York

I wept remembering how cute I looked in those knee high rubber wellies and the great baby-tee with the company logo in orange splashed brightly across the chest. I wondered what had possibly possessed me to close the Landscape Design company I owned with a friend and move to suburban New England in order to macerate in my own suburban juices. I cursed the Gods who must have put it in my head that it would be a good idea to renovate an antique home by myself in the woods. I banged my head against walls papered in 80 year old damask and considered a move back to South Florida just to shoot this video, but I was New England-in-Winter pale and I’d forgotten the Latin names of all major palm varieties.

So I decided to pitch the powerful producers of WEtv another idea. I suggested their camera crew set-up here in my new town and follow me around my house while I type witty comments on writer’s blogs while wearing my bathrobe and occasionally put on yoga pants and walk the dog. I suggested that their audience might really enjoy the footage of me plunging our antique toilet for the tenth time in one week. I explained that this is something I can do one handed, while smiling and explaining the function of certain toilet parts like flush valves and O rings. I promised to make the show cute and light hearted. I even offered to get a new bathrobe. I promised to highlight my hair.

I dashed off a lovely e-mail pitching my ideas and waited for WEtv to get back to me, hoping that the life I’d chosen sounded as interesting as the life I once led – the one in which I had I catered to the elite and lunatic of Miami and drove a big white SUV I called the Bloom Beast to tropical nurseries and dragged back lovely matching Crinum Lilies the size of my dining room table for the illegal immigrant help to plant in the yards of a husband and wife team that were living in separate homes because, the year previous, he had taken up with the female tenant living in their carriage house.

And quietly, as I awaited WEtv’s response, I developed plant lists, an inventory of local providers and a stable of contractors who know their deciduous shrubs and how to lay a stone wall. But it was insufficient stab at self repair. While I familiarized myself with Zone 6 horticulture, the words kept coming. It’s something I couldn’t prevent from happening. Like Winter or the flu. It seemed beyond me. A new story about Faith Shepherd and her daughter Laura began to take shape. The garden I was hired to design for the Williams on Holt Avenue sort of languished, neglected and forgotten. There was no passion I could muster for the privet hedge we would plant along the eastern property line that could rival the need I felt to tell Faith and Laura’s story. It’s just wasn’t even close.

I felt guilt and concern for the characters I had left on the page, abandoned there without resolution. I returned to Habeas Corpus and The Weight of Two and could see how the two were obviously connected bits of the same story begging to be merged. Claire Bensley, her guilty father, the girl found dead in the road, all parts of a story that needed to be told. Screw the William’s and their privet hedge, I thought. This stuff cannot be suppressed.

And so here I am, a year later, doing what has to be done. It is quite beyond me, the need to write day after day. But still, I crave an audience. Nothing as glamorous as a television audience, only the company of like minded people consumed by the need to tell fictional tales. I thought I could adapt to the failure that was last year’s application in a way that conveniently disguised my initial intentions. But then it became obvious that this MFA is not a goal that I’ve ignored or abandoned, it’s more a goal that has ignored or abandoned me. And all the passivity of the previous phrase just doesn’t suit me.

So have another look. You may pass again on what you deem minor or trifling talent but, then again, you might see something that resembles a future. Here’s hoping.

JUST? THAT’S ALL? Interesting word choice.

I’m not sure how he manages blase and flippant when talking about drafting ANOTHER brilliant and concise short essay that best represents me, a better one than the first time around (the flippancy and the need for better are implied. But I figure if I can’t do better than last time why bother? Apparently, my last attempt wasn’t good enough). And then there’s the task of twirling off three new short stories before the March deadline. It’s not that I haven’t been writing since last Spring, it’s just that I’ve been working on a novel and the fair admissions staff at this particular university discourage applicants from submitting long fiction. A fact I probably should have considered long before mid-January.

And with American Idol starting up again this week, I feel quite like one of the hopeful contestants that follows Randy and Simon and Paula from audition stop to audition stop though she is ridiculed and rejected at every location. She enters the room with her number pinned to her chest, sure that the audition in Seattle will be different from the one in Tampa, convinced that this time her talent will be heard and appreciated. She can see their name in lights. So alluring is the notion of someone important finally taking her seriously, that she is blind to one important fact – she is only marginally talented. In the pursuit of her dream she has become an earnest but laughable fool who has presented herself, once again, as a glutton for punishment.

The whole nation groans along with the three judges each and every time she throws her name in the ring. It’s just too painful to watch. The audience covers their eyes and holds their breath just waiting for the audition to be over, for her to finish her pitchy tune and be booted from the room; resolved to return to next year’s auditions with a new hair do and some kick-ass cowboy boots because she has convinced herself that it must have been the outfit.

I figure if I am resigned to the ridicule, if I fully expect rejection and just plain forget to go to the mailbox for all of April and May, then I just might survive the painful period of waiting. Unlike American Idol, the process of rejection from this esteemed Master’s program is a long one. Just long enough to allow all hopeful applicants to fully fashion the image of their acceptance, to imagine themselves attending titillating writing classes with accomplished professors before lowering the boom of denial.

As an adult, who is expected to have plans and goals and something always on the horizon, it’s so incredibly hard – the not knowing. So I’ll pretend I know already and just do it, fashion a personal essay that is passable and professional and maybe just the thing that moves them this time around. I’ll slip a few chapters of Habeas Corpus in the mail, ignoring the warning to avoid long fiction, I’ll shove it all in a manila envelope, not the fancy black leather binder of last year. It’s the equivalent of showing up to the American Idol auditions in a bathrobe. It’s the proof that I’m crazy jaded and not too worried about collecting another rejection letter. It is liberating to act as if I don’t want it that badly. It’s fuck if I care. It’s a lie.

Few of us ever take the time to thank the people that have made a difference in our lives. We assume they know their worth when, in fact, a letter like the one I am about to share is the reward all teachers dream of and few receive.

Here’s an excerpt:

Dear Mrs. W,

I am a teacher of visually impaired children and one of my students is learning braille as she suffers a progressive eye condition…Working with her has brought back fond memories of you.
Forty six years ago I was in your second grade class. I struggled with reading and you were not only my favorite teacher but a God Send. Out of the goodness of your heart and because of your genuine concern for my future, you tutored me after school. The way you worked with me did not make me feel like a ‘dumbie,’ but made me feel very special. I thought it was a treat to dust the erasers and wash your chalkboard and I remember you used my silhouette for a spelling bulletin board. You, without a doubt, had the greatest impact on my foundation for literacy and for that I am eternally grateful. I award you Top Teacher of My Life!

With Sincere Gratitude,
S.C.

The fact that this woman took the time to write such a moving letter to an old lady makes me weepy with the justice and the beauty of it. I have shared the note with a friend who has just gone back to work as a third grade teacher in the inner city. Her job is exhausting and difficult. She struggles daily, wondering if leaving her own children everyday to help these needy kids is worth the sacrifice. I wish for her a letter like this when she turns 85. Her work is necessary and important. She will be the Top Teacher of Many Lives. Let’s hope that someday one of these kids will take the time to write her a letter of thanks.