We just had a new stove delivered. The old one was in the house when we moved in 11 years ago, thus its age was indeterminate. Only three of the four burners worked (there was a time when we turned it on with a pair of needle-nose pliers, but the model was discontinued and we couldn’t get a new knbo), and the oven stopped working last week. Before the new stove was delivered, I moved the old one so I could clean behind/under it. Under the old stove I found the following:

• 4 rawhide dog chews
  
• 1 rawhide bone
  
• 3 dessicated M&Ms (two peanut, one plain)
  
• 1 small candy heart in disturbingly good shape
  
• 1 unpopped kernel of popcorn
  
• 27 pieces of dog kibble
  
• Dust bunnies the size of a Mini Cooper

What I take away from all this is the next time you run out of dog food or dog chews, move your stove.

1. We rented a cabin at Punderson State Park that had a gorgeous view of the lake. The word “idyllic” comes to mind.

2. I went trail running every morning and all the twitchy little muscles and tendons that have been giving me trouble lately (I’m talking to you, Achilles tendon and hip flexor) felt wonderful. Trail running=pleasurable running.

3. We had three visitors during the week:

• One of my sisters, who came and spent two days with us, so the kid got to swim and play with someone other than her boring parents. (Because, you know, when you’re a kid, parents are, like, so boring.)
• A field mouse that ran over my stomach in the middle of the night. Much like the ancient solders of Sparta who could go from sleep to battle-ready in the blink of an eye, I was awake and out of bed in a fraction of a second. We didn’t manage to catch the little critter but peacefully co-existed with it until we left. My husband named it Bobby (or Bobbi–I didn’t get close enough to determine its gender).
• A girl with long blond hair who looked about 11 years old and wandered into our cabin by mistake the morning we were leaving. We said this was Cabin #4 and asked what cabin she was looking for. The little girl didn’t say anything, just looked around the room in disbelief, as though we had somehow supplanted her real family. Then she ran out.

4. We went swimming every day (sometimes twice). I do love swimming outside.

5. El Patron Mexican restaurant in Middlefield is really tasty.

6. Somewhere near the start of the Iroquois Trail is a little fairy house made of stone and bark. The kid and I built it. It’s a little small but in a great location. It’s now listed with Howard Real Estate.

7. Some Amish families will give buggy rides for a donation. We had a buggy ride with an incredibly kind family (an older couple who live with her their daughter, son-in-law, four grandkids, two horses, and a bunch of cats) in Mesopotamia. The grandmother drove the buggy for us. She also confided that her husband is afraid of mice (see #3 above). This amused me to no end.

8. Leaving vacation on the day when it’s cold and pouring rain is far preferable to arriving when it’s cold and pouring rain.

When we were driving to the Emergency Room, my finger wrapped in a bloody towel, I looked over at my husband. The only thing I could think of to say was: “I need to be okay for the fantasy baseball camp.”

“If you’re not, I’ll go. You can still write about it,” he replied with a smile.

Such is the power of baseball.

I am registered to play in a one-day fantasy baseball camp in a few weeks at Progressive Field (home of the Cleveland Indians). As a kid, my brother and I played baseball or whiffle ball all day and watched the Indians every night on TV. There was a time when I dreamed of playing  for the Cleveland Indians when I grew up. I was about nine or ten. I still remember the moment of realization that there were no women on the team and the moment I realized there were no women in baseball anywhere. At least none that I could see. For about a summer (an eternity in kid years), I dreamed of being the first women to play major league baseball. There weren’t many opportunities to practice. I had already noticed there weren’t a lot of girls playing baseball and had already had my first encounter with someone who thought girls couldn’t play hardball.

One day, down at the old Coventry School, my brother and I were playing. He was pitching; I was batting. Two boys were didn’t know came up to us  and went into the “girls can’t play baseball” spiel. I can still remember what they looked like. One was white, maybe 11, sandy blond hair. The other was black, a skinny little guy, maybe nine. The smaller one, especially, was convinced girls couldn’t, shouldn’t play.  To my brother’s credit, he threw me a beautiful pitch, right down the middle, and I smacked it clear to the other end of the playground, so far that the mean boys could only stand there in shock. However, that one little moment of triumph can only carry a kid so far.

My brother played in the local Tris Speaker League (kind of like Little League). I toyed with the idea of playing too. I asked him if there were any girls who played. He said there were a few but added:  “But you have to be really good.”  He never said that he thought I couldn’t play. I said it to myself. Years later, when I took up baseball again as adult (I play in a wood bat pick-up league on Sunday nights), my brother said, “You were really good.” Such is life.

I was too scared as a nine or ten-year-old to play in a league. As I’ve gotten older, the fear has gone away, replaced with the knowledge that I know and love this game. I’m not a great player. I’m not terrible either. I’m an average recreational ballplayer. What makes me stick out is my gender, not my skill level.

What made me sign up for a one-day fantasy camp? Because it’s a chance to play two games on a major league field, in uniform, with a bunch of other people on whom baseball has the same hold. Because it will be fun. I’ll be writing about the experience for ESPN.com’s SweetSpot blog and at ItsPronouncedLajaway.com, so I get to combine two of my favorite things, baseball and writing, into the same participatory journalism experience.

For a while there, I thought the stitches were going to delay my little dream. I had sliced open the ring finger on my right hand, picking up a metal/chrome pasta maker to clean it. Who knew there was a sharp little edge on the inside of the base? It cut me right on the crease at the top of the finger. Three little stitches and a big gauze pad that made it appear I was flipping The Bird to everyone I encountered.

I can’t quite imagine being a professional athlete, making a living with my body and yet knowing that I could derail everything through a simple kitchen accident (or playing on a trampoline with my kid). Our bodies have limitless possibilities, yet there are also limitless ways in which we can hurt ourselves. We’re so strong and so fragile. Lucky for us, we can heal, and we can continue to dream.

Years ago, I read that when Frank Sinatra was a young singer, he used to swim regularly to improve his lung capacity and his phrasing. He’d go from one end of the pool to the other on one breath. The training showed. When he sang, he could express the lyrics as thoughts and phrases, as though he were speaking, unencumbered by worrying about when he was going to breathe.

I’ve never been a good swimmer. We had one of those above-ground pools that my father (accompanied by a steady stream of cursing) would set up each summer. As we got older, we’d help, so the work went faster (although it didn’t reduce the amount of swearing). As the youngest of six kids, I never had formal swimming lessons. The thought seemed to be that if we had something larger than a bathtub in the backyard, the kids would learn how not to drown.

Up until my teens, most of my time spent in swimming pools was less about swimming than about not drowning. I noodled around in the backyard pool, but it was only about 15 or 18 feet across, and it was always full of other kids. There wasn’t a whole lot of swimming going on as much as a whole lot of splashing. I also had numerous ear infections in elementary school, and had tubes put in my ears in second grade. The ear doctor said I shouldn’t put my head underwater for a while. I think I was about 12 when he finally said, “Oh sure, you can put your head underwater.”  (This is also a lesson in getting timely information from your physician.) By that time, I had it in my head that something bad would happen in I put my head under water. I’d drown or my ears would explode and I’d go deaf or some other malady. Being under water was bad.  In high school swimming class, I tried to convince my gym teacher that I had a modified form of hydrophobia and consequently couldn’t put my head under water.

It didn’t work.

My college had a nice pool, and I’d swim there, but I did the swimming-without-actually-putting-your-head-under-water thing. It’s inefficient, but it moves you through the water. When I lived in the Netherlands, I’d bike to the beach about five miles from my house and go swimming in the North Sea. I’d swim out just past the point where I could touch the bottom and then tread water. It was kind of a forced method of teaching myself not to panic in deep water. But it didn’t teach me to swim.

And there my swimming stayed until about three years ago, when I finally decided that it was high time I actually learned to swim properly. There wasn’t any one impetus. It just seemed ridiculous that an active, strong, healthy adult couldn’t swim. And I had a little kid who loved the pool. How could I teach her to swim properly if I couldn’t?

So I went out and bought a pair of swimming goggles and added a swim session to my weekly workout schedule. The goggles helped, as not being able to see while under water made me feel more helpless than my lack of gills. And then I swam. First just gliding through the water, then an odd mixture of not-putting-my-head-under and faux rotary breathing. And I took my kid to open swim sessions and taught her to swim. The more comfortable I appeared to be in the water, the more comfortable she was. So I faked it.

Learning a new skill, especially a physical skill, is a gradual process. You struggle and struggle and then, one day, you realize you aren’t struggling anymore and you don’t remember when the struggling stopped and just doing began. Somewhere along the line, I realized I wasn’t faking being comfortable in the water. I was comfortable in the water. And swimming. Under water.

The kid and I went to open swim the other day. Just before we were going to leave, I paused at the wall in the deep end, took a deep breath, and swam a Sinatra. I moved through the water with a smooth legato.

Everybody’s Daughter, by Michael J. Sullivan, is both the second book of a trilogy as well as a novel that can easily stand on its own. You don’t have to have read Necessary Heartbreak, the first in the trilogy, in order to enjoy this one (but you should because it adds to the richness of the read and because Necessary Heartbreak is a great title).

Everybody’s Daughter centers on Michael Stewart, a long-widowed forty-something whose greatest accomplishment is raising his 14-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, on his own after his wife was killed in a car accident. A troubled family history and the guilt and grief he feels over his wife’s death has left Michael struggling to connect with the world and others. And he’s also dealing with the normal challenges any parent does with a daughter who is no longer a little girl but still needs her dad. While volunteering at their church, he and Elizabeth discovered a tunnel that led them to First Century Jerusalem in the week before Christ’s death. Four months later, he is still pondering the meaning of what he saw and who he met, especially a woman named Leah, who helped save him and Elizabeth from a brutal Roman soldier and with whom Michael fell in love. When Michael has the chance to enter the tunnel again, he does. Elizabeth follows him, not knowing that her father has already returned. Michael is blamed for Elizabeth’s disappearance. Father and daughter must fight their separate battles in separate centuries.

Everybody’s Daughter works on a number of levels. Yes, it’s a “Christian” novel, because faith does play a large part in Michael’s journey, but it is much more than a “God will make you happy” novel.  Parts of it feel like a mystery as Michael tries to find Elizabeth. In Michael, Sullivan has drawn a deeply rich, complex character who has as many doubts about God and forgiveness and as much pent-up anger and guilt as the rest of us. He’s not an anti-hero; he’s imperfect and flawed and genuine.

What moved me the most about this book is that it is filled with genuine emotion that isn’t overwrought and with a view of faith and forgiveness that feels natural and accessible. (There’s actually a little inter-faith scene that adds some comic relief at a crucial point.) Everybody’s Daughter is a difficult book to classify. Is it religious fiction? Historical fiction? Mystery? Mainstream fiction? It’s a little bit of all those things, and it’s a great read. Give it a try. (Now I can’t wait for the third book.)

1. I am unable to write in the present tense.
2. You won’t catch me writing in second person.
3. My mom says I’m not allowed to write a dead mother story

My mom died ten years ago today. Before she died, I had heard people say that someone had a “good death,” but the phrase always sounded hollow. Her death taught me what that phrase really means.

This is what you need to know about my mother for this story to make any sense: While the words “kinder and gentler” were kind of ruined by George Bush I, they epitomize who she was. She was kinder and gentler than anyone you know. She was also a hobby printer and long-time member of the American Amateur Press Association (AAPA), a one-time owner of a used bookstore, and the manager of the bookstore at Ursuline College. Yeah, we were kind of a bookish family.

She was diagnosed with lung cancer on September 12, 2001, (remember that day? I have some vague memory of some important happening the day before.) The cancer had already metastasized to her brain. She was gone six months later. (I feel compelled to add that no, she didn’t smoke. But she grew up near the steel mills of Youngstown and married a man who smoked back in the day when people still smoked indoors at the dinner table with their kids around.)

My mom and I spent a lot of time together before she died. Heck, we always spent a lot of time together and talked frequently. Towards the end, we said that there was nothing left unsaid between us but that we were never at a loss for words.

She got weaker and weaker as the cancer decimated her body.  The last few days of her life, she stopped eating and was in what the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the “Bardo”–the place between life and death. It was as though she had already entered that last peaceful sleep. My siblings and I were privately wonder when “It” would happen.

My mom had a birthday calendar (which I have now inherited) that not only had anniversaries and birthdays of friends and family but things like the date Thomas Merton entered the monastery and Gerard Manley Hopkins’ birthday (who wasn’t actually a family friend). Things happened to her on significant dates. We felt sure that she would die on a significant date.

She died at Little Sisters of the Poor, where she spent the last six weeks of her life. She had worked there part-time in a post-retirement job, and I think to her it felt gentler and less permanent than going to hospice. The night she died, the nuns there (who are saints on earth, every last one of them–don’t let anyone tell you different) said that March 8 was a very special day because it is the Feast of St. John of God. He’s the patron of hospitals and their order holds him very dear. So that seemed nice.

When my mother did die, it was as peaceful and gentle as her nature. One of the nuns had said it would be “like a candle going out,” and it was. All of her children and almost all of her sons and daughters-in-law were there. (My husband wasn’t there yet.) We sang songs to her (some that she had written). There was a moment when we had stopped singing, and one of my sisters mentioned that we had left purses, etc. sitting out in the common room down the hall. Why this would matter in a nursing home at 7:45 on a Friday night, I don’t know, but I said I’d go check on our stuff. About 20 seconds later, my sister-in-law came running down the hall and said, “She’s gone.”

I went back in and one of my sisters said, “She opened her eyes for a second, and then she was gone.” They had rung for the nurse on duty, who came in, checked her pulse and said, “She’s not dead.”

That’s when my husband walked in. She waited until I had someone to hold onto, and then she went, just as peacefully as a candle going out. A friend said later that she must have sent me out of the room because I was her baby. Maybe I’ve always been marked as different.

A few weeks later, I met my sisters at my mother’s apartment to start going through her things. I was the first one, and I wandered around her belongings wondering where she had gone. There was a small, slightly worn copy of Lives of the Saints sitting on top of one of the bookcases. I’m not sure why or how it got there. Nobody had been in her apartment for a while–she hadn’t lived there for nearly two months. But I picked it up and turned to March 8, which was indeed the feast of St. John of God, patron saint of printers. And booksellers.

After the chills left my spine, the world seemed much clearer and some of the pain from her death lifted. Ten years on, I still miss her, but I’m at peace with the loss. May we all have such a good death.

Math equations as given to me by my six-year-old daughter. I haven’t checked her answers because I’m not familiar with all the formulas, but I’m pretty sure they’re all correct.

bird + bird = robin
caterpillar + caterpillar = egg
200 – butterfly = polka dot
4 minus + butterfly = green
bathing suit – princesses = pretty (I would assume that princesses – bathing suit = embarrassment)
towel + towel = hands
4 x towel = wash
pink x grain = bread
lotion + cream = whipped cream
toothpaste + toothbrush = teeth (duh, even I knew that)
princesses + princesses = pretty
clown + flower = rose
dots + soap = wash
garbage can + tissue = dirty
cup + cat = spill (I had a “Eureka!” moment when I first saw this equation.)
cat x dog = animals
dog + sofa = bad
dentist + doctor = fix
balloon kick + star = clown

What’s in the latest issue of The Cleveland Review? Well, um, a short story I wrote called “Slush,” plus some other great short fiction, poetry, photography, and non-fiction.

The Cleveland Review (TCR) celebrates its one-year anniversary with this issue, so I’m glad to be a part of it. I admire their commitment to the literature of the Rust Belt. It’s made me think more about how I portray the area where I grew up–and where I still live–and challenged me to think of my work in a larger context. Certain themes, places, characters continually surface in my writing. Just about everything I write takes place somewhere in Northeast Ohio. Just as my dreams frequently take place in the house in which I grew up (even if the dream is supposed to be taking place in, say, a desert, the architecture, the structure where I am is always my childhood home), my fiction always seems somehow to be tied to this region. I can’t escape it (nor do I want to), so I might as well embrace it.

I hope you’ll embrace The Cleveland Review too. Check out their archives for the first two issues too. My favorite story from TCR is in the first issue–“Kearsley Street Bridge” by Sally York. It will haunt you. I hope you find a favorite story too (maybe “Slush,” maybe something else).

Q. What is the one force that can conquer even death?

a. Love
b. Love
c. All of the above

For me, this pretty much sums up Never Eighteen, by Megan Messina Bostic. Technically it’s a Young Adult novel, but as a not-so-young-adult, I found it an enjoyable read as well. Seventeen-year-old Austin Parker is a leukemia patient whose time is no longer being measured in years or months but in weeks. Austin corrals his best friend (also the girl of his dreams) Kaylee to chauffeur him on one last weekend in which he tries to finish all of his unfinished business. What I enjoyed about Never Eighteen is that this isn’t what you might expect a teenaged-boy’s bucket list to be. Yes, he goes on the carnival ride that scares the crap out of him and tries his hand at pool hopping, but he also apologizes to the kid he beat up in grade school, talks to the mother of a friend who died, and generally tries to bandage the people he loves who are hurting. It’s a noble effort that he knows will not completely succeed. The effort is enough for him, and for the reader.

Austin is very real kid to me. I liked him. Bostic does a fine job of creating a likeable protagonist who can carry the reader along on an emotional journey whose end we know is preordained. It’s worth your time.