June 2008

My Papí passed today.  At ninety-nine years old, my grandfather was, without a doubt, the most amazing man I’ve ever known. 

Anyone who can make it to a few months shy of a century would surely have a million stories to tell, but my Papí would’ve told those stories better than most.  

I knew my grandfather well, but with only thirty years and change between us, I only got to know him at the end.  

The man I did know was remarkable.  As children, My sister and I spent every Saturday, and half of every Sunday at his house.  During that time, I was often giving my grandmother more trouble than she ever could’ve deserved, and yet I only saw him lose his temper with me one time in all those years.  

I remember it clearly, and I clearly deserved it.  

Papí was a fine example, showing me from early on that getting old could be a terrific time in one’s life.  He was always vibrant, with a smile that never faded, pockets that never cleared of candy, and a handful of old jokes that somehow never grew tired.

Once my sister and I were old enough to stay home by ourselves, the Saturday trips slowed and then stopped altogether.  The visits with our grandfather did not.  Papí loved a good bet, and he had a standing appointment at the horse races every Thursday evening.  Often, he would stop by our house for dinner on his way, and sometimes, I was lucky enough to leave with him.  

Three things would happen without fail: Papí would send me down to the arcade with five dollars so that he could sneak an extra beer, he would tell me that a $30 bet was only $3 (while I pretended to believe him), and he would place a bet for me, then tell me I had a winning ticket, whether or not I did.  

Needless to say, I loved going to the track with my Papí.

I remember the first time I introduced him to Daisy.  It was on Christmas Eve, ten years ago.  I’d spent the whole day trying to articulate how amazing he was, and forecasting how much she was going to love him.  By the time we got to my grandparent’s house, I thought that perhaps I’d oversold the performance that a ninety-year old man was capable of giving.  

But of course I hadn’t.

Papí came in the house still hopped up from the Las Posadas on Olvera Street, wearing a smile on his face, throwing candy from his pockets, and one joke after another, rolling from his mouth.  My grandfather had officiated the festivals on the street for a few decades, and at eighty-nine, was still a few years from his retirement.  

A few short months later, the city of Los Angeles threw him a birthday bash, and the mayor handed him a plaque for his unfailing service. 

When I first started writing, Papí was the first person I told.  I was unsure of where I was going, and I wanted to keep things quiet.  My grandfather was the mischievous sort and I thought he’d delight in keeping the secret.  

And he did. 

Every Saturday, when I went to visit, Papí would first ask how things were going (he expected the entire process from idea to shelf to take somewhere between two weeks and a month, and never quite understood what was taking so long), then proudly declare that he hadn’t said a thing to anyone.

Coincidentally, today was my coming out.  I had a belated Father’s Day with my own dad, and showed him everything I’ve been working on for the last nine months.  I gave him a slender binder filled with children’s stories, and showed him all eighty pounds of the novel that at this point more closely resembles a carpet bomb of syllables.  As our perfect day was ending, I got a phone call from my mom. 

Papí was gone.

Thank you for everything Papí, you gave me a shining example to follow.  I love you, I’ll miss you, and I promise to always make you proud.

Writer Dad

Life’s significant moments need to stop colliding with such unrelenting regularity. Yesterday, Mia left Kinder behind.  Today, Daisy and I finally received a long anticipated email.  

Now that it’s here, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that it could change our lives forever.

About three weeks ago, we sent out our first query letter.  We sent it to a local agent in the hopes that he could represent some of our already finished children’s stories.  We selected the agent with care, drafted our e-query, and hit send.  We thought it would take somewhere between all week and all Summer to get a response. 

It didn’t.  

Exactly ten minutes after I heard the woosh of the query leaving my laptop, I heard the ding of an incoming message.  

It was from the agent, and he did not like our query.

To be more specific, the agent said that the query gave him “shudders of horror,” and that, “it did not work at all.”  I made the mistake of writing my query letter in rhyme, as though it were a children’s book; a deadly sin to an agent that I will never commit again.  

But the agent didn’t slam the door in our face.  He said that with a letter of recommendation from a previously published children’s author, he would accept the query.  Daisy knows a wonderful author, Debbie Yamada, that spoke to her fourth grade class, during Author’s Day the year before she left.  She’s written a wonderful chapter book about the Chinese gold rush, called, Strike it Rich!  

We contacted Debbie and asked her if she would please look at our material. 

She did; she loved it; she agreed to write our letter.

Debbie’s letter is in my inbox.  All that’s left to do is attach it to our already drafted query and send it to the gentleman who might one day be our agent.  

I’ll keep you posted.

Writer Dad

Today, Mia said farewell to school for the summer, and Kindergarden forever.  In six years, I don’t think Daisy or I have ever been more proud.  Mia pulled straight fours on every report card this year, and she did it in another tongue. 

Her school’s farewell program was adorable; a chorus of sixty kinders, half awkward, and half not - the perfect harmony for a Kindergarden performance.  The morning was as predictable as a late eighties sitcom with only one exception:

I certainly didn’t see myself crying.

I am, at the least, a reasonably sensitive guy.  Often thoughtful, and sometimes too tender, but also every bit the thirty something version of the rascal that our little Max is right now.  But I didn’t expect to cry, not like I did anyway.

I teared up a bit on Mia’s first day, of course.  Who wouldn’t?  If there isn’t a bit of salt on your cheek when delivering your first born into the arms of strangers for a nine month eon (no matter how qualified those strangers may be), then I’d have to say you need your ducts checked, if not the valves of your heart. 

So, yes, on the first day of school I got a bit misty, but the tears today were the real deal. 

Mia’s Señora had assembled a portfolio for each child in her class, stuffed with nine months worth of their best effort, and crowned with a handwritten letter home.  I made it through reading the letter to myself just fine; it was reading it out loud to Daisy that did me in.

We’re so grateful for the education that school has given to our family.  Before entering the program, I have to admit, I did’nt have the highest regard for public education, having been a product myself.  

This school shows me the very beginning of what is possible.

Writer Dad

Yesterday was our little rascal’s last day of Pre-School, at least until September; a transition he understands perfectly. 

All week, he’s been telling anyone who’d listen, “Friday is my last day at school, and in three months I’ll be in room 4 (room 4 said as though it was the most important thing he would say all day, and possibly all week).” 

Still, the reality of leaving his friends for such a long intermission didn’t seem to slap him until he was climbing into the backseat of the mini-van, where he buckled his belt and sat in thoughtful silence for the entire trip home; not at all what I expected, and completely uncharacteristic of any previous Friday, a few minutes from lunch time.  

When we got home he said, “I have a little bit sad.”  He pinched his fingers together to asure me that it wasn’t too much.  

“Why are you sad?”  I asked. 

“Because I won’t see my friends for a long long time.”  His bottom lip started to quiver.  I took his hands.

“But you’ll be at Mommy and Daddy’s school.”

“Yeah, I know.”  His pensive look went nowhere and his lip continued to shake.  He sighed deeply and fell into my arms, wordless.

Fortunately, Max rebounds quickly.  By this morning, he was already talking about his Summer with Mommy and Daddy, and how much fun he would have with all his friends.  

Daisy’s had the entire Summer schedule plotted for our pre-school since the second half of April.  She has about thirty thousand things she wants to teach the children (we have two groups: tater tots and hot dogs) and she figures she might have time to address around a hundred and fifty. 

Mia’s Spanish is off the hook, but her writing in English needs some attention.  She spells everything exactly as she hears it, and since 90% of her academic day es en español, her English words tend to assemble themselves within the borders of the Spanish alphabet. 

We’ll help her, and she’ll help the other children.  

Daisy’s gathered all of Mia’s homework from the last nine months and made a review book that Mia will use to teach the rest of us, tiny ones included.  Everyday, each student (including Max and Mia) will spend time in Reading, Writing, Art, Stories, Violin, Tennis, and Technology - for ten weeks straight.

Max’s school is finished for the Summer.  Mia’s will conclude this coming week.  That cuts our weekday shuffling down to nearly nothing.  I, for one, am happy to have my children home for a few months.  I miss them when they’re gone. 

I look forward to teaching them and seeing what they have to teach me.

I’m glad that Max goes to another school, away from ours.  It’s good for him to make his own friends in his own environment, with different teachers and different rules, without his mommy and daddy constantly around to supervise.  He needs a place to go where he can practice all the things he tries so hard to learn.

Still, I’m happy it’s our turn.

Writer Dad

My wife and I’ve been together for ten years now, married for six. We have two children: a daughter who is six, and a son just shy of adding a fourth candle to the cake.  

A few years ago, we took a leap. I left my job and she left hers.  She’d been teaching children for seventeen years and I grew up working in a family business.  Together, we opened a small pre-school.  The best way, we reasoned, to spend time as much time with our children as we could during those years that matter most, and seem to be the easiest to miss.  

We bought property that we could use as both our home and business; an old victorian in our city’s downtown historic district. Shortly after opening, we discovered that our city’s parking requirements prohibited expansion and the addition of any more children.

Our business had a ceiling.  

That meant we’d have to start thinking different (the charm of us both teaching children for less than the cost of living was bound to thin once our own were no longer part of the blend).  

Daisy (my wife’s name for the purpose of this blog) has always dreamt of writing, and often urged me to enlist in her fantasy.  She’s always thought I had too much to say, and often believed my thoughts might be best expressed with my fingers rather than my tongue.

But as I had for every one of the ten years we’d been together, I ignored her suggestion.

Writing, for me, has always been a spectator sport.  I love to read, and have ever since I could stare at the pages and string the sounds together. I spent a good part of childhood with my nose between the pages, but I’ve loved movies with an unhealthy appetite for just as long, and yet I’m fairly far from imagining myself running through the streets with a camera slung over my shoulder, shouting “ACTION!”

Our lives changed forever last September, when from nowhere, Daisy shot me a look I’ll never forget and said, “Really, Honey, when are gonna just start writing?”

So I did.  

It was just after Labor Day, our daughter had started Kindergarten, and the winds of change had effectively swept into our lives, leaving plenty of emotional dust to settle like silt over our slightly more silent afternoons.  Across the next four months, I gathered whatever scraps of time I could find (mostly dredged up by Daisy), and drained my brain onto the glossy screen in front of me.

On the last day of last year, our printer groused and grumbled as it spit out my first manuscript; a five-hundred page sloppy copy that sent shivers down my spine and actually made my knees knobby.

I was under no illusions.  The book was beyond terrible and I knew it.  It needed more work than our hundred and ten year old Victorian (which I swear has had at least a hundred and eleven owners). The entire thing was a messy, jumbled, vomit of awkward similes and too many adverbs; a verbal explosion with little direction to guide the riot of ideas, suffocating inside too scant a space.

But I was writing.

I was pretty high on the revelation.  Even if the novel’s only scheduled stop was some forgotten folder, buried in the depths of my hard drive, I’d written something longer than a love note, and in the process, found something that felt innate, that I could do a little of everyday, continuously developing my skill as it drifted from from hobby to trade.

As usual, when I finally relented to one of Daisy’s suggestions, I ended up wondering what had taken me so long.  

By January, I needed a break from the novel, but I didn’t want to stop writing, so I started drafting simple stories for our children, as well as the wee students at our school.  These stories were a fast and fun diversion.  Totally different from what I’d done with the novel, but every bit as satisfying.   

In February, I returned to the novel while continuing to diddle with the children’s material. Now it’s June and I’m starting the third draft of the novel.  It’s already grown into something far from its cradle, but I’m also starting to see the potential of where it can go. Daisy and I have also gathered a portfolio of children’s material; a magical brew of her twenty years with children, my love of words, and the endless inspiration of our own offspring.

If I’m a writer, then I need to write. This blog will be an excercise for my craft, as well as steady documentation of the process as we seek representation and live through the process of getting our work into the proper hands. We have a lot on our plate right now, so posting will be infrequent for the first two months.  By the first of August, posts will increase to five times a week. I promise.

Writer Dad