Delicious Ambiguity: The Beginning

On August 6, 2011, my youngest child’s 5^th birthday, in the middle of a sleepover, at 9:30-ish pm, a family friend, 2 years old, sleeping in her car seat, was shot and killed inside her father’s Toyota 4runner in a remote area in Placer County. It’s an unthinkable cold fact, and really hard. Since August, we’ve kept our antennae up, alert for signs of the girl’s playful spirit. I work hard at being notfurious.

At about that general time, I had come to terms with time itself, its coming and going, my calling to jot some things down, make sense of mine, reconcile it, set things right, quiet myself down. My people have occasionally encouraged me to set thoughts to paper. My girl soulmate fanfriend Kellye once had simply said, “You have an interesting story to tell.” Being in my own skin, my story is unremarkable, plainly simple to me. I don’t know anything otherwise. But with this seed planted, in quiet pausing moments, a new question arises now and again: I’m off to Russia for vacation, staying in a one bedroom apartment with my ex-husband, his wife, our daughter, their son. Is this a “You have an interesting story to tell” detail, is that what she meant? But I didn't take the time to write about that, or even ask what she meant, then.

A month or two before the early-August shocker, I called a meeting with Kellye. We sat at an outdoor table at The Chocolate Fish, our coffee shop, the place where all important discussions occur, aka The Fish. I blurted out my secret thought, I had been looking for writers groups online. Finally, I’d given in, determined now to seriously thinking about maybe devoting some time to possibly writing things down. Where to start? Simply, Kellye said, get Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, by Natalie Goldberg. We finished our coffees and returned to work.

There were exercises, and powered by new energy, I was motivated to complete them religiously. One of those exercises was to get with other writers, because stories need to be heard. And it turns out this along with all the other advice in that book is true. Now that I’ve been at this a bit, it hasn’t happened yet that I don’t tweak a piece after it’s been read aloud. The right words come out of my mouth, but do not reliably come through my fingers. New problem to solve – I needed people to write with - who could be in my writer’s group? Who can I trust? Who can’t hurt me? Who doesn’t know me too well? Who do I want to spend time with/listen to? Who would show up? Who’s cool?

Of course I thought of Kellye, true friend, awesome writer, and voracious reader. The problem with her is that she is too close, maybe she knows me too well. Moreover, as an awkward beginner, I wanted to fumble around privately, in the dark. A true dilemma.

Nothing happened for a long time, and then one night the problem resolved itself quickly, almost as if I was a distanced observer of my own free agent hands. Denise, an old friend from my days as a Tower Books clerk, posted something on Facebook while I happened to be online. Before my brain could intervene, my fingers punched out a question: “Wanna be in a writer’s group with me?” [The sweat and butterflies. What if she wasn’t interested? What if she said no? What if I wasn’t good enough? What if she thought I was a dork? Or worse, a creeper? My heartrate zoomed.] She instantly responded.

“With you? Absolutely.”

September 24, 2011, we met at The Fish. I arrived early, and told Cait what I was up to while I ordered. Denise arrived shortly after – a reunion. She looked no different, had not aged in the 15 years since we’d seen each other in person: petite redhead, big, round, Paul McCartney eyes, bright, wide smile, dry sense of humor. We caught up over hot beverages outside, silently sizing each other up; friendly, but careful.

About an hour into it, we got to talking about writing, what we were up to, what we hoped to get out of this, the format and structure of what a writer’s group might be like. She’d already made the leap into a writer’s life, and even had business cards. I was just poking around. We would be careful about letting anyone into our group. We’d meet roughly every two weeks, at different locations. We’d tolerate each other if writing didn’t happen. We’d inspire each other. We’d have someone to read our stuff to, we’d set assignments, we’d give constructive feedback.

Cait popped over on her break, sat for just a minute. We chatted easily with her about what we were up to. We told her about our plans and she asked if she could join. We instantly, in unison, without so much as looking at each other, enthusiastically said yes. That’s right. We didn’t discuss it ahead of time. We weren’t even fully formed yet and we were already breaking rules.

Two weeks later, we met at The Naked Lounge, and named ourselves the Delicious Ambiguity Writer’s Group. DAWG.

I became aware of the Delicious Ambiguity concept some weeks before, after Madeline had passed but before I knew of it, on August 13, 2011, a Saturday. Driving home the night before, I’d been at Harlow’s Irishapalooza. I passed by a missing child alert on the short freeway stretch home, right there on the Capitol City Freeway, just prior to the I-5 south exit, that short little piece of elevated roadway that connects 99, 50, and 80. A perfect spot for such an alert, really; anyone going anywhere in northern California might have passed through that stretch that night.

The next morning, I awoke so late, cotton-headed, it had been a good night. I rolled over, logged on to Facebook. My middle sister Corinne had posted this: “The mother of a missing child is a friend of ours and there is an Amber Alert. Please help if you have seen the father, he goes by the name Moni and the child abducted is Madeline Fay. If you see them please contact authorities. He drives a green 4runner.”

Every-damn-thing stopped in that moment, and as much as I can know how it feels to have lead in my stomach, so it was. Guilt flooded in. It seemed to me then that had I recognized her when I passed the sign the night before, she would have surely been safely returned to mom already. It’s an absurd idea, but my mind shot to that irrational conclusion in the fog of the morning, in the impossibility of this news, before coffee, before that first pee, before my contacts were securely fixed to my eyeballs.

I just laid there in bed, unable to move, crying crying crying. Friends called, I didn’t answer. A bit turned into chunks turned into hours turned into more than half a day. At 2-ish, I carelessly assembled clothing and drove to The Fish looking like hell.

There she was. Sweet, smiling, cheerful, darling, eccentric, smart, thoughtful, cool, goofy, hipster Cait, working the register. I told her what was up, and went through, in excruciating detail, exactly why I thought Maddy was fine. Listening, Cait decorated my coffee cup with curlicue letters, my name. She spelled it right. EYKrm also at the bottom. And on the back, she wrote me a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, the sun radiates from your shoe.” [Moni, he had a boat, he liked to sail it to Mexico. He’d simply taken the girl by boat, down the coast. Eventually he’d need to dock, she’d be found. It couldn’t have been any different, right? There is no plausible other explanation, right? Being of Egyptian descent, his final destination had to be Egypt. Who would/could harm that little girl? How could he get out of the country otherwise?].

Cait, the puckish caretaker.

She tells me that was the day I told her everything, how I’d lived in Russia, worked at Tower. I don’t remember the words I used, I don’t remember much at all, just that being there was easy. She told me she lived in Hungary, and somehow together we found we both had a thing for Gene Wilder. I told her about sitting with my dad in the living room, watching The World’s Greatest Lover every now and again, growing up; about my dad throwing his head back in laughter, slapping his knee. It made him so happy. Using my phone, I looked Wilder up on Facebook, and liked his fan page. We checked him out on Wikipedia, wondered what he’s up to now.

We worried aloud about him, how he was getting by without his lovelight, Gilda. Then we looked up Gilda Radner’s life story, too. Wilder hadn’t been her first husband, but they had such a strong, meant-for-each-other-true-love connection. That is when Cait surprised me, pulling a page out of her notebook, and gifted me her favorite Gilda Radner quote. Who carries a notebook containing their favorite quotes around, anyway?

The quote: “I wanted a perfect ending. Now I've learned, the hard way, that some poems don't rhyme, and some stories don't have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what's going to happen next.  Delicious Ambiguity.”

My paper to-go cup from that day resides on my bookshelf still, evidence of what was born during those few hours couched between not knowing and knowing, and the tenderness of the girl in the coffee shop: so young, so wise, so sweet, so there.

I went home, eventually. Later, I somehow managed to go to a movie, The Help. I cried nonstop, big tears, for all the injustice everywhere, just like that. I think the people next to me were more than a little worried.

The news broke just as I left the theater that night, unimaginable then, still.  Dad and daughter, murder suicide.

Everything changed with Madeline’s passing. People say writing is therapeutic. This is true for me; it’s a cheaper, more effective drug to quiet the fury swilling around inside my skin. I resisted it for years, but the lightning bolt of Maddy’s passing exposed a dormant – yet urgent – need to write. So that’s how we three began to routinely meet up, write on our own, write together, share our work.

Happy First Anniversary, Loves.