A Space of One's Own

By Kerry Schafer

I've loved the posts this week, from those of my sister whores who have special writing spaces, and those who don't. It always fascinates me to get a peek into the world of another writer.

I do have a space.

I need one. This is because I have a concentration problem complicated by a complete and utter lack of will power.

My first writing desk was in the middle of the playroom when my kids were little. After that, it was the family computer, or the kitchen table, or the couch. All of these places are booby trapped. Middle of the playroom requires no explanation, other than that I find it not surprising that it took me ten years to complete my first novel. The family computer involves - well, negotiations with family. The couch is way too conducive to just falling over sideways into nap mode. And the kitchen table - well - there I seem to be fair game for any Viking, teenager, or cat with a problem, a question, or a "where did my socks go?" emergency.

I think Allison and Marcella are absolutely right about the space really being in your head, but for me I needed to make this physical - an acknowledgement that my writing life was important enough to deserve a space of its own.

So I appropriated the Mud Room as my office. Not that this is a perfect solution, of course. It is, after all, still a mudroom. The shoes & boots are stored here.

It's still part of the house and gets used by other people. For example, the Viking just stood by the door and sprayed mosquito repellent all over his masculine form which means it now reeks in here in a manner not conducive to writing.

None the less. There is a door. I can close it. And this signals to me, at least, that I have entered sacred space and it is time to write. This signal does not always reach the rest of the family. Even the noise blocking ear buds and music don't always shut them out, and I am frequently pulled out of a scene by a teenage hand on my shoulder. Or the feline helper demanding in and out through the door, or jumping in and out of my lap. Or a thundering Viking voice from the kitchen, asking "what happened to the sage?"

On weekends, when a lot is going on at home, sometimes I slip away to my favorite cafe. I have an understanding with myself that I am there to write. It assists me in setting that boundary. Sometimes I even come here when I could be writing home alone.

These are my preferred places, but certainly not the only ones. I still write at the kitchen table sometimes. Or in the car. I've been known to sneak in a few paragraphs at work. As to writing outside - well, I've tried that. I tend to get distracted by too much sun on the screen, mosquitoes, hummingbirds, whatever. Awesome window view from my office though, which this picture does not do any justice.

Love and Hate for Made Up Holidays

By Kerry Schafer

I must begin at the beginning with a question: What precisely is a Made Up Holiday? The phrase would imply that certain holidays exist which are implicit in the natural realm, brought into existence at the very dawn of time - rather like gravity or two plus two equals four. The closest we would ever come to that would be Sabbath days, and that is a can of worms I am not about to open. I think we'd probably have to agree that all holidays are made up, to some extent or another. And for the most part I have no problem with holidays. In fact, I kind of like them. They are a way to mark the seasons, to celebrate transitions. Take Christmas for example - in the middle of cold and snow and darkness, I look forward to the brightly colored lights, the traditional baked goodies that I only get once a year, the decorating of the tree. This is only natural. I grew up in a family where one year we actually delivered gifts to the neighbors by horse and sleigh. These were gifts that my mother made, and we rode through the dark, starry night with antique sleighbells jingling on our dappled grey. You don't experience that sort of idyllic event without it making an impression. I have very little against most of the holidays - I figure it's my responsibility to set boundaries and not engage in whatever things I don't want to do. The one I actually hate? Mother's Day. Yep, I'm evil. It seems to me that this is a day of totally unnecessary guilt and sadness. People like me, the disorganized type with no sense of time, are always scrambling at the last minute to send something that may or may not get to its destination in time. This is a small thing, and it's probably good for me. I keep thinking one year I will learn my lesson and get with the program nice and early. Fortunately, my mother knows better and accepts me just the way I am. But a lot of mothers who don't hear from their kids on mother's day dissolve into grief and despair. I see them on crisis calls, sometimes outright suicidal. "Obviously my kids don't love me. I didn't get flowers. I didn't get a card. They didn't even call." Sometimes there is guilt attached to this of the "I was a bad mother" variety. But more often this mantra gets relayed to said child, with a twist of expertly applied mother guilt. It gets worse. The probability that at some point in your life you won't have a mother to honor on this day is high. For those who have lost a beloved mother, the holiday only serves to rub salt into that wound. And then there are those who experienced abusive or neglectful mothers, who now feel guilt because they are supposed to honor their mother on this day, but they frankly just don't want to make contact ever again. Or what about the people who never knew their mother at all? Yeah. The list goes on. If you have a mother and she has been good to you, I say love her on every possible opportunity. Call her, send her cards just because. Tell her you love her. The Obligatory Holiday? It kinda sucks.

Conversations Over Time

By Kerry Schafer

It's been an interesting week here at the blog, but like Marcella, I've kind of dreaded my day to write on this topic. The truth is, I don't think about time travel very much.

Not that I don't find the topic fascinating. Some of my favorite books involve time travel.

I love Madeleine l'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet, and the way Charles Wallace travels from when to when with the unicorn. But much of why I love it it that Charles Wallace takes all of the risks while I curl safely up in bed reading about them.

Dirk Gently's Detective Agency - with the hilarious paradoxes it sets up - is another one of my favorites. I'm perpetually amazed by the number of people who not only have not read this book, but aren't even aware of it's existence. If I had to choose between the two Gently novels and the Hitchhiker's Guide books, I might just choose the Detective Agency and its sequel - The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul.

I also adore Pratchett's version of Time Travel, and the monks who manage bits of unruly time in Discworld.

But, this isn't exactly answering the question that was asked. Where would I travel in time, if I could?

My immediate reaction is one of sheer cowardice.

Shall I be safe in these travels? Will I be beheaded, enslaved, killed in an earthquake or volcano, consumed by a dinosaur? I know the perils in my own time and have come to grips with them. Navigating the social and physical elements that might want to kill me in another time freaks me out. Really - I'd much rather enjoy the vicarious adventures of a character in a book while I'm safe at home.

My curiosity, when it comes to time travel, lies in people. I should very much like to go back and have conversations with some folks - mostly writers, of course - and find out what made them tick.

Tea with Dickens, to discuss his thoughts on creating character and plot. A visit to Walden Pond for a nice long walk with Thoreau. An afternoon with Milton, to ask him how he managed to craft such long and beautiful poetry without ever seeing a word, and to find out whether his daughter resented having to write things down for him. Oh, and I would love to get in on one of those conversations between C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.

Imagine sitting around a campfire, or in one of the Viking Halls, and listening to the wandering bard actually sing the Beowulf story.

As for the future? No thank you. I don't think it's going to be pretty. I'd really rather not know.

To Follow Knowledge Like a Sinking Star...

By Kerry Schafer

"And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought."
(Tennyson, Ulysses)

What are you going to be when you grow up?

Good question. I haven't decided on the answer yet. My long suffering husband asked me this, when I enrolled in grad school to become a therapist. My answer?

As many things as possible.

I still think this is a good response, and very true. I have filled a lot of different roles in my life, some for fun and some for profit. I'd like to try out a few more. I have a distinct sympathy for Tennyson's Ulysses, who despaired at the idea that all of his adventures were over:

"How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rest unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little..."

Some of the things I have been:

• lumber piler
• housewife
• registered nurse
• secretary
• substitute teacher
• case manager
• counselor
• crisis worker

What's next? Well, the jury is out on that one. If somebody would only pay me, I might opt for professional student, but the lottery tickets I buy stubbornly refuse to be worth the paper they are printed on, and I have no rich relatives waiting to die and leave me a fortune.

I do have plans to begin an RN refresher course in the immediate future, and have been mulling the idea of adding a nurse practitioner designation to my repertoire. That would be a long, hard slog though - and all long hard slogs take time away from writing.

Ah, yes. Writing.

The one thing that has followed me through all of my different phases of being. In fact, as I look back on what I've written here I'm realizing something.

I have not answered the question that I asked. All of this blog post has been about something entirely different, an answer to THIS question:

What do you want to DO when you grow up?

The answer to the first question, the real question - what do you want to BE - is different.

I want to be a writer, of course, and a writer I am already. I was a writer when I wrote that very first little poem about the wild roses in spring. (we will NOT be discussing whether I've always been a good writer.) All through grade school and high school and everything that came after, I have been a writer. Not being a writer would be as inconceivable to me as the idea of sitting around waiting to die was to Ulysses.

Will I be able to make a career out of writing? Only the writing gods know the answer to that one. I'd like that, of course. I would love for the BEING and the DOING to join forces and create a writing based career.

There are things I can do to increase the probability of that happening. I don't know what happens next, only that somewhere in the middle of whatever it is, I will be making stories out of it and putting words on the page.

They had to ask -

Honestly - I hate questions like this. What's your favorite book? Who is your favorite author? Who influenced you?

Human beings are susceptible creatures - any input influences us, whether we are aware of it or not - and I find the questions difficult to answer.

Look – I'm an omnivore. If I'm sitting still and nothing is going on that I must attend to, I'm reading. Literature at the doctor's office. Advertising fliers. The cereal box. Twitter. No, I wasn't reading at four like some of the Word Whores, I was probably six and I remember very clearly the intense pleasure of discovering that letters made words and words made stories and that I could read them all by myself without waiting on my mother. After that - I read whatever fell into my hands. I'm not clear in what order all of these came to me, but these are books that had to have had an influence, because I read most of them more than once.

As a child and teenager I read pretty much anything I could get my hands on. This was somewhat limited, as I grew up Seventh Day Adventist and went to a small Adventist school. The library was generally pretty "safe," and I can't clearly recall a lot of books from my childhood, although I think my reading leaned pretty heavily to horse stories: Black Beauty, Misty of Chincoteague, My Friend Flicka & Thunderhead. The last two of those, by the way, still stand up as damned good books. I remember a total breakdown in class round about 6th grade, when Black Gold was shot after a heroic race in which he broke his leg.

And then I discovered Little Women. I hunted down and read every book Louisa Mae Alcott ever wrote. Repeatedly. I think Jo was my role model – an independent tomboy who was forever getting in trouble and who wrote stories. Anne of Green Gables happened into my hands, and I read everything Lucy Maude Montgomery ever wrote, which led me to another role model – her character Emily, lesser known than Anne but a writer. Emily's books also have a touch of the occult, which opened my eyes and widened my world.

Charles Dickens. He remained my hero for years. I tracked down his books at the town library, every single last one with the exception of Edwin Drood. All these years later I still haven't read it, because it wasn't finished and why would I deliberately torment myself with something I'll never, ever know the end of? I read all of Jane Austen. Charlotte Bronte. Fell in love with the book Jane Eyre.

My mother was pretty much opposed to fantasy, and there wasn't any in the school library, so I came to it late. There were Arthurian stories in my library though, and I inhaled these. I waded through Ivanhoe. And then, when I was probably about 17 already, a friend handed me a copy of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

A fantasy lover was born on the instant. I read all of C.S. Lewis. Read and re-read Madeleine L'Engle. About a year later, on the bus during a long band tour, somebody was reading a big fat book called The Fellowship of the Ring. He obligingly handed it over when he was done with it and - well, I don't remember anything else from that entire trip, as he happened to have the trilogy.

I could, of course, go on forever. There are my current favorite fantasies, my favorite thriller writers, my favorite literary fiction. Everything influences me, but maybe not so much as those books from my youth.

The Myth of Perfection

The biggest problem with the concept of Perfection is that it's a myth. What does this word even mean? Everybody's idea of perfect is different. What it means to you is, I guarantee, different than what it means to me. Which means we're all expending precious reserves of time and energy pursuing a chimaera. I watched the movie Gattaca the other night. (Yes, I'm a little late to the party, but this is not surprising. A lacking sense of time is one of my flaws.) If you haven't seen it, or did see it when it came out and can use a refresher course, the hero of our story is born as a biologically natural child in a world where most parents sit down with a geneticist to select which traits they want for their offspring. Flaws such as poor vision, medical problems, or a tendency to violence are eliminated. Our hero is small for his size, has to wear glasses, and is genetically predisposed to heart disease. But he wants, more than anything, to travel in space. In order to make his dream come true, he must take on the identity of a biologically superior male. It's a great story, and part of what fascinated me was that the more people pursued the idea of perfection, the farther from it they seemed to get. Even the biologically superior characters experienced a sense of not being good enough, of not measuring up. When I was younger I spent a lot of time worrying about my physical flaws. I've got several annoying body parts, the primary being a forehead that doesn't know when to quit. For most of my life I tried hairstyle after hairstyle trying to disguise the damned thing. This pursuit was complicated by a determined cowlick that defied all of my attempts at a nice set of bangs. When I met the Viking, he kept telling me to just let it be. Celebrate your hair the way it wants to grow, be who you are. He actually means this. And really, if it comes down to it, yes there are things I'd like to change about my body but you know what? It's mine, forehead and all. It's familiar and comfortable. It's been with me for my entire life and has served me well. I really don't think I'd want to trade it in. Imagine looking in the mirror one morning and finding another face looking back at you. No thank you. My real struggle is with all of those other flaws. With never quite being enough - not smart enough, creative enough, talented enough. Never the perfect parent or the perfect partner and certainly never the perfect housekeeper. As for the writing - oh, lord - the insecurity there could flood the planet. But again - what is this Perfection that I strive for? During the first year after my husband's death, when I was juggling grief, and grieving kids, and learning to single parent, and a job, and my classes for the Master's degree I happened to be in the middle of, I failed to get an A in one of my classes. This devastated me. I wept. I was seeing a Psychologist at the time, for grief therapy. He was a gifted counselor, brutally honest at times with truths that I needed to hear. He listened to me bemoan my failure and then had the gall to suggest that I was being narcissistic. I was furious. How dare he say such a thing? Obviously I didn't think I was better than everybody else, I had FAILED. But he was right. To somehow think that we should be perfect - which automatically implies being better than the others - is a narcissistic belief. What is so special about me that I should be a better student, a better parent, a better writer even, that the rest of the world? Nothing of course. The only person I have any business competing with is myself. These days I try to aim for my own personal best, rather than comparing myself to others. Of course I fail at this, as well, but it's a failure I can live with.

Men are Like a Box of Chocolates...

by Kerry Schafer

"Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates, you never know just what you're going to get."~Forrest Gump

There is an amazing assortment of delectable men in this world. Sadly, as I've grown older and wiser I've been forced to notice that most of the time, if they're pretty on the outside, the inside is very likely something not worth the calories. Of course I'd be lying if I said I didn't look, or sometimes even drool. Even so, my tastes have changed over the years – I'll choose a well seasoned beef steak over that bit of candy any day. Ripped abs and huge muscles? Decorative, but really not at all what turns me on. It's all about eyes, voice, intelligence, charm.

It all began with pretty boys – not surprising, since I was probably 13. First heart throb I recall?

Yep. I confess to a huge teen infatuation with Leif Garret. It's possible I may once have kissed a picture of him in the dark. My next celebrity love was Parker Stevenson from the Hardy Boys.

Hey, at least it wasn't Shawn Cassidy.

Fast forward a few years, and I discover Robert Redford.

The blue eyes, the charming smile. Melt, melt, melt.

After that time blurs, and I don't remember chronological order, only that certain men made me weak in the knees. Here's another - Brad Pitt, as I first discovered him in A River Runs Through It.

Hmmm. Certain similarities to Mr. Redford - blond, blue eyed and rakishly charming.

Harrison Ford has been on my list since Star Wars. He has grown up so nicely, into a real MAN, not just a pretty boy.

This guy – Roch Voisine – beautiful voice, and he sings in French. Swoon.

I am a total sucker for accents and foreign languages, I admit. And speaking of voices – these two just need to talk to me:

The Cowardly Word Whore, or, Discretion is the Better Part of Valor

By Kerry Schafer

This is the point where I must sadly admit that I am weaponless. I considered this a normal state of affairs until I discovered that apparently, out of all of the Word Whores, I am the only one not trained in self defense.

Okay - I can hold a gun and figure out where the safety is and which end is the business end. I can load the shotgun and shoot something with reasonable accuracy. I've done some target practice with a pistol or two and I can hit a non-moving target. Some of the time. If an intruder came at me and I happened to be holding a loaded gun in my hand I could shoot to kill. Yep. Not a doubt. Uh-uh. None.

Knives? I'm good with knives. I can skin an apple. Dice a potato. Tomatoes are defenseless against my mad skillz.

Good ex-Canadian that I am, I grew up playing hockey with the boys, so I'm certain all of that wild stick handling serves the same purpose as quarter staff training. This is why I keep an old hockey stick under my bed. Next to the knife. And the shotgun. Oh - let's not forget the cast iron frying pan. And the cat. And the very large dog, who is not under the bed but outside the front door.

I'd like to say, like Marcella, that my brain is my weapon of choice. I'd love for that to be true. My favorite characters in both books and movies are the ones who overcome superior force by wit and cunning. Harrison Ford in his role as Dr. Kimble in The Fugitive, for example. Apart from the total hotness of Harrison Ford, whom I happen to adore, the ability of the movie character to survive by thinking his way through things makes me go all fan girly.

But the sad truth is, my brain takes vacations on a pretty regular basis. Particularly when I am stressed or anxious. All of those blonde jokes? Yep, they fit.

When I think about somebody attacking, I honestly don't think about weapons. I think about running away. Where would I run to, where could I hide? Could I get up into the attic? Run into the forest? Climb a tree?

"Discretion is the better part of valor," right? RIGHT?

Hmmm. Maybe it's time to take that self defense class I've been talking about. Sign up for martial arts. Get the Viking to take me out for some more target practice. Or maybe it would be best to start jogging every day, because I suspect when it comes to Fight or Flight, I'm probably just going to take to my heels.

Adventures in Beverage Land

I grew up in a culture where alcohol was one of the deadly sins - right up there with jewelry, dancing, and going to movies. The taboo was strong enough that it lasted long after I left home and ventured out on my own. In fact, except for a few daring sips of wine, I really didn't start drinking alcohol until I was about forty. (Damn. I have just betrayed my age.)

There are two ramifications from this:

1) I'm a ridiculous lightweight. I'm getting better, but for the first few years of my experimentation with drinking, one glass of wine would render me fuzzy and well, sound asleep.

2) Every drink is an adventure. So many different types of wine, so many frou frou drinks with fascinating names and pretty glasses. I'm like a kid in a candy store.

A kid without a lot of money. At least, not money I'm willing to spend. On the rare occasions when I've been to a bar and perused the drinks menu, I've been shocked and appalled. You want me to spend what? For a drink?

I don't think so.

Thus it is, sadly, that I have not experienced many of the frivolous and fascinating cocktails. The Viking does not imbibe, and I don't get out much, so I must confess that mostly I drink alone. The most creative I get with creating my own beverages is pouring a little Grand Marnier in my hot chocolate, or making Hot Buttered Rum from scratch.

Last summer I did have a love affair with Gin & Tonic, a drink I discovered at the house of a friend. This is a beverage for a hot summer day, though, and I'm looking out my window and watching the slow melt of the snow, dreaming of long summer afternoons and an ice cold drink sweating on the picnic table.

My usual drink, suited to drinking at home alone, is wine. At the moment I'm working my way through the reds - loved Pinot Noir, and then Sangiovese, and currently am somewhat obsessed by Malbec.

This makes it sound like I'm much more of a drinker than I really am, so I suppose I ought to make it clear that I seldom drink more than a glass a day, and when I'm On Call I don't drink at all. Not that much really - just one of life's little pleasures. And oh, so pretty in the glass.

My Muse,

“I would especially like to recourt the Muse of poetry, who ran off with the mailman four years ago, and drops me only a scribbled postcard from time to time.” ~John Updike

by Kerry Schafer

When my son was little he had a whole houseful of imaginary friends. On one occasion I had difficulty getting into the minivan, because all of the seats were already taken, and we had to organize the imaginary crowd to sit on each other's laps and free up a little space. Most notably there was Wunsty Dunsty, The Lion, and Mr. Bey-who-lives-in-the-sandbox. This child could play an entire board game with these friends, always giving completely fair and unbiased turns to all of the players involved, often at cost to himself. It was a wonderful gift, except when it wasn't. (Imagine what might happen if an imaginary lion begins to run amok).

If it were up to me my muse would be the best imaginary friend a writer ever had - offering a constant stream of inspiration, doling out pats and condolences when the words won't come, maybe even sitting down in the chair and taking over every now and then - providing the brilliance that is always just beyond the limits of my own talent and skill.

Right.

She's not so forthcoming, this muse of mine. In fact, mostly what she does is sit around smiling in an irritating way - the sort of smile that says "I've got a secret and I'm not telling." This is my cue to engage in a solitary game of Twenty Questions, or sometimes Am I Warm Yet?

My ideas come from everywhere - a stray word, a news story, a random comment dropped on Twitter or really anywhere else. Some of these ideas touch briefly, and then drift away like dandelion seeds. Some stick, taking root for whatever reason ideas do take root, and then bit by bit they turn into stories. The muse just smiles. "I know something you don't know." And this spurs me on to uncover what it is she knows.

I believe that in some version of reality the stories exist already, fully formed. My muse knows where they are and could sing the whole tale from start to finish if she chose, but nothing comes for free and she seems to take pleasure from watching my struggles.

She hangs out by my desk, drives with me in the car, but her natural habitat is the shower. There, sometimes, she will feed me a phrase, a sentence, an entire paragraph. Of course, as she knows, by the time I get dried and decently covered, enough to run out and scribble on a piece of paper or find my laptop, most of this will be lost my the ineptitude of my memory.

It's an odd sort of partnership, but it works. Bit by bit, clue by clue, the characters come alive for me, and then they can tell me their own stories. Despite her elusive nature, I think she's happy when I find my way to the end of a story.

First Kiss

By Kerry Schafer

“Since the invention of the kiss, there have only been five kisses that were rated the most passionate, the most pure. This one left them all behind.” ~The Princess Bride

My real first kiss is not the sort of thing memories are made of - at least not the sort of memories you want to keep around. The First Kiss, the one that I hold in my mind and memory as the first time I was ever properly kissed, followed some time later.

Somehow I managed to reach Sweet Sixteen without being kissed - I'm not sure why, exactly, but it wasn't due to a lack of effort on my part. Socially awkward, that was me. Dropping social cues everywhere, morally conflicted between what my brand new hormones and my thoroughly instilled religious beliefs were telling me. As it happened, on the date of my sixteenth birthday I found myself on a bus as part of a school or church youth function - I don't remember which. What I do remember is that at the back of that bus, in the dark, in the middle of a crowd of laughing teenagers, I kissed two boys as part of some sort of coming of age ritual.

These were not memorable kisses. I wasn't particularly enamored with either of the boys in question, and they were certainly not enamored with me. In fact, the whole experience left me wondering what all the fuss was about. During the next year or so I engaged in attempts to find out. There were several kissing episodes that I can remember, all of which left me a little confused, thinking that kissing was just not all it was cracked up to be - another of those life disappointments I was discovering.

And then I met Mr. Dreamy.

He was older than me by several years. He was hot. He drove a nice car, and he drove it fast. He had a real job, and was far removed from all of the high school drama, which made him fascinating and oh so much more interesting than the boys I saw every day in class. I was half in awe when he began to take an interest in me.

We hung out, casually, for awhile. And then he invited me to the Banquet.

This is a concept that I expect will require some explaining. I grew up Seventh Day Adventist, and went to a small Adventist school in a small town. We didn't believe in dancing - so no Homecoming dances or Proms for us - but the need for some sort of date related activity was recognized, and we had Banquets. I'd been to several of these, with boys I liked, boys I didn't like, and sometimes with no date at all.

This time though - this was special. Mr. Dreamy picked me up. The corsage he bought was not the half expected carnation, dyed in an attempt to match my dress. No, this was a lovely little corsage that had actually been ordered specially from the florist. For me. All of that evening I felt special; every touch, casual or otherwise, set my heart to pounding.

By the time he drove me home and walked me to the door, I was head over heels in love. And when, just inside the front door, he cupped my chin in his hand, smiled, and kissed me - ah, here at last was the answer to "what is all the fuss?"

The angels sang in that moment, the world stopped spinning, all things that ever were or would be centered on that moment, and the touch of his lips against mine.

It was a romantic first kiss - gentle and sweet and just a little lingering. Later, he would teach me the intricacies of kissing and the pleasure of what a tongue might do. Not now, not yet. Only lips, and that warm hand cupping my chin. Oh, the racing heart, the weakness in the knees, the belief that I would love this man forever.

Of course that didn't happen - there have been plenty of other kisses with plenty of other partners in the years since then. But I think of him sometimes, and hope he is well, and happy, and has someone who loves him. I owe him, for leaving me feeling like this:

The Phone Thing

By Kerry Schafer

My mistrust of phones goes a long way back. I remember a time when I would walk a good thirty minutes to schedule a hair appointment, in person, because I didn't want to pick up the phone. When I worked as a nurse (long ago and in a completely different life) I used to fabricate a reason to duck into a patient's room whenever the phone started ringing. To be honest, I'll still do this. Let somebody else answer it, someone who doesn't experience a twist of anxiety in their belly at the thought of picking up the receiver.

Who knows what childhood incident planted the seed of phone phobia that has lingered with me all these years? I can't recall anything particularly traumatic, but then life is often messy and senseless, completely unlike a novel, in which a character with this problem would have a clear and logical reason for her aversion.

In some ways, this Phone Thing, as I call it, makes total sense to me. When the damned thing rings, I have no idea who is on the other end. Yes, I have caller ID. Yes, I screen my calls accordingly. But still. Just because the Caller ID says it's Billy Joe Bob calling, I have no reason to know this is true. Maybe somebody stole Billy Joe Bob's phone. Maybe they murdered him first, and are coming after me next. Maybe Billy Joe Bob has recently taken to using drugs, and is calling in a methamphetamine fueled psychotic rage. Even if the caller is who he says he is, I don't know what else is going on because I can't see. He could be sitting in a room full of unnaturally silent people who are mocking me in secret, or he could be holding a gun to his head with every intention of blowing himself away at any moment. Unless he chooses to tell me I will never know.

So if you have a weird aversion to phones, what do you choose to do as your life work? Mental Health Crisis Response, naturally. This job ensures that I am pretty much glued to a phone 24/7. Heck, why stop at one phone. Let's try for two or three.

Here's me all ready for work in the morning:


Yep. I go out loaded for bear. And yes, I have had one phone to each ear on several occasions. When I'm on call weekends and evenings, I carry both of these phones with me. Everywhere. At any moment either of them might ring, and when they do it's not going to be an agent calling to offer me representation, or somebody letting me know that I've just won a million dollars. Nope. When the phone rings at 1 am, or in the middle of dinner, or when I'm in line at the grocery store, it's going to be Dispatch, or the hospital, or the jail, or a member of law enforcement, and what they want is for me to leave whatever it is I'm doing and come deal with a crisis.

I should insert the part here that I do understand this is my job, and I actually do often love my work. But the phones, they make me twitch.

In addition to the cell phones, there is this baby in my office:

Nope. It is not a thing of beauty. It lurks. It messes with my head.

The Viking just shakes his head as he watches me jerk and twitch each time the phone rings. "Easy, honey," he says. "It's just a phone."

Right. To ordinary, well adjusted folks, it is.

I find ways to cope. Every few months I change the ring on my On Call cell, to minimize the cumulative impact of that one particular ring. My home phone lives in the garage where I can sort of hear it if I'm paying attention, but where it's easy to ignore. Important people will leave a message. And if I'm feeling energetic and sort of brave, I might just call them back.