64-LOVE

Tennis TidBits in the Life of Writing

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From a young age, I’ve been interested in biographies, then autobiographies, and then ushered in were the diaries. I knew about Eleanor Roosevelt before Anne Frank probably because my elders thought the former’s life was less scary. I remember saying, “I’ve loved biographies. I’ll get to know the important people and then I’ll die writing biographies about them.”

It didn’t work out that way. First of all, I’m not dead yet. Second of all, once the diary came into my life, little by little it became more to me than a place to store words about my life as if I were storing photos in an album, book, folder, or slideshow.

I’ve collected books my whole life. How many of them have I read? Few. First, even before the internet, before cell phones, before cable (not sure the order or important enough to research), my ability to focus and concentrate was and honestly, still is, sporadic.

Many of the political science students I knew when studying the subject matter at UC Berkeley became lawyers. Of the 17 jobs for Poli-Sci majors, the lawyer gets paid the most. In my twenties, I discovered I had a bad case of selective listening (attention span) that’s only gotten worse over time. Regardless how much I might want to learn, it’s not always under my control whether I can. In my one statistics class my brain would not stay in my head. Eyes, or ears, a shut down refusal to cooperate. I couldn’t read a legal document, much less study the subject or live the law night and day in a career, whether I wanted to or not.

If I would have read all the books I’ve collected (many at garage sales), I’d be absolutely scintillating, but without reading them one male told me in 2002 our conversations were exactly that. I know what I like. I know what I care about. I know what catches and can control my interest. It’s rarely been fiction that I allow to capture me in print.

Once I opened a library book copy I picked up because it literally wouldn’t let me leave the library until I did so. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt. My MO (method of operation) is to flip around in a book. Read a paragraph here or there. My fascination with the movie My Octopus Teacher snagged me first. I couldn’t stop. With Pelt’s book, I went to the beginning and was obsessed until I got to the end at the end of the second day.

I never obsessed about Anne Frank’s diary, even though she also had her moon in Gemini. This piece is not about astrology, nor political science careers, octopus, or even my lackadaisical capacity to concentrate. It is not that I am “carelessly lazy.” When something catches my attention, I’m indeed drawn in, closer and closer, by an invisible magnet.

At the age of 23, when my poli-sci sisters were already studying the law, I was given a copy of Etty Hillesum’s, An Interrupted Life. I swear, for at least six months I could read nothing else. I felt as if she was alive again, inside of me. Lots of lives are interrupted. Lots of books are called by the same or a similar name. My yoga teacher gave me that book. I had grown my hair out so I could hide behind it in yoga. I’d pushed myself to get through college in four years but I had absolutely NO IDEA what I could commit myself to as a career, or even in the here and now, for a job.

I’d learned to delegate long before I understood what minimum wage was. Oh, here I go again. This is not about my job search or professional skills. So what’s it about Guest?

Now that I’m at the age most people are about to or have been or are planning to retire, the retired life is on my brainwave. I won’t bore you with astrology if you’ll just get through these next few sentences. I promise. Sagittarius is 9th of the 12 signs. So, if Aries represents birth and Pisces represents death (oh they represent much more than that) but Sagittarius is about when people retire. I have four planets (Sun, Mercury, Mars, and Jupiter) in Sagittarius. Not the four horses of the apocalypse, but definitely a handful to rein in and get moving, aligned, in the same direction.

Looking back, when everyone in my grade was focused on careers, marriage, and baby-making, I was lost in a haze of WTF. In my last blog I shared a diary page from my first time as president of my class. Even though I was most corporate during those three years in high school than ever since then, my diary was always my very important last stop after an exhausting and overbooked day, before I turned out the light. Seriously, I didn’t really start watching much television until the late 80s, early 90s.

My diary became a place I confessed, shared what might not be safe with others, my deepest dreams as well as my exact dreams whenever I could catch them upon awakening.

This morning I finished reading the PEOPLE June article on the new movie Federer: Twelve Final Days. Elizabitch, her newly deceased sister used to call her that I learned when we first met, has been cutting my hair for the last 15 years. She lets me grab a bunch of old magazines I call my guilty pleasure and would never buy for myself when I’m on the way out.

It dawned on me, I could watch this movie about the player I hardly knew anything about. Watching it like a retired person who can focus on whatever they want to whenever they want to, my mind was its brightest even though I’d been up for two hours working from 3:30-5:30. This is what I wrote in my online diary.

10:30 AM        I got almost another three hours of glorious sleep. The dreams were flowing and catchable. I decided before I get to work I’d watch that movie about his life. So good, nearing the end but I had to put it on pause, to write these words. Before he retired he and his agent created the LAVER CUP because Laver deserved to be found again in the digital world. I got very emotional because tennis had a profound impact on my life. My dad loved the game. Watching this I felt his energy strongly. He would have loved its subtlety of excellence. Watching Federer talk about his love for Bjorn Borg, his strategy with the game being like chess-he’d learn what his opponents strengths were and then beat them in that department, losing to Nadal but knowing it was good to let the young ones have their time. The two who were his age, he’s retiring before them… because he had six years before they got into the circuit and they should have time without him. So, when it said his last match was September 23^rd, 2023 I put the machine on pause. This diary career is catching and I was directed to come see what happened to me on that day. Last week I wondered when I talked to Roberto.

9/23/22 (these five pieces lifted from that day)

1)   Funny, January 2008 was pc and rad… the latter keeping me up all night with erotic sketches and the former asking why I wasn’t up with the dawn. Love reading me… my life.  My influences.

2)  Saw 501WOM (501 mom’s death day) when getting to Nancy’s truck on the corner to go to FreeGeezerWaterAerobics and then 5XUR177 (5177 dad and his mother Pearl’s address in Eagle Rock) after just mentioning Pearl not thinking she could have kids and me discovering I was unsupported in the womb from my father’s side of the family. I know they are devoted, I get it.

3)  Waiting out in the car for Rite-Aid I caught Roberto Gonzalez at the same old work #@CBS. We talked 20 min. He is moving to Lakewood with his sister. Sightings: 420 (dad’s PM death moment and Pearl’s AM death moment). Saw DM (mom: Diane Maxine). Saw 518 Mom’s father’s death day. Can’t forget the Hershey (mom’s mom’s nickname) on the table waiting for my last gifted Lymph Star massage via Natasha… an 11/17^th daughter of 12/5 mother… who gave me some EMOTIONAL CODES and said I inherited OVERWHELM via Mom through her family… which came through the also gifted EVOX machine series on Tuesday. She then said I’ve got worry and I mentioned that mom worries about everything and Pearl said, “If worrying would do anything for me, I’d worry.” Then she asked, “Dear God, have we cleared Lisa’s worry?” and I noticed a change of light beyond my closed eyes. I asked, “Did that little light (a salt light with three parts to it) just come on?” Yes. Then I asked still with my eyes closed, “Was it scheduled to come on?” No.

4)  I will begin again to believe in the story I’m living and choosing to tell.

5)  I carefully carved my boundaries and held my own. I’ll begin again this belief in the story I’m living, the story I’m choosing to tell.

Tel Aviv bookstore at twenty

Fiction never caught me much but Etty Hillesum did, then Hannah Senesh. To have this much knowledge at my fingertips. So many diarists never had the capacity to see the magic of self evolution when seen in retrospect, synchronized with the modern gifts of technology at our fingertips.

I am now 64. I self-published one book and took it down to edit a decade ago.