F is for...

Fans

Yesterday, I went to go see the opening day game for the Texas Rangers in Arlington.  My husband and I love baseball and the three years that we've lived in Texas, the Rangers have gone to the World Series twice.  We've been to several games, but we're usually seated in the cheap-o nosebleed section.  But not today.  These tickets were gifted to him and they were SWEET.

But, and there's always a but.  We were seated very near Josh Hamilton in the right field.  Josh Hamilton used to play for the Rangers but he left for the Angels after last season.  Mr. Hamilton had this to say about his time in Texas...

"Texas, especially Dallas, has always been a football town. The good with the bad is they're supportive, but they also got a little spoiled at the same time, pretty quickly. You can understand a really true, true baseball town. There's true baseball fans in Texas but it's not a true baseball town."

So, this did not sit well with Ranger fans.  They loved Josh Hamilton.  He was a player that could knock a ball out of the park and when he was good, he was really, really good.  But when he was bad, he liked to blame it on Red Bull and quitting nicotine and stuff like that.  Oh, Josh.  The mere mortals of the world who don't make millions of dollars have to do that humdrum/icky no fun stuff all the time and we still have to show up and do our best.

So, here you were, Josh, back in Texas.  And boy did the forty-eight thousand fans at today's game vocalize their dislike for you.

I didn't boo.  Or call him a traitor or bring up his drug and alcohol addictions.  I merely clapped when we struck him out.  I know why people feel the way they do about him, but I didn't want to focus on the negative.  I was enjoying the sun on my face, the bacon wrapped hot dog and a day with my husband at a ball game.  

Are you a baseball fan?  Who's your team?

E is for...

Editing.

I have been writing Death Becomes Us since January of 2009.  First I did research and immersed myself in the world of people who work with death  I met with an EMT and a coroner and a crime scene cleaner and some EMTs and a hospice nurse and a grief counselor and a death row inmate and a warden and a prison chaplain on death row and it was all very nice and I turned it in as my MFA thesis in 2010.

Once I finished school, I began to submit my proposal to agents.  (I suffer from premature submission,not obsessive compulsive editing, if you really want to know the truth.) One agent liked my voice but wanted the book to be more of a journalistic exploration into the professions of death workers. In other words, more about them, and less about me.  At this time, I realized that this book wasn't really about the people I was writing about.  Yes, they were important, but the journey was really about what happened to me--a middle aged woman with very little experience with death--when I started paying attention to it.  I will be the first to admit that some very weird, out there stuff began to happen.  It was like the universe was just putting stuff in front of me that worked so well for the narrative arc that I was like "NO WAY!"  And the universe was like "WAY."

Years passed. 2011, 2012.  I didn't even want to look at it.  I continued writing, but I couldn't see where it was going.  But now I do.  And now I'm breaking that sucker down into small little manageable chapters that I can spit shine and polish and submit to an editor on April 20th.  I really want to be traditionally published because that feels more like acceptance and love than the self publication route, but if I have to do it myself, I will.  I owe it to the people I wrote about.  Their stories are important.  My story is important.

Editing sucks.

Hey, guess what?  I'm bringing "Monday Mournings" back in May. No, not the TV show, my blog posts.  I need people to interview about their experience of death.  If you search on this blog for "Monday Mournings" you can see these posts.  The questions are simple.  Lots of people read them.  It drives traffic to your blog.  And it's beneficial to talk about death.  Heck, NPR just had a post on this very topic.

So, want to volunteer to be interviewed?  Pretty please with a cherry on top!

D is for...

Death.  NOT.  During the month of April, I'm taking a respite from the subject of death.  Okay, okay, I'll sneak a few things in because there is a day that's pretty important in April that deals with death.  Today, I let Gracie Wilde  pick my D topic and she said "Doors."

Well, the first thing that comes to mind is the band, the Doors.  So, here's a song to listen to while you read the rest of this rambling post.

The next thing I think of when I think of doors, is the quote, "When God closes a door, he opens a window."  My mom says this to me a lot.  I've had a lot of doors close and I've crawled through some half-open windows in the past few years.  When bad things happen, like death or job loss or house loss, it's hard to see anything good that comes from it.  We can't possibly see anything good from something that hurt us so much.  But, I have to say, it is when we are in the abyss that we do our best learning.  We come out stronger or we get closer to someone or we find joy in the simple things.

So, what do you think of when you think of doors?  What's your favorite Doors song?