Preparing for the day

I've been thinking about New York City recently -- what I like about it, what I don't.  I moved here because it's where the entertainment industry is, but if I could live anywhere in the world, I think I'd live in a coastal town where I can smell the fresh breeze and the leaves and where I hear seagulls and waves rather than delivery trucks and car horns.  I hate crowds and I hate loud noises, to the point that I always have earplugs in my purse, and when I'm in a crowd I can't escape, I have to internally retreat in my mind and try to block out my surroundings.  This doesn't make New York City an ideal fit for me.  But at the same time, I recognize that all those people give me ideas about which to write, inspire thought and creativity, and give me a better understanding of the vast variety of human quirks and personalities that exist in the world.  I can get story ideas while just waiting for my train at Penn Station or walking down the street, watching people and imagining their conversations and motivations.  No place else could I get such a variety of characters in such a concentrated space.

And perhaps no place is better for people watching and listening than the New York City subway system.  I was reminded of this today while riding the subway to work.  This morning on the subway train, a woman and a man sat down next to me.  The man was thin, wearing a jacket too thick for the day's temperature and sporting a short, unkempt beard.  His female companion's hair looked like she'd either loaded it with mousse as she blow-dried it to within an inch of its life or she hadn't touched it in days.  Tattoos adorned her arms, fake nails were carefully pressed in place on her fingertips, and a giant faux-leather purse rested on her lap, the thin leather-like covering broken over the underlying fabric in many places as the purse's contents stretched it to its maximum space potential.

The couple settled into their seats, and without saying a word, the woman opened her purse, took out a package, and carefully removed a brand new electric razor from its plastic box, opening the packaging with a tool so that she was careful not to rip the plastic.  She silently handed the razor to the man, who proceeded to shave himself on the train.  The buzzing hum of the razor was the only human-generated sound in a car filled with people still waiting for their caffeine to kick in, and heads immediately started twitching, looking for the source of the sound.  Soon everyone was staring, some people were laughing, some were shaking their heads, some were muttering....   The couple didn't care.  Subway grooming was apparently just business as usual to them.  Eventually, the woman took the razor from the man and started shaving his neck for him.  When she finally finished, satisfied that her companion was sufficiently groomed and presentable for whatever the day held in store, she re-opened the plastic package from which the razor had come, fit the razor neatly back in just the way it had been, pressed the edges of the packaging together to seal it back up, got the receipt out of her purse, and put the package with the razor in a plastic bag.

"I'll return it this afternoon," she told the man.

Then she took out a bottle of pills, popped a few, and told the man to hold out his hand, into which she sprinkled a few pills, which he immediately took.

Before long, both of them were leaning at strange angles, eyes mostly closed, mouths hanging open, comfortably vacant.

But at least he had a good shave.

My take

I wrote a long post over a year ago in response to an article in the Chicago Reader about sexual abuse in the theatre.  I abandoned it and left it unposted because I was worried about how I would come off in it -- if it would scare away producers from hiring me because it looked like I would be difficult.   Time went by, and I forgot about the post.  Then Harvey Weinstein happened, and the #metoo thing started on social media, and I was seeing posts by people with whom I've worked, talking about all the abuse they've faced in theatre.  I was seeing posts by actors about how they went to their stage managers to complain and their stage managers did nothing.  I find that reprehensible.  But as a stage manager myself, I don't always have an obvious person to go to if an actor is harassing me.  I thought of one particular actor on one particular show who harassed me.  He was also a producer on the show and a close friend of the director, and he stayed late one evening after rehearsal the first week and made me uncomfortable by asking numerous personal questions about myself, ending by inviting me to some event with him.  When I declined, he continued over the following weeks to harass me about hanging out with him.  He told me I wasn't "warm" enough because I didn't socialize with him outside rehearsal, told me part of my job was to make the actors comfortable, and that included socializing....  When I rebuffed him, he took his inappropriate behavior onstage -- first in fight-call (running the fight scenes before a show) and then into the show itself, even once glaring up at the booth during a performance after purposely doing something he shouldn't have onstage.  Eventually he sent me a long, inappropriate e-mail (asking me not to share the e-mail with anyone) about our "relationship," and when he didn't get the response he wanted from the e-mail, he even cornered me after a show one night when I left the theatre after everyone else, informing me he was purposely trying to "razz" me because he was failing to get a reaction from me and I wasn't being "warm" enough and my lack of warmth and friendliness towards him was making him struggle with his performance on stage.  I went to the (male) general manager, whom I remember chuckling and sighing as if the actor were an annoying child.  The GM said he'd do something if the show were running longer, but we were already set to close in a week or two by then, and the actor wasn't a member of Actors' Equity Association, so the union couldn't do anything even though I am a member.  I didn't push the issue, because I knew a lot of the work I get as a stage manager is because I'm so low-drama, and because I didn't consider the actor a serious physical threat as long as I was never alone with him.  However, I refused to interact with the actor in any way at all after that, so I figured I might as well join the GM in his attitude that we were close to closing.  I turned over running fight-call (which the actor was routinely turning into an opportunity to harass me) to my Assistant Stage Manager and stopped giving the notes that it's my job as a stage manager to give, since the actor was unable to take my notes without harassing me.  I interacted with the ladies in the show but completely avoided the men backstage.  I asked my ASM to wait for me every night so I would never have to leave the theatre and walk to the subway alone again, and I always had pepper spray in my hand as I left.

In the remaining time that the show ran and after the show closed, I told the story to friends as something to laugh over -- by laughing at the actor, I belittled him.  I shared with friends the e-mail he had sent me specifically because he had asked me not to, so it gave me a sense of power to expose him for the creep he is.  I remember passing my phone around, e-mail up on the screen, one night at a bar, enjoying that my friends were laughing at him and calling him names.  It gave me the power back and reduced him to a non-threatening laughingstock.

But both times after the show closed when he sent me e-mails about jobs, it didn't make me laugh -- it made me shudder and say "ick" when they popped up in my inbox, and I hoped he would stop e-mailing me.

So when I saw all the #metoos on Facebook and debated if I had a blog post about this subject in me, I searched my blog to see if I'd ever written about that actor and was unable to find anything... but there, sitting on my computer, was an abandoned post about the subject in general, along with notes about why I wasn't posting it and that it sounded like I was whining.  I'm still not posting it, because frankly it's not very well written and is way too long, and I couldn't even be bothered to finish rereading it myself, so I wouldn't expect anyone else to read it all the way through....   But I am posting this.  Because the problem isn't just big, powerful Harvey Weinstein.  It's the little people too. It's the little perverts; it's the people who think it doesn't matter because a show is closing soon; it's the directors who don't mind that their actors are gross people; it's the people who turn a blind eye; it's the fact that as a whole, the industry doesn't treat this profession as a job where people should treat their coworkers with the same respect with which they'd treat someone in an office.

When I first moved to New York after graduating college, I got a job as a Production Assistant on a show.  The Company Manager of that show made some vaguely inappropriate remarks to me backstage.  I don't remember what he said, only that he made me slightly uncomfortable.  One day, sitting in the lobby chatting to someone higher up on that show with whom I'd become friends, I told him about the comments -- I was talking as a friend, not as a PA complaining to someone more powerful -- and he immediately made a face and stood up, ready for a fight, asking if I wanted him to go say something for me.  I laughed and said no, it wasn't worth it.  It truly wasn't worth it -- the Company Manager was just a sad, middle-aged creepy guy trying to flirt with a 21-year-old girl, and in a perfect world guys wouldn't do that at work, but it seemed relatively harmless -- the man wasn't around more than once a week to hand out checks, and I'd experienced worse.  But my friend's response is the one I wish everyone would have.  He didn't laugh and brush it off, he didn't stop to think about the consequences of standing up for me, he didn't dismiss it as small and just business as usual, and he didn't just say, "oh, that sucks" and post his moral outrage on social media....  He knew it was wrong, and he was ready to put himself on the line for it.

We all need to be more like that.

Differing views on the purpose of theatre

Me: So are you seeing any theatre while you're here?
Him: No, not this time, but I do love seeing theatre here.  I've slept through some wonderful shows here.
Me:... I'm sorry, what?
Him: Oh yeah, I've gotten some great naps in. Opera, Broadway shows.  It's wonderful. Some great sleep. The shows here are so great.
Me: You sleep through Broadway shows?
Him: The good ones, yeah.  They're so relaxing and peaceful and calming. It's the ultimate compliment if I sleep through them.
Me: What shows do you find relaxing and peaceful and calming?
Him: Hmm. Well, Wicked. I got some great sleep in at Wicked.
Me:  Wicked's not supposed to be relaxing and peaceful and calming.
Him:  Parts of it are.
Me: They're not supposed to be.  You're not supposed to sleep through it. 
Him: No, it's a compliment. That's what I want out of theatre.
Me: But the artists who create it want the opposite.  They want you to feel heightened emotion and thought while you're engaged in it.  I don't think anyone who put work into a show would consider it a compliment that they put someone to sleep during the show.
Him: Oh yeah they would. I want to be relaxed and take a nap after being "on" all day. That's what the best theatre does to me.  It's a compliment, really. If it's really good, I'll sleep through it. That's why I go.
Me: ...That's an expensive nap.

Circle

My parents married in the summer of 1981.  Both Harry Chapin fans, they bought tickets to see him for the first time in concert on their honeymoon.  Then on July 16th, a day before their wedding, Chapin was tragically killed in a car crash (or had a heart attack that led to the car crash).  Judy Collins played that concert for Harry.

I don't remember a time in my life without Harry Chapin's music.  I think my dad played his records more than any other artist's, and, partly because of the honeymoon concert my parents never got to see, Harry Chapin more than anyone else for me held an aura of what could have been.  He has always been as much an author to me as a musician, telling elaborate stories in his songs that could make you cry or make you laugh (or sometimes both in the same song).  He could make you think, make you question, make you see the world and people around you in a new way.  He even found his way into one of my college admission essays.  Where other folk singers tended to express their opinions through generalizations, Chapin found the extraordinary in the ordinary, made every feeling achingly personal, and made the listener reach their own conclusions.  He wrote of dreams, of missed opportunities, of pain, of love, of regular people who hold all the complexities of life within themselves....  To this day, the lyrics of a song are at least as important to me as the music, and that's partly because of Chapin.  The words were never secondary to him.  They merged seamlessly with the music, each helping the other to express a thought or feeling or bring a character to life.  Who else could write a ten-minute song about the University of Texas tower shootings, working into the brain of Charles Whitman ("Sniper"), or an eight-and-a-half-minute song about a man in a diner in a small town where, as Harry put it, "I spent a week there one afternoon" ("A Better Place To Be")?   He could look at one line in a newspaper review about a concert singer and write an entire story about it ("Mr. Tanner") or write a song that rivals The Sixth Sense in its breathtaking twist ending, and which interested both Broadway and film producers ("The Mayor of Candor").

The people who populate Harry Chapin's story songs have always been as real to me as my favorite book characters, their pains and joys and worries as palpable to me as if I knew them myself. After  listening to "Dreams Go By," my imagination would go off wondering about the old lady who said she should have been a ballerina or the man who had "songs I should have sung."  What had deterred them from their dreams?  Were their lives lonely and full of regret?  Were they nearly content with an almost-forgotten yearning?  What had happened to derail them?  I would imagine the future of the couple in "Dirt Gets Under Your Fingernails" -- one of Chapin's few "dream" songs with a fully happy ending, where the characters seized their dreams in time and opened new chapters that were sure to be full of both joy and new challenges.  I also wondered about all the characters he never got to breathe life into.  Whom would I have come to know through his music that I never will?  What stories were never told?

There are relatively few videos of Chapin performing live.  As any Harry Chapin fan knows, the live versions of his songs are an entirely different experience from his studio recordings.  The emotion he poured into them is unparalleled.  He would find new layers, changing tempo, notes, rhythms, even lyrics.  He would change "But of course she let him go" to "So of course she let him go" one night, entirely changing a character's motivation.  He would growl a word instead of making it flow like butter, pause to hold the audience in suspense, and fill every song to the brim with emotion.  Fortunately, in response to fans' recognition of the difference between his studio and live performances, Chapin released two live albums, but there is still too little footage of him live, and the one bootleg tape my parents did have was ruined in a faulty VCR.

So I knew I would never see him live in person, and I took it for granted that though I knew my way around every one of his songs, they would never come to life in front of me.

And then my fiancé's work friend, who knows I'm a big Harry Chapin fan and whose own childhood was full of Chapin's music (albeit as contemporary music which she had the opportunity to see live numerous times as a teen growing up in the New York area), told him that Harry Chapin's band from all those years ago was performing a concert of his music with Harry's two younger brothers, Tom and Steve Chapin, and both Tom's and Harry's daughters.  Of course I had to go.  But I admit that partially it was just to have the experience of seeing them.  Though both brothers performed with Harry and I knew their voices from the 70s, I had no idea how they would have held up after all these years, or what the beautiful voice of bassist "Big John" Wallace would sound like 36 years after the last recording of it I had heard.

When we took our seats in the tiny auditorium, which appeared to be a converted public school (and which, true to Harry's spirit, was accepting food donations), my fiancé's friend turned to me and said, "Well, Jessica, I think it's safe to say you are by far the youngest one here!"  I told her that's normally the case with music I like, but as we looked around at the audience, I had to admit that this was a new extreme even for me.  Almost the entire audience was in their 60s or 70s.  She pointed out to me at intermission that I was coming at the concert from a very different perspective from her and everyone else there.  For them, this was a nostalgia visit, a trip back in time to one of their favorite artists from an era long gone by.  Most of these audience members had seen Harry live and the audible sniffles were a testament to the fact that this concert made them miss him even more.

But for me, the concert was something entirely different.  From the first notes of "Sunday Morning Sunshine," when Tom Chapin's voice, having descended over the years from his smooth tenor to a gravelly mirror of Harry's, sang Harry's words, I felt like I was watching the most surreal concert ever.  Most of the audience might have been transported back in time, but I was transported to an alternate reality -- to a world I had long thought closed off to me, where Harry Chapin's characters could come to life in front of me.  I saw Mr. Tanner take shape, felt his heartbreak and his joy as he lost and then regained his ownership of his passion in life; I saw the loser radio DJ of "WOLD" come to life, saw Harry himself as a taxi driver in his famous "Taxi"; and perhaps most affecting for me, I saw Tom Chapin bring to life one of my favorite of Harry's songs, "Any Old Kind of Day."  I think it's one of the most understated of his songs, and its perfection and power lie in the complete and utter ordinariness of the day depicted by its singer.  Not quite a story song, it's more like the prologue to so many of his other "dream" songs -- songs that speak of big dreams that were neglected over the years, of passions and goals not pursued....  "Any Old Kind of Day," though, shows not the effect of dreams getting abandoned over years but how those dreams have a way of slipping away one day at a time on the beautiful, cloudless, pleasant days that are "just an any old kind of day, the kind that comes and slips away" -- on days where there was no big ache, no big pain, and you think, "there's time enough for thinking come tomorrow."  As an adult, the song has become to me the saddest of Chapin's, and no other song works more to get me up off the couch and working.  It was perhaps the only time in the evening that I didn't have an incredulous smile glued to my face.

The next generation of Chapin children have picked up the mantle proudly from their fathers, still singing to change the world and make it a better, kinder place, and the evening was peppered with their songs.  There might not be as many people listening anymore -- maybe overly produced, label-generated music will rule the airwaves from now on -- but it was wonderful to hear that there are still voices with intelligent, thoughtful stories to tell and emotions to color.

And I like to think that 36 years later, maybe I've finished my parents' honeymoon for them.

I'm turning my blog over to my cat today. . .

Sometimes your day just really needs a picture of a cute cat who has a heart mark.  My cat has a heart mark. So in case you're one of the people who needs that, here ya go:

I'd like to thank . . .

I've heard some actors say that they'll find themselves composing awards acceptance speeches in the shower.  Today in the shower I found myself doing what I suppose is a writer version of that: I was absentmindedly composing a very detailed acknowledgements section of a book.  I wasn't just coming up with the names I wanted to thank -- I was composing exactly what I wanted to say about them.  And this wasn't for just any general book. This acknowledgements section was specifically tailored to a middle-grade book about a girl fighting her way through grade school and high school as she finds herself.

That would all be great -- and maybe not that weird -- except that's not the book I'm writing.  I'm writing a book about a young woman working in the city.  It has nothing to do with school.  Or kids.

So I suppose now I'll have to write a book to go with the acknowledgements section that I have so beautifully and eloquently composed.

In this hypothetical acknowledgments section, I thank a lot of teachers -- my first grade homeroom teacher for seeing me for me and telling my parents that all the other teachers at the school were wrong; my 9th and 11th grade history teacher for echoing her words in front of me 11 years later; my high school chemistry/ anatomy & kinesiology teacher for never giving me the benefit of the doubt and making me prove myself every day in class; my entire magical middle school and every teacher who walked the halls there, plus the actual hall (I said "halls" before because that's the expression, but really the middle school portion was just half of one hall) and its ratty orange carpet and the leaky trailer outside that we'd have classes in that we called the Taj Majal and which caused me to be pooped on by a bird one morning as I headed out to class there....

But there were two teachers this currently bookless acknowledgements section includes that specifically had something to do with my writing.  So I'm going to write about them here.

One was my third grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Kemper.  In order to discuss how Mrs. Kemper was so great, I have to back up to kindergarten.  I was always the youngest one in my grade, and when I was in kindergarten, my kindergarten teacher (a horrid, vile woman whom I remember as if she were a villain from Matilda -- she's also, curiously, about ten feet tall in my memories) told my parents at a parent-teacher conference that I should repeat kindergarten.  My parents immediately bristled because they knew that would be wrong for me, and they asked her to explain why.  Was I not doing great in kindergarten?  I had friends and was doing just fine with all the activities, was I not?  Mrs. Villainess said that yes I was, but kids who are too young for their grade break down in the third grade.  "She's doing fine now, but you just wait and see.  She'll totally fall apart in the third grade."  (She also said it was because I misidentified an umbrella as a "carousel" on a test, which was actually because Mrs. Villainess had bad hearing and didn't understand I said "parasol" because I loved parasols ever since seeing them in Mary Poppins and at Disney World vendor stands, and I had my own pink parasol with frilly white trim that my mom had just bought me from a gardening store....)  So anyway, my parents assured Mrs. Villainess that A. I knew a carousel from an umbrella and had identified it as a parasol, and B. I would be bored repeating kindergarten and she was just saying that because the school had a quota they were supposed to fill of students to hold back, and since I was young I seemed like an easy target.  Mrs. Villainess got all villainy and (after insisting I couldn't know what a parasol is) said something along the lines of, "She'll fall apart in the third grade! And it will be too late then!! Don't say I didn't warn you! Just you wait and see!!" (and then in my mind she does an evil villain cackle and her cape billows behind her and her staff sparks fireballs).

So I went to the first grade, and I was fine.  I went to the second grade, and I was fine.  I went to the third grade, and, to absolutely no one's amazement except that horrible, vile kindergarten teacher's, I was fine.  In fact, I was better than fine.  Third grade was my favorite school year.  Third grade was a blossoming year for me, and I think I owe that in part to Mrs. Kemper.  Mrs. Kemper was everything I thought a third grade teacher should be: pretty, warm, wonderful at reading books out loud, and an excellent listener at recess when I sometimes preferred to sit on the bench and talk to her rather than play with the other children.  I'd always had a penchant for sitting on the bench with teachers at recess, and previous teachers would frequently tell me after a few polite exchanges, "You need to go play with the other kids."  I understand their motivation for that, but I was well adjusted and had plenty of friends, and sometimes I simply wanted to talk -- or even just sit on the bench quietly and watch -- rather than play, and I got miffed by being told I couldn't.  But on days when I preferred a bench in the third grade, Mrs. Kemper never told me I should leave it.  She listened to whatever I wanted to talk about -- our cat and dog, the book we were reading in class or the one I was reading at home, my summer vacation, my ballet lessons....  She also was my first teacher to give journal assignments.  She would assign a topic in class to write about in our journal, and if we didn't finish it in class we had to take it home as homework.  I had never had homework before, and I was so excited and so eager for homework that I wrote extra long journal entries to ensure that I'd have to take it home to finish it and could have my first "big-kid" homework.  Those journal entries were the first time I wrote regularly about the world around me, and those writings didn't just go into a void -- Mrs. Kemper wasn't reading just to ensure completion or to check for grammar and syntax issues; she commented on my thoughts and experiences in the margins, posed questions both of genuine interest to her and to make me think more myself, and generally made me feel like my writing was actually engaging someone rather than being just "homework."   I loved journaling in that class, and I've never stopped.  And my approach to writing a journal or blog -- to write like I'm talking to one person I know and trust rather than to an inanimate book or screen or to a group of readers out in cyberspace -- came from that class. 

Plus, I didn't fall apart in the third grade.  So Mrs. Kemper was great, and she will definitely one day be in my acknowledgements section.

The second teacher my shower-writing thanked was my sixth grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Powell.  Sixth grade was my first year at my new middle school after my parents pulled my brother and me from the school we'd been in for the last six years.  The longer we were at the elementary school, the worse things had gotten for us, both in terms of bullying and in terms of the school not being the right fit for us academically.  To put it succinctly, the school's academics were bad because they weren't the school's primary focus, and from third through fifth grade, my language arts teachers were horrible.  They taught irony and sarcasm with identical definitions and shut me down when I tried to have a discussion about it, just repeatedly telling me with a face full of frustration that I was wrong; they collectively once told me I was wrong in saying "none is" rather than "none are," even though I was right and find it shocking that a language arts teacher doesn't know proper grammar and wouldn't bother to look it up when I asked; my 3rd/4th grade language arts teacher wrote on my report card that I had trouble listening and following directions, when in my mind it was that I was bored and thought her directions were unclear and insufficient.  Mostly I remember them sighing with frustration at me a lot and telling me I was wrong.  Writing was not a significant part of language arts classes there.  I don't remember writing one story or journal entry, and I don't remember how we wrote ever being of interest to the teachers -- only what we wrote about.  No one since Mrs. Kemper at that school had encouraged my writing -- to the contrary, it was the language arts teachers with whom I had the most conflict -- and worse, no one had bothered to teach any grammar (not surprising from a language arts teacher who thinks "none is" is wrong).

So anyway, I arrived at my new middle school, which had an incredibly rigorous academic program, and the first day of school in language arts class, Mrs. Powell handed out a grammar pretest.  I looked at it and felt butterflies in my belly.  It was like that dream where you have a test for a class you've never been to.  I had no idea what anything I was looking at was.  I had never diagrammed a sentence in my life and couldn't name the parts of speech.  I could use them correctly, but that's not what this test was checking for -- it was asking about objects of prepositions and adverbs and infinitives and diagramming sentences, and I had no idea what I was doing.  I raised my hand after she passed out the test and very nervously told her I'd come from a school that didn't teach grammar and I had never been taught any of this, and she reassured me that the grade wouldn't count; it was just for her to know where we all were.  That didn't make the butterflies go away, and I very anxiously filled out as much as I could -- which wasn't much.

I don't remember if we received a letter grade, but I remember knowing that I did horribly on it.

But Mrs. Powell said it was no big deal.  I can't know what I haven't been taught, she said.  That's what school is for.  That's why I was there.  To learn what I didn't know.

To be completely honest, I didn't like Mrs. Powell very much at first.  She was very strict -- by far the strictest teacher I had ever had.  But that turned out to be wonderful and exactly what I needed (and she actually wasn't very strict at all -- I was just comparing her to a ridiculously lax school).  I learned my grammar and I learned to diagram, but the best part about Mrs. Powell's class was that we wrote.  We wrote a lot.  We wrote short stories, we wrote essays, we wrote reports, we wrote poems....  And Mrs. Powell, rather than sighing with frustration at me and telling me I was wrong and a bad listener and not following directions, told me I was good.

One assignment we had after reading the book Johnny Tremain was to write a new chapter to end the book after the existing last chapter.  I loved the assignment and loved making the ending I wanted to a book I had loved but whose ending wasn't entirely satisfying to me.  After Mrs. Powell read my chapter, she asked if she could read the chapter to the class.  I said yes, and when she was finished reading it, she said something that has stuck with me ever since.  After some student had said I should be a writer, Mrs. Powell, standing in the middle of the room and looking at me, nodded and said, "If she writes like this now, I can't wait to read what she writes when she grows up.  I look forward to reading it."

It was the first time anyone had said anything like that to me -- the first time a teacher had expressed that I could be a writer.  It made me wonder what I would write when I grew up.  I envisioned, years off into the future, sending my first book off to Mrs. Powell and eagerly awaiting her response, hoping it would live up to her expectations after my Johnny Tremain chapter all those years ago in the sixth grade....

The next year, Mrs. Powell got sick and died far too young.  She wasn't my teacher that year, and I remember during her brief fight thinking I had words trapped inside that I wanted to tell her, but they never formed and I never did, and she was the first person I ever knew who died.  I never told her how much it meant to me that she said she couldn't wait to read what I wrote when I grew up, that she encouraged my writing and told me I was good, but I hope she knew.  On this earth, she'll never get to read my adult writing, but I often think of her when I'm writing, picturing her sitting up there on a cloud reading my work.  I hope I make her proud.  And I thank her.