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The plan was to rent out my house and go someplace I could live cheaply enough that I could write a novel. The place I ended up was Guatemala, and I stayed there for seven months -- long enough to finish my new novel, The Usual Rules (to be published this coming February), and to fall in love with Guatemala. For all those months I spent in the little village of San Marcos, on the shores of Lake Atitlan, my days had a wonderful simplicity: Get up, swim, write, swim some more, walk into town for vegetables and fresh coconut, sit on my porch and watch the sun set over the lake. I lived without telephone or internet, or mail, or a car, or even a radio, and though I made many friends, I lived alone. Once a week I traveled by boat to a town at the other side of the lake, to buy wine and stop at the internet café. I never had less, materially, and I was never happier. I returned to North America in April. It's a pretty jarring experience, re-entering our fast-moving consumer culture, after more than half a year in a third world country. At first, just buying a cup of coffee at the airport was a shock. (Two days earlier, I'd been walking dirt paths lined with coffee trees and watching men carry bags of coffee beans on their backs along steep mountain roads. Now there I was at Starbucks, where the price of one latte is more than most of those men make in a day.) Home again in California, driving was hard, because I was so distracted by all the activity around me -- so much more than I was used to. (Well, some of you who have read my stories over the years may remind me that driving has never been my strong suit.) I missed the children who played in the streets of my little village, the volcano I could see from anywhere in my town, the chickens wandering free, the women with baskets of avocados on their heads, the sound of the language I'd spoken every day. One day I heard Enrique Iglesias singing a song I'd known from the radio, in Guatemala -- but there, he sang in Spanish -- and started to cry. And then, hard as it is to re-enter so called civilized modern life, what is almost harder is discovering, after a while, that you have done it so well, that this other life you'd been living begins to fade from memory. The happy, relaxed woman I was in Guatemala whose frown lines had disappeared without the aid of Botox injections no longer had the time to sit on her hammock, in Marin County. I sat on hold for an hour, with the cable tv company, and when someone finally came on the line, wanting to know if I was interested in HBO, I snapped at him. I worried about money again. I started eyeing clothes in store windows. I measured a morning spent getting my car repaired by how much the lost time had cost me. Only now, at least, I recognized what I was doing, and how poorly it served me, or anybody else. I was home, but not entirely -- caught between worlds, and you might say I still am. I loved my house, my books, my CD's, my cooking tools, my kitchen. But I also knew I wasn't ready to stay there yet; I was just home long enough to rent out my house again and take off once more.
My children had been away too for most of that year: my sons Charlie and Willy traveling in West Africa together, my daughter doing social work in the Dominican Republic. They came back a little after I did -- the first one home being Charlie, in his wild Senegalese suit, then Willy, then Audrey, and finally our dog Opie, who had been off on his own adventures. They touched down in California long enough that we could tell each other a few of our stories, before heading off in our separate directions. (All except Opie, who has stayed with Willy.) Charlie headed back to school in New York City (where, by the way, he can be heard on WNYU FM, 89.1 Tuesday nights, playing world music). Audrey -- now totally fluent in Dominican Spanish -- was going back to college in Santa Cruz after a little work time in New Hampshire. Willy, my youngest son, had made the decision to become totally self supporting, which meant taking not one but three waitering jobs at different Marin County restaurants to save up his money for school. Once I had found good tenants for our house, I took off again. Audrey and I spent ten days together on what may have been the best trip we have ever shared (though it was the least expensive... maybe you see a pattern emerging here, and if so I think you are right). With no particular plans or mapped-out route, we made our way in a general northerly direction up through California to Oregon -- where we passed through Ashland to take in a little Shakespeare, then on to Crater Lake, and Eugene, and a bunch of hot springs where we sat for a number of hours that would once have left me restless and impatient to get moving. It was foxglove season, and we seemed to be following the flowers north, to a magical fishing lodge at Odell Lake, and then to Cannon Beach where we had a marvelous dinner with my dear friend Myrna, the webmistress here, and her son Calen, whose name you should remember because he is a bass player of huge talent (who also helped Myrna prepare the downloads of the Where Love Goes CD you can now hear at this site).
Then we headed into Washington State, where we took in the virgin rain forest at Olympic National Park and the city of Evergreen, and stopped by a tattoo parlor so my twenty four year old daughter could... get her ears pierced. (That's it.) We parted at the ferry dock in Port Angeles. I was heading north into British Columbia, Canada, to stay for a while with a friend I had met in Guatemala, Ken, who is a cabinetmaker on an island there. Audrey was going to New Hampshire to do some housepainting with her father for the summer. So I stood on the deck of the ferry, and my daughter on the shore, as the boat pulled out into the ocean, taking me into a whole different country, away from her, though really, I had never felt closer to her. It is one of the things I'm learning about this new stage of life I find myself in -- with children grown, or nearly so -- that where once the time I spent with them was measured in months and years, a day with them now has become so precious. I know when I say goodbye to one of my children that it may be months before I'll see this one again. I couldn't wish them to be at my side all the time anymore, the way they used to be. They are doing what they need to: living their own lives. I had better do the same.
In August I was on the road again -- to my 31st high school reunion in New Hampshire. Ken and his son Alex joined me on the east coast a while later, and we took in a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, and visits with old friends in New England,including visits with two good writer friends, Jackie Mitchard and Judy Blume, whose new Fudge book is just out this fall. But the high point of our trip was what came next. Back in early spring, I'd received a beautiful email from a fourteen year old girl living in a little village in Northern Israel -- I'll call her Ann -- who had read some of my work on the Internet. Ann wanted to be a writer, and she was asking my advice. After asking the questions she'd put to me, I asked her one myself. Tell me what it's like to be a young person in Israel now? She wrote me an astonishingly moving letter -- the kind of letter that leaves you feeling, as you read, that you can actually hear the person speaking to you. This was all the more moving because of course Ann was not writing in her native language of Hebrew, but in English. Early on in our correspondence, I asked her permission to show her letters to some people I knew. My goal -- though I didn't tell her this at the time, not wanting to get her hopes up -- was to see if I could find a way to bring her to the United States for the summer, and thanks to a number of very generous people, that is what happened. My dear friends Gilda and Ed (known to many of you here in this discussion forum, which is where I met them) hosted Ann first, at their home in San Francisco, along with their granddaughter Jessi. Then Ann flew to New Hampshire for a month at a wonderful summer camp there, Interlocken, run by my old friend Richard Herman (with additional scholarship money provided by Interlocken alumnus Greg Feldman). Her airfare was provided by Lee Larson, from Oregon. By mid august, Ann was finished with camp, and so Ken and I and his son Alex (also age fifteen) picked her up in New Hampshire so we could spend her final week in the United States together. The story of that week is more than I can tell you fully here. We were the unlikeliest foursome -- fast-walking, half-Jewish American woman, calm and unflappable Canadian cabinetmaker and his tall, easy-going baseball-playing, Austin-Powers-loving son, and a small, beautiful young girl whose stories, as we made our way down the highway towards New York City, would sometimes leave us speechless. It was all so far removed from anything we'd experienced first hand -- the kind of sensibility that makes a person check the floor, when she boards a bus, for a paper bag set on the ground, beside a suspicious looking person, who might just be there to blow himself and everyone else up. For Ann, the presence of violence is a daily reality. When I explained to Ann about our friend Lee Larson's sponsorship of the homeless village, she was momentarily puzzled. She had supposed everyone in the great land of America had a home. If not, had missiles hit their houses? The seven days we spent together -- partly in New Hampshire, part in New York -- were a revelation for us all, nearly every moment. Hard to choose what touched me most, but one thing was the lovely, easy closeness between Alex and Ann (who called him her mentor). We walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, studied the Thomas Eakins paintings at the Metropolitan Museum and the Barbies at FAO Schwarz. We watched The Vagina Monologues and Thoroughly Modern Millie on Broadway, waited while Ann (wearing a driving cap purchased on the street for ten dollars) debated a group of Muslims in Times Square. (She could quote whole passages of the Old Testament, as she can quote, verbatim, the speech delivered by Yitzak Rabin's granddaughter on the occasion of his funeral.) She wept when she saw the New York Public library, had to restrain herself from kissing the sidewalks in Times Square (though in the end, at Kennedy airport, she could not resist kneeling to kiss the ground before leaving America. "Nobody ever told me," she said, "there would be sparkles in the sidewalk.") In the cab to the airport, we had discovered our driver was a young Palestinian man. Six weeks earlier, I think Ann would have wanted to jump out of that cab, her fear and hatred would have been so great. Now she talked with him, and listened, and when we reached Kennedy Airport, they shook hands and she told him, "I will say a prayer for you in Jerusalem." It says something about how that moment felt to us all, I think, that the cab driver forgot to charge me for the forty dollar ride, and it was only after that I remembered, myself. Her last words to me, as she moved through the metal detectors towards her plane, came from the musical I'd taken her to, Thoroughly Modern Millie. "A lot can happen in seven days. If you don't believe me, just read the Bible." Ken and his son flew home to Canada then. In this new and strangely rootless way I've been living, this past year (but not rootless, really; I just carry home within myself, as I never could before), I had not made a clear plan of where I'd go next, but it came to me -- maybe in part from witnessing Ann's rapturous discovery of New York City -- that I wanted to stay in New York for a while, and so I did. Oddly enough, the same impulse had come to me exactly a year earlier, when I'd come to New York, I thought, for a few days, to see my son Charlie before heading off to begin work on my novel. I had touched down on September 9, 2001. It was a month later when I finally took off for Guatemala, and by the time I did, I had a whole different novel in my head -- one that came directly out of the wrenching experience of being in the city on September 11, and the days that followed. A year later, New York feels like a different place. I'm working, but for me, more and more, part of what constitutes work is simply taking in the world around me, so once again I am walking and thinking and talking to people and listening to music and looking at art in museums and graffiti on the subway trains and faces on the subway. Every day, I hear by email from my young friend, Ann -- who calls me her American mother, as I call her my Israeli daughter. Her village is just eight kilometers from the Lebanese border, in a high risk zone, and often these days, school is called off. Often, when she writes, she tells me she hears planes overhead, and the sound of explosions. All these years, as a mother, I was so preoccupied with the safety of my children. Now here comes another, ten thousand miles away from me, who tells me she is starting sharpshooter training in a few days, and not to worry if I don't hear from her soon. She and her family may be headed for the shelter if the missiles come too close. Ann tells me I can't possibly understand what it is like for her in her country now, and of course I know she's right. She is angry at our country, and she expresses frustration and confusion to know that I, a woman she loves, could be part of a country that is about to bomb Iraq -- a move she tells me is sure to result in massive retaliation against her own country. I tell her I didn't vote for this president or support this bombing -- farthest thing from it -- but my words sound hollow, even to me. For Ann, coming from a country where loyalty and unity is everything, the notion of a person in opposition to the policies of her own nation is difficult if not impossible to grasp. So here I am now, sipping a cappuccino whose three dollar pricetag I barely notice any more. Sometimes I take out my photographs of the village in Guatemala and the volcano and the children there I grew to love. I attend the New York Philharmonic and listen to a choir of several hundred perform, with full orchestra, the piece commissioned to commemorate September 11. I stand in the subway and listen to Peruvian men play handmade flutes and guitars and drums, an orchestra of angels. I proofread galleys of my new novel and make plans for my book tour. I meet my son Charlie for Indian food in the East Village. I look at Richard Avedon's photographs of famous people. I see a woman on a park bench, talking to herself, and don't even slow down as I pass her. I go to see Michael Moore's brilliant, funny, heartbreaker of a movie, Bowling for Columbine, and I am laughing so hard I am snorting, one minute, and five minutes later I'm in tears. (As some of you may remember, I spent a few weeks, back in May of 2001, helping out with the filming of a documentary my friend Michael Moore was filming at the time, in Colorado. That movie, Bowling for Columbine, has now been released nationally, to stunning response. To my mind, it's a stunning and sometimes profound examination of life in America today. I hope you make a point of seeing it.) I read about the sniper in the white van and the explosions in the Bali nightclub, and the fashions for winter. My son the waiter -- same boy who hiked fifteen miles across a desert in Africa till he got to the next village -- tells me he got an eighty dollar tip from a customer at the restaurant last night. I talk with my daughter in Santa Cruz, who's moving into an apartment where she can hear the ocean out her window, and my other daughter, in Israel, who tells me she hears missiles at night. If you can make sense of it, that makes one of us.
In the months ahead, I plan to be around this space more than I have been for a while. Partly that's because I want you to know about my new novel, of course, and to spread the word to your friends. Partly it's the sense I have, after a year spent largely out of communication with the outside world, beyond my little mountain lake, of wanting to hear what's on the minds of people here, these days. I hope you'll take the time to let us know, and invite people you know to come here and do the same. (Tell us what you think about the bombing of Iraq, or how you go about making pie crust. Show us a poem you wrote, or recommend a CD, or tell us about an argument you had with your husband, or a good moment you had in the car driving your kids to school, or tell a story from when you were a child, or from five minutes ago. The only rules for posting here are that we all demonstrate courtesy and consideration for each other.) You'll notice Myrna has done a great job re-designing this space, which has included posting a lot of new material -- including the first chapter of The Usual Rules, streaming video of the Joyce Makes Pie video, and a bunch of other things, including software that now allows you to recommend this site to a friend. We'd love it if you'd let us know who you are -- and promise not to give your name to anybody else, unless they're looking to write you a very large check or give you a car. In the months to come, you'll be seeing lots more new things: more of the new book, announcements about places I'll be visiting on my book tour, columns from my old Domestic Affairs archives, and some things never published anywhere before. But don't just wait to hear from us, either. You can have a voice here, too.
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I'm
writing this from New York City, the most recent stop along my travels,
and a place I'll be staying for the next few months. As some of you may
know, if you've been visiting this site for a while, I made the decision
a year and a half ago -- when my youngest son Willy graduated from high
school and headed off to see the world -- that I would do something similar,
myself. I've been living out of a suitcase ever since. 
Next
stop was Portland, where we visited my old friend Lee Larson -- who had
helped to fund the women's organization Audrey worked for in the Dominican
Republic last year, and is now in discussions with me about single-handedly
providing sneakers for the entire girls' basketball team of San Marcos,
Guatemala. In addition to giving us a tour of his bee hives and fruit
trees and organic gardens, by the way, Lee also took us to see a homeless
shelter he supports in Portland totally independent of the city, called
In
British Columbia, at Ken's house, I worked on the final revisions for
my new novel and swam and visited the cabinet-making shop at the end of
the day and sat on the porch drinking a beer while the sun went down.
Ken took me fishing - and I caught a salmon, though just as I was reeling
him in, a bald eagle appeared out of nowhere and dove for him. I won,
and that night there was salmon enough (and six pounds of prawns, also
caught that day) for all four men who work in Ken's cabinet-making shop,
and us too. 
