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Re LibraryThing:
Oh, you evil evil woman. You convinced me to sign up, and now I'm obsessed! Looking at my books. Looking at other people's books. Thinking about what books to add to the collection. Thinking about books I know I own but can't recall where they are. Linking to Amazon and inadvertently BUYING more books!
Evil, I say.
You know what I say to this? Guilty as charged. Obsession loves company, and all that.
I'm certain I'm mentioned this before, but our birthday tradition is this: three families get together, and the birthday person picks the menu but does no cooking or cleanup.
Most people vary what they want from year to year. Once I made Penny crabcakes from scratch (she'll never live that request down). Once somebody wanted a breakfast party, so we had waffles and omlettes at seven in the evening. Bruce the Man of Pain usually wants collard greens and hush puppies and all kinds of exotic Georgian fare. Last time I believe he also wanted smothered fried chicken.
I always want the same thing. I want Thor's smoked salmon (not lachs/lox -- fresh salmon that has been grilled over a smoky fire) with Penny's hollaindaise sauce, or as we call it, Eggs ThornPenny.
We have tried many times to get Thor to explain how he gets the salmon to taste the way it does. It's not a recipe any normal human could follow, because he starts it like this: I go down to a beach I won't tell you the name of to a special tree and I take one or two small branches and I strip them and then I take them home...
He's got a grill he's modified to handle his three or four or ten step process for smoking and grilling the fresh salmon. This salmon, it melts in your mouth with its smoky wonderfulness. So you put a nice hunk of Thor's smoked salmon on a perfectly poached egg and you cover it with Penny's perfect hollandaise -- I have no idea what she does to the stuff, mine never tastes that good, just the right amount of lemony goodness -- and that's my perfect birthday meal. With a pear and blue cheese salad on the side. And a double dose of Lipitor for dessert.
So there you go: the non-recipe for Eggs ThornPenny, which I felt compelled to record. Because today? Is not so good, and I'm trying to distract myself.
This morning my daughter asked me what I was working on.
Now, the girlchild is a normal kid in that at almost seventeen, the world is very narrow. It's mostly about surviving high school. Parents figure in only peripherally. Do you think about the cornerstone holding up your house? Only in case of earthquake. Almost seventeen = lotsa earthquakes. Otherwise, we're invisible.
But once in a while she wakes up and notices me scribbling, as she did this morning. So I told her, and there followed a brief conversation on which books were finished and coming out this year, and what I was writing now and next. She got a thoughtful look on her face and asked me a big question. She wanted to know if I would be done writing when I finish the two books I've got contracts for.
My first reaction was to point out that I'm too young to retire, and anyway, we couldn't afford for me to retire, not with college around the corner. But the question stuck in my head and I have been thinking ever since about the rest of my career. I have a grandmother and five aunts who all lived into their nineties. I could be around for a good while, after all. Will I just... keep on writing? Will I ever be able to retire, need to retire, want to retire?
I remember as a twenty-something working in an office. There were ten or so women who worked in the secretarial pool who were fifty or older, and who had been there for their whole working careers. You have to think about that. They started working out of high school and forty years later they were still there in the same cave-like office with no windows. I was fascinated and horrified. They seemed to be normal, most of them -- they had families and grandkids and they bowled or sang in the church choir or collected teddy bears. I would guess that most of them had started in that typing pool with the understanding that if all went well, they'd be right there until retirement. My parents' generation -- raised in the depression and during the war -- lectured about the importance of steady work. You had a decent job with benefits, you stayed with it.
Six years ago I left academia, where I had an established career, a good salary, excellent benefits. I left academia and I started writing full time, self employed -- no benefits unless you count being able to go to work in a ratty bathrobe as a benefit. If I had stayed in academia there would have come a day to retire, and somebody would have organized a party, and I would have signed papers. An official end to a career, and a ticket to go out in the world and do something else.
The self employed have to provide such things for themselves. I could someday buy a baloon and a cake and a gold watch and wish myself well in my retirement.
But here's the weird thing. I can't imagine retiring. That is, I can't imagine not needing to earn money. On the other hand, I can't imagine not retiring. That is, I can't see myself as a eighty year old agonizing over book twenty three or thirty three or whatever. I don't want to be agonizing at age eighty. At this moment, if we magically won a huge lottery jackpot (and I say magically not so much because of the odds, but because I rarely buy a ticket) and I really didn't have to work anymore, would I stop writing?
Sure. Sure I would. It would feel great, no deadlines, no pressures, no sales figures to worry about. I can imagine waking up in the morning and having the day to fiddle in the workshop and take drawing classes and go for walks. No need to open the computer or check email. The question is, how long I'd last before I felt compelled to start writing again, or if the urge would simply go away. The same way I wonder what it would be like to look at a bar of really expensive chocolate and think, really, chocolate is overrated. Or to be served eggs benedict and look at the hollandaise, all buttery and lemony and say, oh no, thanks. Not my thing. The same way I could never be anything but pleased and happy when my daughter notices me and sits down to talk.
Some things just can't be imagined away.