Shuffle Off to Buffalo

“Oh, you went to the same high school?” asks almost everyone who learns about my husband’s and my background. “Were you high school sweethearts?”

No. We didn’t know each other at all. But the universal question does make sense.

One might think, since my husband and I lived a mere 12 blocks apart during elementary school, that we would have known each other since we were knee high to grass-hoppers. But we lived in Brooklyn, New York, and many of the blocks were between avenues, so we went to different elementary schools. We did not know each other, neither did we know any grasshoppers.

We didn’t go to the same junior high, camp, or synagogue, so I didn’t have another opportunity to meet him until high school. It never happened though, because I was a “W.” I sat next to the windows (and spent far too much time looking through them, rather than focusing on my teachers). He, an “A,” sat right next to the door, in accordance with the dictates of the Delaney book.

In order to get a clear picture of our high school seating arrangement, it’s important to understand that our desks were of the old fashioned wood top and seat variety, with metal bases bolted to the seats in front and back and to the floor. The year could have been 1920 or 1969, there would have been no difference in the seating. Each of the five columns of desks was six deep. That was how the room was set up and it never changed. Also, since we had no lockers, we had to carry our coats, books, and whatever else with us as we moved between classes. That usually meant wearing my coat all day, and, because I was sitting near the heat under the windows, I was often struggling to stay awake.

So although I kind of heard of this boy who would become my husband someday, when our physics teacher kept calling him Mr. Archer instead of Mr. Ascher, I didn’t know who he was. It’s even possible that he might have heard of me, when the same teacher, dear old Mr. Swett, called me, “Mrs. Wolf, oh, no, you’re not Mrs. Wolf, she is the chemistry teacher. You are Miss Wolf, but you’ll be Mrs. Somebody someday.”

Did I mention this was the sixties? The late sixties, mind you, when times were changing.  Rigorous dress codes were already “slackened” and we were allowed to wear pants, although not “dungarees,” and think about real, non-stereotypically female careers. I swore I wouldn’t be Mrs. Anyone, ever. But that’s not part of the story. Nor, obviously, was that the outcome.

In those three years of high school (we didn’t do our freshman year there, since we were both part of a three-year-in-two junior high program) we didn’t meet, although we were in five classes together.

When I learned that he would be going to the same university as me, I tried to get a mental picture of what he looked like. The yearbook helped a bit, but I didn’t know him at all. I never saw him the first semester of college. He was friends with another “W” though, someone who often sat in front of me in high school and who was also going to the same college. It was our only connection, yet it never brought us together.

But, during the second semester, he changed dorms and landed on the same floor as my “W” friend. And for the first time I saw him in all his splendor, from his shoulder length brown hair, to his work shirt which brought out his big blue eyes behind his aviator glasses. (Remember, this was early 1970. Young men in college actually looked normal, even handsome, that way.) I suddenly realized that he was taller than me (a big selling point), something he hadn’t been before, at least in my memory, and he was smart, funny, and to me, gorgeous.

I immediately fell in lust. Eventually, so did he. And three weeks after we finished college, his parents came with us to get a marriage license. (They were there because we were under twenty-one, and though women only had to be 18 to get a license without parental permission, men under twenty-one needed to be signed away.) Weird? Did I mention this was 1973?

What would account for so many near misses, chances to notice each other that we failed to seize? I don’t know. But I think Fate may have intervened, giving us enough opportunities to finally become aware of our mutual future.

I was lucky. My husband is a really good guy, whom people see when they read my Wally Morris character’s husband. And which of my Wally Morris books does my real-life paragon of wonderfulness like the most? Vengeance Runs Cold. Maybe that’s because we spent so many years together in Buffalo—learning to warm one another’s hearts.

Still Not Nesting

When I sold my first book to Avalon, I learned that the print run would be about 2,000 copies. Of course I was thrilled anyway, and the thought of having several thousand people read my book made me giddy. The print runs on the other four Avalon books were similar, and since I chose to put the last Wally Morris mystery out myself, with the help of CreateSpace, it was probably less.

But the amazing thing is that I once had an audience of over a million readers. A long time ago I had read an op-ed column by Anna Quindlen, a person whose opinions I respected, and I strongly disagreed with her. You can read my letter to the editor, thanks to the magic of the internet. Believe me, though, if I couldn’t have found it that way, I have copies of the newspaper from that day tucked safely away.

LIVING DESK

Nesting

Published: February 10, 1988

To The Living Section:

Anna Quindlen's column on the nesting instinct [ Life in the 30's, Jan. 27 ] reminds us that the grass is still greener on the other side.

Nesting is not all what a person who doesn't have a job does all day. Those of us who don't have jobs do not all spend the entire time our children are in school having lunch with our friends or furniture shopping and picking out wallpaper. We have the luxury of having time to do these things occasionally (and without the children, which is the only sane way), but we also feel strong responsibilities to various activities, which we probably wouldn't have time for if we were working.

We make sure our children get to their different after-school activities. We also work on committees handling such trivialities as improving our children's education and starting recycling programs in our towns. Some of us even have to find sitters to take our infants so we can have the time to do such things as performing in a puppet show that seeks to sensitize third graders to the handicapped. We don't expect help from working mothers for these things, although some of them occasionally ask us to chauffeur their children around since they think we have nothing better to do.

One thing that I have noticed is different: we don't have to send a sick child to school. That's usually the day we do a lot of nesting, because it stops our whirlwind of activities and there's not much else we can do. One or two days spent at home nesting, particularly with a cranky child, is plenty for most of us, and more than satisfies that need for months. JOANI ASCHER South Orange, N.J.

Looking at that letter all these years later. I hope I did not hurt anyone’s feelings. It is hard to get everything done, I’m sure, especially if a person has a full-time job. And now, from the standpoint of a writer trying to get book after book finished and published while people think that just because I only work part time the rest of my time is available for whatever, I find myself just giving in, putting off my work, so that I can do those jobs that full-time workers don’t have time to do. My children are grown and gone, and the only person home with me, during the days when I’m not working at my outside job, has four legs and a tail. But she needs time too, so that she can develop into a good Seeing Eye® guide dog.

And I can always hope that someday I’ll have a circulation closer to the one I had for my letter to the editor over twenty years ago before I started writing professionally.

Furry Muses

In the bio of my first book, I mentioned that I got a lot of writing done with a warm puppy asleep on my foot. How a sleeping puppy can help a writer develop her craft is almost as much a mystery as those I write. So I’d like to take this opportunity to explain.

As many people know, my family has been raising Seeing Eye® puppies to become guides for the blind for over twenty years. We are currently raising our thirteenth pup.

We started shortly after I found a copy of the novel FOLLOW MY LEADER, by James B. Garfield, in one of the local libraries.  I had read it as a child and tried to become a puppy raiser at that time.  I sent a letter to The Seeing Eye® asking them how I could get involved and they replied saying I could not do it because I lived in Brooklyn. I would have to live in New Jersey. I figured that would never happen.

But it did, many years later, when I was an adult. And when my daughter read the book at about the same age as I had, she asked if we could raise a puppy.  My husband was totally against it, we were cat people, and it was out of the question.  We finally convinced him that it would be just for one year. That was in 1993.

Raising a puppy starts with the delivery of a seven-week-old ball of fur. The anticipation for each of our puppies was similar—excitement, acknowledgement of a big responsibility, and in the beginning, lack of sleep. The warmth and sweetness of a soft fresh puppy is unbeatable and the cuteness factor is sky high. Cuddling ensues when the puppy is delivered, but also training.  The more we followed the rules, the easier it became. We learned that when the puppy wakes up, we were to take her out, after she ate, we were to take her out, and when she had been playing for a while it was a really good idea to take her out. It sounds tedious but it doesn’t last forever, and it cuts way down on the paper towel and stain remover bills.

Because I was not officially working, (volunteering in two school libraries, puppeteering in KIDS ON THE BLOCK disability/difference awareness performances, carpooling and taking care of my mother didn’t count as work) I was the one home with the puppy most of the time. I learned a few things, one of which was that if I was sitting at my computer, the puppy would curl up on my feet. If I wanted to get up, the puppy would wake up, need to go out, be played with or walked, or fed, etc. So I stayed in my chair and wrote book after book.

I have found that when I’m stuck, taking a walk with the puppy is a useful thing. We walk along, practicing crossing streets without running into them unheedingly, and discuss plot points.  The puppy rarely disagrees, but, on the other hand, cannot take notes, so I’m obligated to remember all the epiphanies by myself, rush home and write them down. When I self-published the last book in the Wally Morris Vengeance series last year because I couldn’t stand the series not having an ending, we chose the name TWELVE PUPPIES PUBLISHING as the name of our publishing company. The puppy who was #12 is on the back of the book.

Each of our puppies has had a different personality and sense, or lack thereof, of humor. Two didn’t make the program and lived with us for their whole lives. One of them became a therapy dog. Another of the dogs we raised who had a career change became a bomb sniffing officer for ATF. When people ask how we can give them up after raising them for a year and falling in love with them, which we always do, we say it is sometimes harder than other times. But one thing about raising Labrador Retrievers, at least in our experience, is that they will go with anyone, and I think that makes the separation they feel easier. To me, that’s more important than our feelings. The departing dogs will fall in love with their trainers, then they will fall in love with their forever people, who will not have to leave them at home all day while working as I now do.

Luckily I only work outside of the house three days a week, and while I’m home writing there is still a warm puppy on my foot, even as I write this blog.