Five Pages a Day (4 page)

I knew how to cook only two things: grilled cheese sandwiches and fudge. As soon as we returned to Austin from our honeymoon, I bought a cookbook. Fortunately, anyone who can read can cook, and I soon had success with spaghetti, cinnamon rolls, and lemon pie.

I could have continued my college education. At the time I didn't want to, a choice I now regret. My husband had a bachelor of science degree and a job at his family's dairy. I was busy baking chocolate-chip cookies.

Carl and I adopted a kitten, Stompy. Although I had always considered myself a dog person, I quickly fell in love with this small gray cat.

After a few months of housekeeping, I returned to work at the radio station.

One of the KAUS salesmen, Ken Soderberg, had blond good looks and a sharp wit. I was in awe of all the KAUS employees, but I felt especially tongue-tied around Ken. He taught me something even more valuable than how to write quickly and create ideas out of nothing.

One afternoon Carl was riding in a milk truck when a car ran into it. His left elbow was broken and he had to stay in the hospital for surgery.

That night Stompy didn't come home. All night long, with Carl gone, I called Stompy and searched our yard with a flashlight.

As soon as it grew light the next morning, I found her—dead on the side of the road behind our house.

Broken-hearted, I ran to my neighbor and told him the terrible news. The neighbor, a farmer who had raised livestock for decades, said, “It's only a cat. Be glad it wasn't Carl.”

He didn't mean to be unkind; many people then and now think animals are unimportant.

It's only a cat
.

But she wasn't just a cat! She was Stompy, my special little friend, and I mourned her deeply.

I was supposed to go to work at KAUS that morning, but after I buried Stompy, I couldn't stop crying. I considered calling in sick. I toyed with saying I needed to be at the hospital with Carl, but I couldn't bring myself to lie to the colleagues who'd been so kind to me.

In the end, I called the station, and when Ken Soderberg answered, I blubbered, “I can't come to work. My cat got run over!” Then I dissolved in tears.

I braced myself for Ken's reprimand, waiting for him to say Stompy was only a cat and if I wanted to keep my job, I had better get myself down to the station.

Ken's voice was gentle. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “A pet is one of the family, and of course you can't work today. Don't worry about it. Grieve for your cat, and come back to work when you're ready.”

It was my first experience with someone who understood my affinity with animals. Now I know that many people adore their dogs and cats and horses and guinea pigs, but I didn't know that then.

During visiting hours that afternoon, I sat beside Carl's hospital bed and told him what had happened to Stompy. We held hands and cried together. One reason I have always loved my husband so much is that he has a tender heart. He cries as easily as I do, and his love for animals runs as deep.

When I went to work the next morning, a bouquet of flowers from Ken's garden brightened my desk.

I don't know if I ever told Ken how much I was touched by his sympathy and understanding. I hope I did. I have followed his example many times when friends have lost a beloved animal.

Carl and I soon adopted another cat (Tiger, who lived to be fourteen), and since then we have never been without one or more companion animals.

{ 5 }

Two Letters That
Changed My Life

T
hree years after our marriage, Carl and I moved from Minnesota to California. My dad had been transferred to Fresno, California, two years earlier, and after we visited my parents we wanted to live on the West Coast, too. Carl was hired by a large company, and I got a job with an employment agency. I interviewed available workers, then matched them with employers who needed temporary help. I worked there a year, and left the day I became a mother.

When the doctor told me that because of polio, I couldn't have a baby, Carl and I knew we wanted to adopt. Our adoption agency did a thorough “home study” to be sure we could provide a good home for a child. We were interviewed separately and together, and a social worker visited our home twice. During one visit, she asked me, “If you never have a child, will your life be happy?”

I answered, “Yes,” then worried that I had blown our chances. I wanted a baby, but if we didn't get one I wouldn't waste my life yearning for what I couldn't have.

Bob came to us when he was five weeks old. I was at work when our social worker called. “We have a baby boy for you,” she told me.

I burst into tears. When I calmed down enough, I set a time for the following day when we could see the baby, learn about his background, and decide if he was right for us. As if we would have said no!

As soon as I finished talking to the social worker, I called Carl. The next morning we met our son.

No young couple ever appreciated parenthood more than we did. While Carl was at work, I pushed the stroller on long walks, hung diapers to dry in the sun, and rocked my baby to sleep. Evenings and weekends, Carl took baby pictures, and we both marveled at every new thing Bob did.

Carl got transferred twice, so we moved when Bob was eighteen months old and again six months later. In between moves, we applied to the adoption agency for another baby.

Anne was two months old when she joined our family. We had just bought an old house, and our electricity could not be turned on until the wiring was repaired. Carl was in the basement with the county electrical inspector, finding out what needed to be fixed.

Once again, I answered the phone. The same social worker told me that the agency had a daughter for us.

I flew down the basement stairs shouting, “We have a baby girl!” Carl and I cried and hugged, and then explained to the startled electrical inspector, who not only joined the celebration, but turned our power on. “You need to be able to sterilize baby bottles,” he said. “I trust you to make the repairs.”

I loved being a mother, and enjoyed my kids at every age: babies, toddlers, schoolchildren, and teenagers. Now I'm repeating the fun with my grand children.

After Bob and Anne were in school all day, I grew restless. I learned to sew, I knitted sweaters, and I read a lot. I was the Cub Scout den mother, I volunteered at the school library, and I helped a non-profit theater group, but I still felt incomplete, like a book with missing pages.

One day I received a letter from the University of Minnesota. It was a survey of intellectually gifted students who had dropped out of school. “What are you doing now?” the survey asked. “Have you won any awards?”

That letter zapped me like a lightning bolt.
Intellectually gifted?
No one had ever told me that. I had always felt smart, but I thought everyone felt that way.
Had I won any awards?
For what? I had a blue ribbon from the county fair for my lemon pie, but I knew that wasn't the kind of award the university meant.

I reread the letter several times. Then I asked myself what I wanted in my future. If I got this same letter ten years down the road, what answers would I give?

The next day, I enrolled in a California community college. The application form had a space to put down what future career I had in mind. I thought about putting “writer,” but that seemed too impossible. I didn't want to leave the space blank, so I wrote “unsure.”

I signed up to study astronomy, comparative religions, and early childhood education. I also took a class called “composition and reading.”

I liked school even more as an adult than I had as a teenager. In the composition and reading class, the professor had us write a one-thousand-word paper each week. This quickly became my favorite course. I loved writing those papers, and I thrived on the professor's encouragement.

When our beloved cat died, I wrote about him. The professor read my paper aloud in class, and I saw tears on the cheeks of my classmates. None of them had known Tiger, yet they wept at his loss because my words had touched them.

This is what I want to do, I thought. I want to write. I want to share my thoughts and emotions by creating stories. When I registered for the next semester, I stated my career goal without hesitation: writer.

After I had completed only two semesters, Carl's company went out of business in California. We moved to Washington State, where he had a new job.

I called a local college and learned that I'd be considered an out-of-state student for one year, even though Washington was now my home. We couldn't afford the higher tuition that out-of-state students must pay, so once again my college education was put aside.

Since my goal, after getting my degree, was to be a writer, I decided that I would spend the year writing. It would be good practice.

As soon as Bob and Anne left for school each morning, I headed for my desk in our unfinished basement. Most days, except for lunch and a break to walk George, our dog, I stayed there until the kids returned home in the afternoon.

I subscribed to two magazines for writers, and I bought a copy of
Writer's Market
, a book that tells how to submit writing to publishers. I began sending magazine articles and short stories to potential publishers. My goal was to put a new piece of writing in the mail every Friday.

I made a chart to keep track of my many submissions, all of which came back with brief letters declining my work. Most of these letters, which writers call rejection slips, said simply, “Sorry.” Not as sorry as I am, I thought. A few said, “Not right for us.” Why not? I wondered. What's wrong?

Except for Carl, Anne, and Bob, I didn't tell any one that I was submitting my work. I was too afraid that I would never publish anything, and I didn't want others to know of my failure. It's hard enough to be rejected without announcing it to the world.

As the months went by, though, I began to think of myself as a writer anyway. When a new friend asked what I did, I said, “I'm a writer,” and I knew it was true. Getting published didn't make me a writer. It was the act of sitting at my typewriter day after day, putting words on paper.

With every submission, I included a stamped envelope addressed to myself so that if the editor didn't want to publish my work, it could be returned to me. When I got my mail each day, I glanced through it, dreading the sight of one of those self-addressed envelopes. They always meant a rejection.

Bob often mispronounced words when he was growing up. One day he brought in the mail, handed me one of the all-too-familiar self-addressed envelopes, and said sadly, “Sorry, Momma. It's another dejection slip.”

He was right. I did get discouraged, but even so the process of writing daily and submitting my work became my way of life. When the year ended and I could once again afford to go to college, I didn't do it. It would have taken too much time away from my work, from my new life as a writer.

I continued to write, submit my work, and have it returned—until one special day in 1972 when I got a different kind of letter from a publisher.

It was an ordinary Saturday. As I carried in the mail, I looked, as always, for one of my self-addressed envelopes. When I saw one, I laid it aside with the bills. I didn't want to spoil a happy morning with my family by reading another “dejection” slip.

Later, I finally opened the envelope. Instead of a returned manuscript, it contained a letter from a small magazine called
Today's Christian Mother.
My short article, “Whistle While You Wait,” had been accepted for publication. Payment of five dollars would follow.

Goosebumps tingled up my arms and the back of my neck. My hands shook as I read the letter again, and then again.

“I sold an article!” I yelled. “To a magazine!”

Carl and the kids came running.

“I sold a magazine article,” I repeated, in case they hadn't heard me the first time.

I was as thrilled as if the pay had been five thousand dollars. The editor of a magazine liked what I had written well enough to publish it. At last it was official: I was a published writer!

“How much are they paying you?” Carl asked.

“Five dollars. I'm going to save it until I earn enough for all of us to go to Hawaii.”

To his everlasting credit, my husband did not suggest that five dollars was a drop in the ocean as far as the cost of a trip to Hawaii went. Instead he said, “Good plan.”

As soon as the check arrived, I went to the bank and opened my Hawaii account. The minimum amount needed to open a new savings account was five dollars. I had just made it.

{ 6 }

Twenty-five Words or Less

T
he savings account grew slowly, partly because I tried too many different kinds of writing. Instead of deciding what I most wanted to write and then working to improve, I wrote a little of almost everything. I tried poetry, humor, short stories, and nonfiction, all aimed at adult readers.

Writing is like practicing a musical instrument: the more you do it, the better you get. However, my early years of writing were like practicing the piano one week, the violin the next week, and the banjo the week after that. I jumped from fiction to nonfiction, from prose to poetry, without ever gaining expertise in any one kind of writing.

Although my rejections still far outnumbered my acceptances, I did publish a few more short pieces. I lacked focus, but I was persistent. I tried to write five pages every day.

After that first article to
Today's Christian Mother
, I sold a humor article about Thanksgiving, “Feast or Football,” to
Deli News
, a publication which went to small food businesses.

Next I sold a verse about Washington's wet weather to a newsletter put out by the American Automobile Association.

My dad subscribed to the
Wall Street Journal
, a business newspaper, and I always chuckled at the funny verse in its “Pepper and Salt” column. I began sending my light verse to the
Wall Street Journal
, and in the next few years they published four of my poems.