I’ve always loved the Bare Necessities column that Rebecca Joines Schinsky posts on her wonderful site, The Book Lady’s Blog–and when she and I emailed earlier this week and she invited me to submit a list of books I was influenced by while I was writing The Stuff That Never Happened, I was delighted.

But which books to mention? I’m always impressed when other people can bring in titles like War and Peace and Ulysses to explain their penchant for–oh, I don’t know–watching South Park reruns, but I didn’t have time to go reread a bunch of classics just so I’d look smart. (I’m not that smart, especially in the summer.) Let’s just say that Vanity Fair was off the table. Instead, I picked genuinely lovely contemporary books that I have adored, books that made me laugh and made me think as they explored the fascinating ins and outs of unhappy marriages and the secrets that are often at the heart of them.

I hope you’ll go and see Rebecca’s wonderful blog and settle there and read other people’s fantastic lists of the books they love and why they love them…and then, of course, I hope you’ll want to read The Stuff That Never Happened, which just happens to be coming out in paperback on Aug. 2nd!

I hope you’ll go and register to win one of five copies they’re giving away. But you have to do it now. Free Book Friday is ending on Jan. 28, and they’ll be sending out the books right then. After that, if you want to read the book—well, you might  have to fork over real dollars.

Go to http://fiction.freebookfriday.com/2011/01/stuff-that-never-happened-by-maddie.html.

I’ve been thinking a lot about characters lately, probably because some new people have recently moved into my head. Like summer tenants, they are rowdy and noisy, self-absorbed, taking the place over like they have full rights to everything. They’re waking me up in the middle of the night, co-opting my attention, forcing me to get out of bed and write down the bits of story they suddenly must tell—bits of story that they refused to part with earlier that day when I sat, fingers poised on the keyboard, waiting and begging.

Of course, even as I’m annoyed with them, I’m also enthralled by them—a little bit in love, actually.

Let’s face it: being at the beginning of a novel is one of the most exciting times to be a writer. I feel almost feverish with wanting to know everything I can about these new characters: what they wear, who their parents are, what they ate for lunch in fifth grade, who they took to the prom in high school, and mostly, what shenanigans they’re now caught up in, shenanigans that I know are going to be the basis of my new novel.

The bestselling romance writer Jennifer Crusie calls this phase the “sticky time,” because nearly everything you listen to, observe, or experience, sticks to your novel.

At the risk of sounding truly mentally ill here, let me just say it’s as though you’re hearing songs on the radio through your characters’ ears and not your own anymore. You feel inhabited somehow, as though you’re not alone in your own head; someone else is in there with you, commenting on the passing scene in a voice that may have nothing to do with your own sensibilities.

But how does this happen? Writers are always getting asked this question, usually by people who are narrowing their eyes and backing away, who perhaps have already punched in the “9” and the “1” on their cell phones, even as they’re waiting for the answer.

I used to just answer this glibly, that writing is the only socially acceptable form of schizophrenia—and yes, we are possessed by spirits, and yes, our characters do take over the stories from time to time. I would even give a little shrug to indicate that this is just one of the mysteries of writing—being willing to suspend disbelief and let ourselves be carried away.

But now, talking about this with fellow writers, I want to truly think about that process of creating new characters. Am I as passive in this process as I allow non-writers to think? Is it as easy as simply standing back while handing over the running of my brain to virtual strangers who paint pictures for me and tell me a story?

I don’t know how it is for other authors, but the first inkling I have that I’m about to write a novel is that a situation begins to take shape in my head. “There’s a woman,” I think, “and what if she was married to the same man for 27 years, and it’s an okay marriage, but suddenly she realizes that for years now, whenever anything has been wrong in her life, she’s found herself thinking and dreaming about the man she loved before?”

Trite, I answer myself back. (I almost always give myself the courtesy of an honest reply.)

“Yes, but what if this other man was somebody she had an affair with, and her husband knew?”

Hmmm. Tell me more.

“And what if they nearly broke up over this affair—it was early in their marriage—but they survived it, and now that the kids are grown, her husband is punishing her for this with his silence…?”

Okay. But will she meet up with the other guy again?

“Perhaps you should ask her that.”

Of course first I have to find her. Who is this woman who risked her early marriage, and why did she do it? And who is the husband, and the other man? Was she not in love with her husband, and if she wasn’t, why did she marry him? And what is it about marriage, anyway? What if it means different things to different people?

And—well, then I’m off. That’s how Annabelle McKay first came to me, explaining herself, torn between the loyalty she felt to her husband and kids, and her need to revisit the past. Every day she took shape, becoming more and more real to me, a deeper, more complex human being—silly sometimes, yet hurting even as she was trying to please everyone, caught up with remembering the past. Meeting this fictional woman was like meeting a new friend, and just as it happens when you’re meeting someone for the first time, they don’t spill all their secrets at once. Annabelle slowly spun out her story for me, quietly explaining and showing, using songs on the radio, lines in movies, overheard snippets of conversations, dreams, even elements of people I’d known before—all of which seemed to combine to create this new person.

I loved her, but what’s more, I also heard from, and loved, the men that she loved, both of them. They came to me, layered and complicated, neither man truly the “right” one. As Annabelle explored the meaning of her marriage and her past romantic fling, I was there with her, going through the shades of meaning, peeling back the layers of feeling, giving her the benefit of the doubt even when she was doing things all wrong.

It’s not an easy journey, writing a book. I’ve never been the kind of writer who sits down and outlines the entire story from beginning to end, scene by scene being laid out for me like Triptych from Triple-A. Instead, I think I’m something of a “pantser,” in that after the intial plot points are revealed to me, the journey I take is entirely dictated by what feels right at the time.

I liken it to starting out on a trip in California, heading toward New York—but having no idea of the exact route the journey will take. There will be detours and surprises, long stretches where I might not know the way (stretches that perhaps only serve to illuminate my characters for myself, and which ultimately won’t survive the revision of the book)—but eventually I’ll get to New York City, my characters and I traveling along together, keeping each other entertained on the way, even as we correct our course dozens, or hundreds, of times.

But are these characters responsible for the whole story? Do they truly dictate the way? No, of course not. There are times they want to take a wrong turn—the equivalent of getting off the interstate in Colorado and indulging in a little ski trip, and I have to say no. There are moments when a secondary character decides to try to hijack the book and make it a treatise on something else altogether, and I lay down the law. Once, Annabelle tried to engage some workers painting her house and get involved in promoting a house-painter’s romance with a young woman, and I had to frog-march her right back into her own story.

That’s the way it is. I’m in charge. Characters are there to illustrate something about human nature that I want to get across—something that I’m often not conscious of until I’m at the end of the book and then look at it in amazement and say, “Oh! So that’s what this book is about!”

And then—this is the most amazing part to me—after months or even years of living daily with these people, hearing everything they want to say, experiencing my own life through their eyes—they just pack up and go. I don’t hear from them again.

“Will you write a sequel? What happened next?” readers ask. I’m grateful for the question, truly I am…but the truth is that I don’t know. It depends on whether Annabelle and her men come back to me sometime. If they have anything else they think I might have missed out on, I’m sure they remember my address. They know where my head is, asleep on my pillow in the middle of the night, and I know from experience that they’re not too shy to wake me up and force me out of bed and to my keyboard.

This is a post I wrote for the Fairfield Library Writers’ Blog, which has lots of good posts about different aspects of writing. I wish to thank them for asking me to do it, because it truly made me think hard about characters.

Take book publishing, for instance.

In the old days, say before 1995, if you wrote a book that someone wanted to publish, they wrote you a check for it, you said thank you and took it to the bank, and then you went home and put your feet up, had a nice celebratory dinner, and waited for the happy day when people would come up to you and say, “Oh, I saw your book in the bookstore!”

These days you take the check and, according to one of my writer friends, you’re insane if you don’t immediately launch yourself into a P.R. frenzy. Don’t trust your publisher’s publicity department, she said: YOU need to schedule readings and signings, YOU need to visit bookstores and start stalking influential librarians. You need to get serious about multiple-daily bouts of blogging, tweeting, and facebooking.

But above all, she said, you need to invest your money into little mementos which you will some day hand out to your fans-to-be, such as postcards, notepads and pens–all having your name and the name of your book emblazoned there. One of my more crazy acquaintances, who wrote a gardening mystery novel, actually hands out gardening gloves and little shovels with her book title on them. Now what, I ask you, is the point of getting paid for writing a book, if you then simply take your advance money and use it to help people forgo standing in line at the Home Depot?

This, it occurs to me, possibly comes under the heading of “Things That Do Not Benefit Anyone At All, Ever.” Least of all the author, who might have used her advance money to buy herself a nice set of pillowcases instead, or a venti skinny latte at Starbucks .

And so here I am, ten short, hot, steamy little days away from having a novel coming out into the world. It will be published on Aug. 3, which happens to be my late father’s birthday. (A person who wanted to believe in “signs” would say that my father is perhaps shepherding this book from the afterlife, only my I think my father would have disapproved of this book because it deals with marital infidelity, and so I’m just hoping he’s not out there in the afterlife sending signs to people not to read it.)

Thinking about signs is just one of the many manifestations of insanity that happens when you’re ten days out from having a book. This is the time when you’re starting to wake up in the middle of the night, hyperventilating and regretting not stalking even a single librarian, not getting past chapter 3 ofTwitter for Dummies, and not investing one cent in postcards and mementos. (Although, really now, what object would I stamp my book title on for a book about infidelity–condoms?)

So I am vowing right now to stop looking for signs, and while I’m at it, here are some other things I’ve decided to try NOT to do pre- and post-publication:

1.  I will not obsessively check my amazon numbers. This is because I’ve learned the hard way that they mean nothing. They mean less than nothing. Your number can be in the low millions in the morning, 79,000 by noon, and then back to half-a-million by evening. And I think all it can possibly mean is that two people bought your book and one of them is thinking of sending it back.

2.  I will not try to turn any topic to a discussion of my book. I have one writer friend who is so skillful at this that she’s driven off all potential conversational partners, except those diehard friends who are fascinated to see how she can bring ANYTHING back to this one subject. Here’s an example of how she does it. ME: “Man, it’s hot today.”  HER:  ”Well, not as hot as the weather was on page 37 of my book. Now that was a hot day, don’t you think?”  The other day I wanted to have a discussion of how the Tea Party people seem to be getting an inordinate amount of press, for such a small splinter group…and there she was with, “You know, my main character makes tea four times in my book. Oh, and speaking of splinter groups, how did you feel about the scene where she gets a splinter in her finger?”

3.  I will not correct people who take away a completely different idea from my book than I intended. For instance, I was pleased, thrilled even, that More.com listed it in their list of Scandal-Filled Summer Reads coming out this summer–even though (ha ha!) I thought while I was writing it that it was perhaps a semi-literary novel examining the ups and downs of a middle-aged marriage and one woman’s difficulties accepting her life now that the kids have left home. Silly me! That’s not going to get anybody interested in plunking down real money for a book. Not during a recession! But hey–luckily More.com saw humor and scandal–and I’m all for it!

4.  I will try hard to stay happy, even if People magazine and Oprah never hear of my existence. With over 200,000 books being published per year in this country, these days stores keep a book on the shelves for approximately 2 or 3 seconds, and if nobody has bought up the stock by then–bam! It’s back to the publisher with it. So what’s a writer to do, really? Go door to door with the book and beg the neighbors to buy it? Tackle people in line at the grocery store? Just be miserable?

I think I’d rather go to the beach, take deep breaths, and try to get 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep…and that way, when People magazine and Oprah call, I’ll be well-rested and won’t have too many bags under my eyes.

5.  Oh–just one more thing–and please forgive me for this. The name of the novel is The Stuff That Never Happened. It’s either a book about a big scandal or a heartfelt, semi-literary look at marriage and love and raising children and family. But, sorry. No vampires.

It still made me laugh. I tried to picture how that line would have worked with the Who song of the same name. Even hummed a few bars just to see if it would work. Not so much.

And then another family member said he’s been watching the show, “Who Told You That You Could Dance?” and still somebody else asked me to go along to see the movie, “I’m So Detestable.”It’s got me wondering if there isn’t some kind of self-help book for this disorder.

Still, I’m glad to see we’re not the only ones. In the New York Times’s Metropolitan Diary column a few months ago, there was the story of a woman who was walking down the street with her daughter, when they spotted Larry David, the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” coming the other way. The daughter said, “Oh! Wow! There’s that guy from the show ‘Lower Your Expectations.’”

I think this could be a fun game, actually: coming up with paraphrased titles. The singing group “They Might Be Giants” could be called “They Are Certainly Not Tiny” and the movie “500 Days of Summer” might be renamed “A Whole Lot of Hot Weather.”

I suppose my new book, “The Stuff That Never Happened” is fair game for some mangling, too. Although it occurs to me that the real meaning of “the stuff that never happened”  is–well, “a novel.”

I’m writing a new novel, which is another way of saying that I am obsessed with picking crumbs out from between the keys of my laptop, reading up on and worrying about Lindsay Lohan, clearing out my spam folder every 15 minutes or so, comparing my horoscopes from different astrologers, brushing up on Spider Solitaire, and looking around for new things to become obsessed with.

Today I hit upon a GREAT new obsession, and for once it even has the feeling of being even remotely about writing my novel: finding really excellent first lines.

The first line of my new novel is–at least so far: “I think I finally understand how this happened.” So it was important for me to make sure, you know, that this had never been the first line of a novel before…and in making sure of that, I came across some wonderful other first lines.

Do you have some favorites? Send them to me! (Save me from having to actually write my novel.)

It’s true, he put his hand on my ass and I was about to scream bloody murder when the bus passed by a church and he crossed himself.

-   From Luisa Valenzuela’s short story “Vision Out of the Corner of One Eye”

Even when she was very little her hunger was worth something: hunger taught her to dance, and her father noticed.

-          From Robert Hill Long’s short story, “The Restraints”

Gerard Maines lived across the hall from a woman named Benna, who four minutes into any conversation always managed to say the word penis.

-          From Lorrie Moore’s novel Anagrams

It began when George was trying on a black suit in Allders the week before Bob Green’s funeral.

-          From Mark Haddon’s novel A Spot of Bother

And Louise calls him down—she’s screaming her head off because the pipe just blew totally and water’s shooting out from under the sink and Bernie must think she’s popped an artery or something and he’s out of that bathtub like a goosed whale.

-          From K. C. Frederick’s story “Teddy’s Canary”

Noon.

One day you have a home and the next you don’t, but I’m not going to tell you my particular reasons for being homeless, because it’s my secret story, and Indians have to work hard to keep secrets from hungry white folks.

-          From Sherman Alexie’s short story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem.”

They almost fingerprint the children before I can stop them.

-          From Ron Carlson’s short story “Milk”

I had always planned to kill my father.

-          From Amy Bloom’s short story “Between Here and Here”

Looking back, I should have realized something was up as soon as I opened the bedroom door and found my wife asleep on top of the sheets with a strange man curled up like a foetus beside her.

-          From Douglas Glover’s novel The South Will Rise at Noon

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

From Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice – not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God.

From John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany

He was so mean that wherever he was standing became the bad part of town.

-          From Les Edgerton’s short story “The Bad Part of Town”

The Jackmans’ marriage had been adulterous and violent, but in its last days, they became a couple again, as they might have if one of them were slowly dying.

-          From Andre Dubus’s story “The Winter Father”

People thought the Larkin couple would move after what happened.

- From Elizabeth Strout’s novel Olive Kitteredge

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

-          From J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye

When I got there they were burying the lion in the back yard again.

-          From Richard Brautigan’s short story “A Need for Gardens”

Jennifer Sheridan stood in the door to my office as if she were Fay Wray and I was King Kong and a bunch of black guys in sagebrush tutus were going to tie her down so that I could have my way.

-          From Robert Crais’s novel Free Fall

Several of the miracles that occurred this year have gone unrecorded.

-          From Carol Shields’s short story “Various Miracles”

Once upon a time, I was Professor Thorne Speizer’s stoned wife, and what a time that was.

-          From Laurie Colwin’s short story “The Achieve of, the Mastery of the Thing”

What it begins with, I know finally, is the kernel of meanness in people’s hearts.

-          From Jane Hamilton’s novel The Book of Ruth

I don’t know just why I’m telling you all this.

- From Maureen Daly’s novel Seventeenth Summer

My earliest memories involve fire.

-          From Dennis Lehane’s novel A Drink Before the War

“You must not tell anyone,” my mother said, “what I am about to tell you.”

-          From Maxine Hong Kingston’s memoir The Woman Warrior

Bomber Boyd, age thirteen, told his new acquaintances that summer that his father had been executed by the state of Florida for the murder of a sheriff’s deputy and his drug-sniffing German shepherd.

-          From Joy Williams’s story “Escapes”

All of a sudden she noticed that her beauty had fallen all apart on her, that it had begun to pain her physically like a tumor or a cancer.

-          From Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story “Eva Is Inside Her Cat”

It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel, they didn’t want Jews; we were Jews.

-          From Elinor Lipman’s novel The Inn at Lake Devine

On the flight to Raleigh, I sneezed, and the cough drop I’d been sucking on shot from my mouth, ricocheted off my folded tray table, and landed, as I remember it, on the lap of the woman beside me, who was asleep and had her arms folded across her chest.

-          From David Sedaris’s collection When You Are Engulfed in Flames

They were supposed to stay at the beach a week, but neither of them had the heart for it and they decided to come back early.

-          From Anne Tyler’s novel The Accidental Tourist

Elinor Mackey is cleaning out her purse, trying to lighten her load, wondering how a broken sprinkler head wound up among the contents, when she first learns that her husband, Ted, is having an affair.

-          From Lolly Winston’s novel Happiness Sold Separately

My friend Levine had only a few months to go on his doctoral dissertation, but when, one Sunday afternoon at Acres of Books, he came upon the little black paperback by Dr. Frank J. Kemp, he decided almost immediately to plagiarize it.

-          From Michael Chabon’s short story “A Model World”

When you’re seventeen and you’re the gay son of a Baptist preacher from Dallas, Texas, and you have a lisp and a drawl and a musical gift and you were named Oral because an angel told your daddy to do so in a dream, then New York City can seem like it’s saving your life.

-          From Mark Ray Lewis’s short story “Scordatura”

Shut up he explained.

-          From Ring Lardner’s novel The Young Immigrants

It is no longer so hot here that you want to take off all your clothes and pour ice water all over yourself, so that means that it’s possibly safe to think about love again.  We’ve been in a love  moratorium for some time now on the East coast. It’s a safety issue. You can’t survive long if you get too close to another human being when the temperature and humidity are both in the triple digits.

But hey, it’s 10 p.m., and the mercury has fallen to a mere 86 degrees, so game on.

Could we take a moment to think about “The Bachelorette”?

This is only my first season watching this show, and yet already it has  introduced me to a whole new way of talking and thinking about love. Until now, I figured that falling in love was some kind of mysterious emotional response between two people, something that comes on without warning and shakes you to your very foundation–but now I see that Real Love is something you can catch, like measles or cholera.

How, I ask you, did this concept for a TV show ever get off the ground–the idea that you could take a whole bunch of hunky guys and one perky, cute woman…and presto, by the end of a season, she could go on enough dates and ask enough questions that she would catch herself a good case of love.

And yet…I can’t seem to look away.

Each week the poor bachelorette seems to me to be on the verge of a psychotic break, so distressed is she that she might not fall in love by the time the season ends. Every week she has to eliminate yet another contestant who didn’t spark her hormones, and now time is running out, and just how many more romantic locations can she and the remaining men be thrown into, while they wait for the mysterious igniting of the human spirit to happen to them?

I love the way they all agonize over the rose ceremony at each show’s end, and then switch to outright joy and optimism when they find out where they’re going next, as if love just might exist in the very next location they get to.

“Iceland!” she’ll squeal for the cameras, her eyes as bright as buttons. “I just know I’ll fall in love in Iceland!”

Worse, though, are the poor guys in the show, who have to keep declaring over and over again from the initial meeting onward that they already are in love. America asks that they appear to be pining away, as they look into the camera with hangdog faces and one after another, intone, “I really feel a connection to Ali.” Meanwhile, the producers of the show keep thinking up new ways for them to be humiliated: they have to sing in public, write love poems and read them aloud, perform in a Broadway show half-naked, wrestle Turkish athletes–all the while looking both tragic and hopeful, mournful and excited, manly and sensitive.

It’s the craziest thing in the whole world.

And yet I am inexplicably hooked. What if the world really did work this way? It would be fascinating. Think of it: if you had a pool of eligible applicants, unlimited money and bottles of wine, and chances to sit in a castle watching them all wrestle for your love–could you truly pick out The Right One and know it was all going to work out forever? We are being asked to believe this is possible.

As a novelist, I know this isn’t true! The human heart, with all its twists and turns and inexplicable appetites, will surely never work that way. We go head over heels at the whiff of a certain perfume, or a sidelong glance from across a subway car, from a casual remark, the tilt of a head, the pull of fabric, or even a fleeting memory. As humans, we don’t always go for the most appropriate candidate, either. We pine for people we can’t have. We wake in the middle of the night, tormented–and we love our torment as much as we love the whoosh of feeling that set us out on the roller coaster ride of love in the first place.

Which is, of course, why over time the show hasn’t had a very good success rate at developing real-life marriages once the cameras have gone away, and ABC-TV isn’t supplying the artificial pizzazz. You don’t need castles and romantic locations, rolling cameras, and a whole bunch of good-looking hunks in order to find love.

I know I’m in the minority here (even in my own house) but I think what  would be really great would be if at the last show, if Ali would simply turn to the TV audience and tell us the truth.  “I guess the right guy wasn’t here after all,” she could say. “I don’t know what it is, but I just can’t make myself fall in love with any one of these people! So I’m going to take all the rest of these roses and go home. Maybe I’ll start a great garden somewhere, or maybe I’ll take some time off and and do whatever it was I meant to do anyway before I came on this crazy show: just wait for love to sneak up on me like the miraculous force it really is.”

Maybe what Ali needs is to hear from somebody like my Aunt Mary, who used to to tell me, “Child, love won’t come when you’re looking for it. You have to give up on it, and that’s the only time it comes.”

I am barricaded in the basement of my house, where many of the degrees mercifully can’t find me. It is only about 100,000 degrees down here. Upstairs the air is brutal. And my kitchen–my second-floor, un-airconditioned kitchen, on the south side of the house, is filled with four college-age boys, whom I hired two weeks ago to come and paint the cabinets. (This was back when the weather was spring-like and cool, before I knew that we were headed for the fourth circle of hell.)

I feel bad that painters–child painters, yet–have to come to my house and do physical labor on a day when even the federal government is telling everyone to lie down and be quiet and for god’s sake, don’t go outside. I apologized profusely when they arrived for neglecting to get central air conditioning in advance, so their lives would be easier. And I gave them two electric fans and told them about the pitchers of iced tea and lemonade in the refrigerator, all for them.

They gave me a blank look. It was the blank look of people who have never heard the words “lemonade” and “iced tea,” even though they speak English. It was the same blank look I’d seen earlier when I’d inquired as to the finish they’d bought: flat, satin, high-gloss enamel, which?

“Um, let me look at the can,” the ringleader said. He is the apparent spokesman, the same guy who came and gave me the estimate on the job two weeks ago. We’ve already done a few rounds as far as scheduling goes, he and I. He had promised to come one day last week and then couldn’t because, as he put it on the telephone in the confident style of a teenage boy, as though this will nail down the reason in my head and create no further questions: “There’s a lot of stuff going down here, mean. I mean, I totally take responsibility for blowing you off, but there’s so much shit going down, you wouldn’t believe it. I mean, totally.”

And now it was his job to come and tell me that the finish of the paint he’d bought was called “flat.”

“Oh, no, no, no,” I said. “You can’t put flat paint on wood. Not on kitchen cabinets. You need satin. At least satin. And, also, just so you know, you should always ask your customers what kind of finish they have in mind.”

I am no expert when it comes to painting–I can’t be trusted to use tape, for instance, and I’m fairly clumsy with paint splatters–but I feared I was going to have to give a remedial course in Rudimentary Cabinet Painting, as well as Customer Relations for the Entrepreneur. (I was already mapping out the unit on Acceptable Excuses for Not Doing What You Promised, with a separate section on the proper use of cuss words.)

“Oh, %^#*#*!  I bought the wrong kind!” he wailed. “The guy at the paint store didn’t say anything! And now I don’t even know if he’ll take it back!”

“He’ll take it back,” I said calmly. “Just explain to him what happened. Be firm, but be nice. He’ll mix another gallon for you. Have him call me if he gives you any trouble.”

He left and came back later with the right stuff. We all sighed in relief.

But I have to be honest here–it’s too hot for dishonesty–other issues have cropped up during the day, and we have had minor discussions on painting protocol. There are some things the Painting Experts forgot to tell these college boys before they gave them their own license to do this work. Here are just a couple of points we’ve had to go over:

• The importance of removing cabinet doors before painting them.
• Why sanding before painting just might have been a good idea.
• The importance of putting primer on wood cabinets before painting them, as well as the answer to the ever-important philosophical question: What IS primer, anyway?
• The necessity of doing two coats of paint, whether you forgot to estimate for that or not. (“But I’m losing money on this job!” he wailed. “Will you pay me more?”)
• The importance of drinking liquids on a hot day.
• The importance of not letting the plastic drop cloths fall on stove burners that you have accidentally turned on and which are now causing an odd, acrid, burning smell to permeate the house.

Still, the kitchen looks good, and I have kept my temper in check. We’ll never be able to be in there to enjoy it again, of course–it’s far too hot to ever cook, and I’m still not convinced that the whole thing isn’t going to be burned down by child painters before I can get them safely out of here.

But it looks good. And we’ve all learned a lot.

My very own husband got hooked on the first episode–a night I was busy with a work assignment–and since then he hasn’t missed a moment of anything “Lost”-related. We are not DVR people, so this has meant that Tuesday nights are hallowed times, not to be disturbed. Honestly, I haven’t seen anything like this level of sacred time around my house since the Cubs made the playoffs a season or two ago.

I missed the first few shows, and by the time I was interested in seeing what it was all about, even I could see it was far too late. The plot was already in such a twist that there was never any hope for people who didn’t witness the initial plane crash. We who were busy on a Tuesday night years ago have, sadly, been shut out of the entire phenomenon.

Tuesday nights Nick goes down into the family room, and from there, I can hear him reacting to each twist and turn, shouting at the television set, beseeching characters to be careful.

The other night he moaned, “OH NOOOOO!” and then fell silent. Later, when he came upstairs, he was quiet and pale. He went immediately to the computer to connect with the other watchers.

“Are you okay?” I said.

“Sun and Jin are dead,” he said grimly.

He was so silent and sad for the rest of the evening that I felt as though I needed to send some condolences to somebody.

But to whom? What is this show about, anyway? There have been times when I’ve tried hard to find out. Apparently it’s got everything–that’s all people seem to be able to say about it. The Bible, literature, free will, faith v. determinism, and whether a person can survive in the world by themselves: all that is there. There’s also, the way I understand it, something called flash sideways, polar bears, and a frozen donkey wheel.

“How can you not love a show that is written by people who can think up stuff like that?” my friend Mary asked me. “Come on. A frozen donkey wheel! That’s great stuff.”

Once I made the mistake of actually asking to be told the plot. It was like listening to someone’s odd, rambling dream.

“The show starts with these people in a plane crash on a deserted island. The survivors all gather themselves and at first they’re just lost, hoping to get home, and you learn about how each character got there by flashbacks. Then they start seeing polar bears and a column of smoke that shows up and kills people, and they find an ancient wooden sailing ship, and then they learn there are other people on the island, violent and mysterious people. And there’s a secret metal hatch in the ground, and they discover that there is a whole labyrinth of underground stations by something called the Dharma Initiative there since the 1970s. The mysterious Others not only try to torture them and kidnap some of them, they tell them they can never leave the island because the island needs to be protected for some reason, yet some of the survivors do manage to go back home, but their lives are more miserable when they get home than when they left. They feel guilty about the survivors, and they decide they need to go back somehow. Then some of them go back in time. It culminates in them setting off a hydrogen bomb as a way to reset time so that the plane crash never happened. What it in fact seems to have done is to set up two parallel universes…”

STOP! Please. I beg you.

But of course it’s ending next Sunday, flaming out in a full evening of television that is sure to leave more questions than it answers, according to all the “Lost” pundits. My own husband is preparing himself for being cut loose from this show, and I’m not sure yet how he’s going to survive it. Life is going to have an emptiness to it that I’m not sure the “American Idol” finale is going to be able to fill.

My friend Ben–who also happened to miss the first season or two–said he’s attempting to go back in time, Netflixing the first episodes so that he has a hope of understanding one day what this whole thing was about. He figures in about seven years, he’ll be able to talk intelligently about the show.

Right now he still knows nothing.

I told him I know something that might help him.  “There’s something called a frozen donkey wheel, and it’s buried underground and if someone turns it, it sets off an electromagnetic response that moves the island,” I said.

“Please,” he said. “Don’t tell me anything more.”

“Come on,” I said. “This is great stuff! How can you not love a show that has something called a frozen donkey wheel?”

People are never happy about the way spring is going, that’s the one lesson you learn living here.

But this spring has been so fantastic that it could give lessons to all the other springtimes.

Here’s the blueprint for a perfect spring. You need an early hot spell. Let the temp go up to 70 or even 80, even though it still looks like mid-winter outside. Take three days of this. In a row—that’s important. A day of 80 followed by a day of 50 and then four days later, another day of 75—that’s not going to get you jumpstarted into any kind of spring worth its salt.

Once you’ve had three days near 80 degrees, the magic has happened. Buds get the idea that maybe they could bloom sometime. The leaves wake up, stretch, and start stirring inside those sticks. Crocuses and blades of grass: everything starts poking its way through the soil. Encouraged, the sun starts hanging a bit higher in the sky, calling out to the blossoms.

And then it turns cold again, but you don’t care. Cheer this coldness, in fact. You don’t want it to stay warm. That’s where a  lot of springs make their mistake. They think that if they work themselves up to 80 degrees one day, we all will demand that every day. But no, we don’t want that. We don’t mind if it goes back down to 50, because the spark has been ignited, and spring is launched.

If it gets too hot, the tulips poke up through the soil one morning, unfurl their leaves by noontime, their feverish red petals by 3 p.m., and then are wilted and tired by 6. Like some of the girls you knew in high school.

But some cold weather after hot: that is the true secret to spring. The tulips hang around, coquettish in the morning chill, lasting long after we had any right to expect them. They are there to welcome the dogwoods, to cheer on the forsythia, to smile at the magnolia.

It’s April 29, and some people I know have mowed their lawns TWICE, and everything has this soft, fresh, apple-green look to it. The air is chilly, the petals blow on the breeze, skitter across the yard, and yet there are more still opening up on the trees, in the shrubbery. It is not winter, it is not summer. It is clearly and plainly spring, young and bright and feverishly, sexily blooming everywhere you look.