Writing Boots

Nobody appreciates some good etymology like my old pal Tony Judge, and when I was recently able to remind him of the original meaning of “offing,” I couldn’t have been more pleased. “Layoffs are in the offing,” the modern phrase goes. The offing originally meant the part of the ocean you can see from land. So that, for the wife of a fisherman long out to sea, it mattered a lot when she learned her husband’s ship was in the offing. (Where, in the old sailing days, it might remain for a day or more, depending on the wind.)

[Alzheimer’s wasn’t a common term when I grew up. When an old person displayed confusion—we had a demented and angry neighbor at our lake house—my dad would say only, “He has hardening of the arteries.” A term we’ve mostly forgotten, because we have hardening of the arteries.]

And the other day in traffic on my motorcycle on the Eisenhower Expressway, I switched lanes one more time than I probably needed to, and scolded myself for being—and everyone who took driver’s ed around the time I did, 50 years ago, knows exactly what I’m about to write—a “jackrabbit lane-changer.”

Boy, that was the worst thing to be. (Aside from one of the mangled corpses in the gory accident photos they showed us enough of that driver’s ed movies started to feel like snuff films.) Nobody liked a jackrabbit lane-changer.

Until at some point, somebody realized that 96 percent of student drivers had never actually seen a jackrabbit, and so wouldn’t understand the reference any more than most of us get the original meanings of a million terms from our agricultural past like “make hay while the sun shines.”

Once my very young daughter got impatient with some instructions I was giving her and she said, “Dad, this isn’t my first rodeo.” And then paused and said, “Wait. What is a rodeo?”

And so on, and so forth.

I’m preparing for a book talk next month in my hometown of Hudson, Ohio—sponsored by The Learned Owl bookstore and held at the Hudson Library and Historical Society.

I’m going to say a few things about my Hudson writer parents—and especially my mother, a young novelist who didn’t fit into a WASPy, preppy town—but who probably kept The Learned Owl in business singlehandedly for some years. I spent a lot of time sitting on the floor in there while Mom endlessly shopped for books by Marilyn French, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Joan Didion.

During my talk, I want to hold up copies of my parents’ books—my dad’s mild fathering philosophy book, A Child to Change Your Life (that’s me on the cover) …

… and my mother’s book, Women With and Without—a by-turns agonizing and hilarious (and agonizing) novel about seven women living in a motel in Reno, waiting for divorces and desperately bewildered about how their lives have turned out and just how strange and terrible it was to be a woman in America in the 1970s (or anytime?).

That’s how I remember it, anyway. But when was the last time I actually read it? I think I tried and failed when it came out. There’s not much here for a 15-year-old boy. I must have read it in my 20s—or during a little sabbatical I took, when I turned 30. Now, where is my copy?

I don’t have a copy of my mother’s only novel.

My sister has one, but she’s not about to trust the postal service or her brother who lost his only mother’s only book. I go online, and find one at a bookstore in Binghamton, New York. It appears to be the last copy for sale in the universe.

It arrives.

Amazingly, it comes with the original publication date announcement, telling reviewers, “This first novel heralds the emergence of a stunning, new, and accomplished stylist on the literary scene.”

The second page has her biography, and includes this unintentionally funny update on the frustrated-novelist’s career: “Women With and Without is her first published novel. She is currently writing her fourth.”

(My sister and I were visiting our older half-sisters in Michigan when the call came that this book would be published. I remember my mother was so maniacally overjoyed it was kind of scary.)

The musty smell of the release and the book act as a screaming upper, and I must drink gin just to keep my mind from racing as I tear in, taking a big snort of Mom’s style, in this brief prologue.

I also remember, of course, the opening lines of the main character:

(Spoiler alert: Babs dies at 52. Also, my mother died at 52.)

There is more of her style—endless scenes like this:

And, as the hour grew late and the twilight turned to lamp light, the color of the pages changed—I read the book in one sitting (and three gins)—and one of the characters wonders if she smothered her daughter, emotionally. (As I occasionally wonder if I smother mine. Oh, I’d love to talk to Mom about this.)

And along the way, I turned a page that I’ll share here next week, that hit me like a soccer ball in the face—an insight I’ve been missing in all my conversations about youth sports, around my book Soccer Dad.

Thanks Mom. It was wonderful spending the evening with you Tuesday, and I’d love to do it again sometime. (I’m 57.)

Meanwhile, I’ll tell those Hudson people about your book—which appeared, however briefly, on the shelves of The Learned Owl next to French, Solzhenitsyn and Didion—and I’ll hold up my copy.

And, if I look out on the crowd think they can take it, I’ll tell them what you wrote in your journal about Hudson women, who spent their time “decoupaging wastebaskets, macraming guest room toilet paper covers, playing bridge (and stuffing buckeyes down their brassieres?).”