From My Journal This Week

Trying desperately to meet the deadline for finishing my novel. Much anxiety.
I ask myself: What are you so afraid of?

The Great Fear:
If I don't do things just right, everyone will discover what a loser I am. I will wake up one night and find the whole town outside my house with flaming torches and pitchforks. They will attack me, beating me with clubs, and drive me into the desert, where I will be forced to exist the rest of my life alone, cast out, with hungry jackals all around.

But what if I managed to find some way to survive?
Perhaps I could befriend the jackals. (After all, a jackal is just a kind of dog, right? And dogs like me.) This would give me, the Big Loser, enormous power. I might become "The Jackal Woman."

Then because once a society creates Losers and Pariahs it cannot survive without them, pretty soon other people will get banished to the desert. There will develop a whole community of us. The Jackal People.

Need I be so bold as to suggest that this has already happened?

Run for the Roses

The Kentucky Derby—is there any way to convey the excitement, the thrill it held over us kids? It was the town's obsession for a whole week, a long time when you’re eight or nine.

One highlight was the steamboat race between The Belle of Louisville and Indiana’s Delta Queen. Every year I hoped Louisville would win.

Every year the Delta Queen creamed us.

A Memory:

In 1962 my brother and I went to Camp Tall Trees. That year the camp acquired a new horse, and the head counselor announced a contest. We campers would submit names and the staff would pick the best one for the horse’s name. The prize: a candy bar.

For me, it was about much more than a candy bar. If I won, that horse would be mine , or at least always bear the name I chose. I submitted the most beautiful one I could think of: Brown Beauty.

Now I was a little disappointed, but mostly pleased, when my brother won. His entry—“Horace the Horse.”

Steve later told me that as soon as he’d thought of the name he knew he’d win. As for me, that was when I realized I was hopelessly out of his league. How could my “Brown Beauty” mind ever compete with his “Horace the Horse brilliance?”

So What’s My Point?

I loved this year’s Derby, when a puny fifty-to-one nobody (with a toothless rider!) came from last place to win by eight lengths.

I also loved it when fat, dumpy Susan Boyle mowed down the cool crowd on American Idol.

My hope--maybe this bad economy has produced some kind of universal psychic energy change.

Maybe this is our year, when we losers come into our own.

Let's hear it for Brown Beauty!