Do You Know What Today (okay, tomorrow) Is?

So asks the musical question by Tony! Toni! Toné! The answer: It's our anniversary. Yes, tomorrow is my anniversary, 16 years. We are a little older and a lot heavier. Last year in Chicago it fell on a Friday and we had a foot of snow. I got the day off. Hubby was extremely busy and went in around 2PM, when the roads had been cleared and the electricity was back on at his office.

This year they are again expecting a storm, snow, sleet, real messy stuff. So we'll likely do the same thing we did last year . . . chill out patiently, knowing that in three weeks we'll be leaving for vacation in Florida!

I wonder - as I consider that I might have to cook dinner in rather than go out to eat if it's really slippery - what are the odds of crummy weather on the same date two consecutive years?

This weekend I will be cleaning up some projects in preparation for submission. This is the real grungy part of writing, and I'm giving myself two weeks to get it done. I already know from last year (because If These Walls Could Talk was a May release) that I will likely be dragging galleys along on my vacation (it's a May thing; those galleys are due back in New York right after the first of the year, so, future published writers, avoid May publication dates if you're hosting the holiday dinner, giving a New Year's party or have small children). I see no film classics scheduled, so I'll probably work in some shredding as well. Maybe even get a jump on my tax return and clean up the receipt file. Then again, maybe I'll just read a book.

Wishing a productive weekend to all!

The Atheist and the Bear (a Modern Fable)

An atheist was walking through the woods, exclaiming aloud at the beauty of nature.
"What majestic trees!"
"What powerful rivers!"
"What beautiful animals!"

As he was walking alongside the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him. He turned to look . . . and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge toward him.

He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the bear was closing in on him.

He looked over his shoulder again, and the bear was even closer. He tripped and fell on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw and raising his right paw to strike him.

At that instant the atheist cried out, "Oh, my God!"

Time stopped.

The bear froze.

The forest was silent.

As a bright light shone upon the man, a booming voice came out of the sky. "You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don't exist and even credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?"

The atheist looked directly into the light, "It would be hypocritical of me to suddenly as! k you to treat me as a Christian now, but perhaps you could make the bear a Christian?"

"Very well," said the voice.

The light went out. The sounds of the forest resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed his head and spoke:

"Lord bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through Christ our Lord. Amen."

Tell me, am I the only one . . . .

Who thinks that heroes and heroines in romance novels who vow to never love again because their heart has been broken need to be, if not retired permanently, at least seriously cut back on?

I read maybe one or two romances a year, and the moment I see this in the text I groan . . . and usually put the book down. (This was Saturday, and I haven't picked it up yet.) Any hints on why this situation is so grossly overused?

Just curious.

Same old lovable me, with a few changes

After I wrote 'til I was empty-headed this weekend (don't know what's gotten into me); I changed the look of my blog. It's something I've wanted to do since my pal Gwyneth Bolton spruced up her blog recently. (Yeah, monkey-see, monkey-do.) It took forever to find a design that a) I liked, and b) that a technically un-savvy person like myself could figure out how to drop into Blogger. I also expanded my links to other blogs, something else I've been meaning to do.

I finally got around to getting the ball in motion to transfer my domain name from my old site to my new one that my husband designed for me. Check me out if you get a minute; I'm at www.bettyegriffin.com . I've still got some work to do on it, but at least it's up. Now I've got to set up my e-mail, which I've lost in the transition.

Sunday Company

Yeah, I'm guesting again, this time over at Blogging in Black, so stop on by!

The Week in Review

I hope you all had a good holiday. Ours couldn't have been nicer. We did manage to get to our destination; the predicted snowfall only turned out to be a light dusting. Dinner was great, and my sweet potato pies and marble pound cake went over well. A very happy day overall, even if I did end up leaving the Mrs. Smith's apple pie (my attempts to bake a pie of this type have been unsuccessful) in the freezer (something I realized while driving through Tippecanoe County in Indiana).

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip celebrated 60 years of marriage this week. It was revealed that they are both great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria, which seems unnaturally close for married folks. First cousins share a set of grandparents, so I'm thinking that sharing a set of great-grandparents makes them just second cousins. Forget all that talk about it being all relative in West Virginia; it's all relative among the crowned heads of Europe. They're lucky their kids didn't turn out to be idiots.

The Stacy Peterson missing person case is without resolution. People are coming out of the woodwork like termites. Drew Peterson's first and second wives have shared their views of their ex-husband (the first wife said he has a temper but never threatened her, the second one said he threatened her.) So has a motorist who had a fender bender with Stacy before she went missing, who claims that in the aftermath she confided in him all about her troubled marriage and fear of her husband (the lead item on the 6 o'clock news here last week). And Drew's mother has also spoken out in defense of her son. His former boss on the police department says he was a bad cop. As for Drew himself, he has an attorney now and isn't saying much of anything. That was one painful Today show interview, as the attorney refused to let him answer question after question. Made me wonder what was the point of going on at all.

I predict that Stacy's eleventh grade classmates (after all, Stacy started messing with Drew when she was 17) will probably be the next ones in the spotlight.

Barack Obama is reported to be leading in the Iowa polls, but I have to wonder how many Iowans are really planning to vote for a black man to be President.

It's wonderful to have four glorious days off. This is the first year that I'm not going shopping. I usually give gift cards, but have braved those 5AM crowds to get something I wanted, like the 19-inch LCD monitor for $129. This year I'm perfectly content with what I've got. I'm going to do some housecleaning, some reading, and of course some writing. Saturday morning will find me and my laptop up at 5AM, watching Mutiny on the Bounty on Turner Classic Movies. Not that overblown version with Brando from 1962, but the 1935 original with Clark Gable and Charles Laughton. I believe it was Clark Gable's best performance ever. Hard to believe there was just a scant 18 months in the ages of Gable and the short, portly Laughton, who personified cruelty with his depiction of Captain Bligh. But my favorite character was the ship's wooden-legged physician, who, when inebriated (which was most of the time) gave differing accounts of how he lost his leg, all of them colorful.

May the holiday glow continue to surround you and yours!

What A Character, Part III

Here's the third and final installment of the guest blogs from If These Walls Could Talk. Have a happy Thanksgiving holiday, all! It looks like we might miss having turkey with extended family because of some snow and rain expected to come this way. But there's sure to be leftovers, right? And don't they say that everything tastes better the next day?

Character: Veronica Lee from New York, New York
Novel: If These Walls Could Talk, in stores now
Setting: Washington Heights, October 2001

I find myself moving slowly as I push the shopping cart along Amsterdam Avenue. I have it upright because I’m also balancing a plastic basket full of clean clothes on top of the heavy black plastic bag full of clothes that’s inside it already. Fortunately, my shopping cart has two small wheels on each side in the front, so it will roll without me having to tilt it on back wheels only.

I’m Veronica Lee, and I’m tired. Walking a block-and-a-half with laundry for a family of four is no picnic. I do it every single weekend. My husband, Norman, helps me get the clothes from home to the Laundromat. It’s a real pain in the ass getting all that down the stairs from our third-floor walk-up. It's become a weekly ritual for us. He walks me to the Laundromat and then runs back home, where our two girls, Lorinda and Simone, are just waking up. Sometimes when I’m finished I’ll call him, and he and the girls will come and walk me home. But today it’s raining, and Norman was coughing this morning. I told him to go home and get back in bed. I’m hoping I’ll be able to get somebody in the building to help me carry the clothes upstairs. If not, I’ll just do it myself and make two trips, as women in these walk-up apartments have been doing for the last hundred years.

As I continue my slow walk, keeping my umbrella poised over my basket rather than myself, I can’t help thinking about those houses Norman and I looked at last year up in Northern Westchester County, in a Hudson River town called Peekskill. We saw one in particular that was really nice, with good-sized bedrooms and a great yard for the girls, and even for Norman and I to hold barbecues in. The price wasn’t bad, either. We made an offer for less, hoping the seller would come down a little bit. The moment our offer was in I started having second thoughts. What would we do all the way up in Peekskill? We didn’t know a soul who lived there. All our families and friends live here, in the city.

I kept my fears to myself, not saying anything to Norman until the sellers rejected our offer in favor of one that was higher. Norman was disappointed when we didn’t get the house. He said he definitely wants us to get out of the city. He’s been real gung-ho about it ever since last year, when he was mugged at gunpoint right here on Amsterdam Avenue, in broad daylight. I could have become a widow that day, and my daughters fatherless. Yeah, I’d like to get out of here myself.

I know no place on earth is completely safe, but New York has become a lot less so since September 11th. Norman and I both work as nurses up at the Presbyterian Medical Center here in Washington Heights, well away from the Towers, but that lockdown they put on the city’s bridges and tunnels after the attacks caused a whole lot of grief. You have to remember, Manhattan is an island. There’s no way to get off it without taking a bridge or a tunnel. A whole bunch of folks couldn’t get home ... or get to work.

Sure, I’d love to live in the suburbs someplace, where it’s all green and leafy, and where kids can ride bicycles on the sidewalks. Here I can’t even send Lorinda and Simone outside to play because there is no place to play. No wonder so many kids are getting fat, just sitting at home with TVs and computers. In the city it’ll soon be an epidemic.

One more thing about having a house. We'd be able to buy a washing machine and a dryer, and I wouldn't have to schlep in the rain, the snow, and the humidity to wash our family's clothes and linens. That's a beautiful thought, but Norman and I have a better chance of winning the big Lotto jackpot than we do of being able to buy a house in the general vicinity. New York may be the world’s most exciting city, but damned if it ain’t one of the most expensive. Everyplace that’s not too far, like Jersey or Southern Westchester or Long Island, is priced way beyond our means. I mean, four hundred thousand dollars for a house older than we are, and with one lousy bathroom. And the neighborhoods aren’t all that fabulous, either. The one in Peekskill sure wasn't. Of course, we're probably priced out of even there by now.

But on TV or in the movies, I'm always seeing black people living in neighborhoods that look like they’re no more than three years old, with two cars in every driveway, sometimes three, if they have kids old enough to drive. Whenever we see that, somebody always says with a loud suck of their teeth, “Black people don’t live like that.” From what I’ve seen in those black lifestyle magazines that I read at the bookstore, I don’t think that’s true. I’ve seen everyday people, not movie stars or people like that, featured living in gorgeous houses. Sometimes they’re even single women with homes of their own. But none of them live in New York. When I see that it makes me think if leaving New York really is the answer. Because my kids deserve better than what they’ve got.

And, I think as I park my shopping cart in a corner of the vestibule and begin the long trek upstairs with the basket, so do Norman and I.

I hope you enjoyed that peek at the three main characters of If These Walls Could Talk. I'll be back sometime over the weekend, wherever I am.