Under the Influence of the Druid Bard

It seems that as much as I might neglect my novel manuscript, she pursues me. Take my recent trip to Arizona for example.

I networked day and night at the National Conference for Tobacco or Health and had little time for relaxation and no time for writing, except for editing my clients’ work. I met a woman from Erie who invited me to rent a car for a day trip to Scottsdale to see Taliesin West.

I’m a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright homes, but I’d never set foot in one until last Friday. During the guided tour we learned a little about Frank’s personal life and how the house evolved from year to year. Of greatest interest to me was that the home did not have glass windows, originally. Canvas was stretched across the openings. Mrs. Wright the Third convinced Frank, over the course of 10 years, to use glass because he would then be able to work, inspired by the scenery around the house. Then, when he blasted to excavate for his cabaret, all the glass in the house shattered.

The guide told us, before we even set foot in the house, that taliesin means "shining brow." Then she talked about how the house was purposefully situated not on the top of the hill, but under the top, like a brow, so as to blend with the landscape.

This morning I got around to an Internet search for the word. I came up with some of Frank’s own words:

"Taliesin was the name of a Welsh poet, a druid-bard who sang to Wales the glories of fine art. Many legends cling to that beloved reverend name in Wales.

"Richard Hovey's charming masque, 'Taliesin,' had just made me acquainted with his image of the historic bard. Since all my relatives had Welsh names for their places, why not Taliesin for mine? . . . Literally the Welsh word means 'shining brow.'

"This hill on which Taliesin now stands as 'brow' was one of my favorite places when as a boy looking for pasque flowers I went in March sun while snow still streaked the hillsides. When you are on the low hill-crown you are out in mid-air as though swinging in a plane, the Valley and two others dropping away from you leaving the tree-tops standing below all about you."

- Frank Lloyd Wright

My Facebook friends wrote to me and suggested that I read Loving Frank. After checking the synopsis, I understand that this story of taboo love is meant to inspire me to finish "Acoustic Memory." And so I must return to the influence of the bard.

Why Not Phoenix?

I’m in Phoenix. There’s a pigeon at my feet at the Starbucks table, a waning moon has paused between twin towers across the street, and my US News and World Report hasn’t told me anything my teenager did not presciently discuss with me on the day before I left. Panhandling and mandated health insurance have one thing in common: They’re both controversial. One of them is very pressing right now—I keep getting harassed for money by panhandlers—feels much like Chapel Hill.

Phoenix was a fork in the road for me in 1997. The song that was on the radio in my rental car was the Gin Blossoms “Follow You Down.” I was offered a job at Good Samaritan Hospital and belabored the decision. I recall that they did a fairly good job of courting me. The very friendly Mass General trained female in the group took me in her Land Rover on a tour of expensive digs that looked like adobes. We cruised past the Scottsdale Neimans (I was in a blue pinstripe suit from the Houston Galleria Neimans). She gave me the word on the guys in the group and told me that being single was no problem: She met her surgeon husband in the doctor’s lounge at Good Sam. (I bit back the “been there, done that.”) They could have enticed me with a hike on Camelback (well, I hiked it anyway by myself) or pictures of the head partner’s cabin in the mountains that was only discussed in the context of his car when we went to dinner. “He drives an economy car because he sinks his money into his weekend retreat.”

In the end there was my darling Ella, a daycare child, who would be in a very hot climate (as if Houston wasn’t hot enough) and there was a grad student at Baylor, who struck me as a fun guy. Now there is a son, Samuel; a husband; Beckley, the Baylor grad; and Ella with a recently diagnosed proclivity for making preneoplastic moles. Forget the Arizona sun; the moon across the street tells me I made the right decision. Now the only phoenix in my life is the one on my husband's tattoo.

Takin' It to the Streets

It's funny just how jam-packed a life can become when you are living fearlessly. I'm approaching the 6-month mark of a resolution to take it to the streets.

I'm putting more miles on the car, spending more time with real world people, meeting one on one with exceptional folks with stellar track records, and finding myself moving forward on many fronts. I'm filming a video that has teenagers enthusiastically asking to participate. I'm following a big idea dream that has talented people jumping on board. I'm aiming for backing from the WHO and the CDC. I'm watching legislative committee meetings. I'm reading political blogs.

Just in the past thirty days I've interviewed a pilot home from Charlie Wilson's war, spent two hours in the office of the executive director of the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network, bent the ear of a National Urban Fellows graduate, and made plans to work on a storyboard with a filmmaker in Austin. I've attended a freelance writers' seminar, registered for the National Conference on Tobacco or Health, and listened to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Chair of the Cullen Trust for Health Care speak on tobacco and health disparities.

New words in my vocabulary include ecological momentary assessment, MPOWER and F-scanning.

The people around me inspire me: I learned that my next-door neighbor is on the board of Africa Rising, that James Protzman's political blog rocks, and that altruism is alive and well at the Splinter Group.

My community is asking me for more. I've been asked to speak at two state employee functions, to write a letter to the editor of the local papers and to consider how I would like to contribute to leadership in the American Lung Association.

All of this for a girl that used to be chained to a microscope. Now I'm holding on to whatever I can find.

When a Picture is Worth a Thousand Lives

My generation did not "kick the habit" because for every "We Mind Very Much If You Smoke" jingle, we had another one about coming a long way. Those acoustic memories intermingle with memories of friends and loved ones whose lives were extinguished by the tobacco industry.

There is a global movement underway toward graphic warnings about disease on tobacco packaging. What follows is my letter to the editor of a North Carolina newspaper.

Sunday, May 31st is the World Health Organization’s annual World No Tobacco Day. This year’s theme is the implementation of pictorial warning labels on tobacco products. Other countries, including India, Canada, the United Kingdom and Brazil, already place pictures of diseased patients on tobacco packages, making the health risks of tobacco use hard for the consumer to overlook. The United States lags behind. Currently textual warnings are all that are in place on tobacco products.

Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the world. I witnessed this firsthand at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and the University of Texas Medical School at Houston, where I diagnosed thousands of cases of disease caused by tobacco.

World No Tobacco Day is an ideal time for all individuals to consider their own possible contributions to the WHO’s MPOWER initiatives to “Monitor tobacco use and the policies to prevent it; Protect people from tobacco smoke; Offer people help to quit tobacco use; Warn about the dangers of tobacco; Enforce bans on tobacco, advertising, promotion and sponsorship; Raise taxes on tobacco.”

Let us act responsibly and proactively for the benefit of our country’s children by advocating for picture warnings on tobacco products.

Dolley Madison and Maureen Dowd

We were having dinner with some friends on Saturday night and I was enjoying the company of a bright 5-year-old who sat to my right at the dinner table and held forth with me on the topics of his selection, namely, the war that won’t end, Dolley Madison, and Hotel for Dogs. When he mentioned Madagascar 2, I said I thought the plot was a little too similar to The Lion King. I told him I felt like I was back with Scar and the hyenas all over again. Because the boy is an accomplished writer, who had shown me several books before dinner that he had written on first grade paper, I introduced him to the word plagiarism.

Plagiarism. Well first, he wanted to spell it. You know the schools are really creating brave spellers these days because now there is a theory called something like experimental spelling in usage in the Chapel Hill Carrboro City Schools whereby students are not penalized for using a word that they cannot spell correctly in their writing. Thinking back to my days of typing term papers at Sacred Heart Academy on a typewriter, I wish this educational coup would have occurred decades earlier.

So the experimental speller gave it a crack: P-L-A-Y-G-E-R and so on. This spelling makes plagiarism seem like child’s play. A quick check on Webster’s online says that the word is from the Latin word for kidnapper.

And the taking of the idea must be willful. I made that point very clear at the table.

Did Maureen Dowd willfully take from another and fail to credit him in her NYT column? I personally find it doubtful. According to an AP article I read this morning, she told the Huffington Post that the material she wrote was an acoustic memory. She did not use my term acoustic memory. That might have gotten my goat. She did say it was something she heard and then wrote. The AP article does not go on to say if she intended to credit the speaker or if she didn’t feel it was necessary.

I am such the idea purist that I do fault people who steal others' ideas. But what under the sun is new today? Still I think there is a line that does get crossed too often. Having been around many writers in the past five years or so, I once witnessed a writer discussing a topic at a coffee and then saw a very near exact quote of his concept in another writer’s work, uncredited, the very next day by a writer who was at our table.

But what of aging brains and acoustic memories during the creative process? For example, have I heard someone posit this question and failed to credit him? Does Maureen Dowd sometimes forget she did not create an idea and then fail to credit it? At my age it would be plausible. My son constantly tells me that I forget because I am OLD. His caps. His emphasis. There, I gave credit.

The Dalai Lama and My Mama

I've been reading Barbara Walters' memoirs, Audition. An elderly friend of mine bought the book for two dollars from the Chapel Hill Public Library and passed it on to me.

Every time I think of Barbara Walters, I think of my dad. My father was on his deathbed in Baptist East Hospital in the fall of 2003. I had flown to Louisville to visit him. I had plans to meet two friends, Susan Ward and Kim Maddox, for lunch. My dad was short of breath because he was dying from idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. It was my second day in his room, and we'd been over the important stuff. It didn't seem appropriate to waste breath on small talk, so my dad asked me what I would like to watch on his television in his hospital room. I said The View.

"That damn Baba Wawa," my dad said, in an exasperated tone of nearly benign disgruntlement, "I never did like her."

After reading Barbara's memoirs, I realize one thing: Men hate her or they try to seduce her. Harry Reasoner--hated her. Fidel Castro--tried to seduce her.

I'd been reading the memoirs in a fairly linear fashion, which is something that I do on rare occasions when I am entirely fascinated. On Mother's Day weekend, I had asked my husband to read me the chapter on Monica, so I had already skipped ahead a bit. Last night I chose to read the chapter on celebrities. Barbara writes of her visit with the Dalai Lama in that chapter.

Now two friends of mine, Troy Campbell and James Protzman, have recently spoken of the Dalai Lama to me. Troy mentioned the Dalai Lama when he told me about the movie Happiness Is (Troy is an associate producer of the film)and James said that he would most like to interview the Dalai Lama when I interviewed James about his first book, Jesus Swept. So I was clearly at attention while reading this passage from the book, even though it was about thirty minutes past my bedtime of ten o'clock Eastern Time.

I got to the part toward the end of the chapter where Barbara interviewed the Dalai Lama, and he told her that the purpose of life is "'to be happy.'" I had to put the book down. I had an acoustic memory.

It was January of 1987, and my mother was on her deathbed. We were both on her deathbed, actually, because I was lying with her in her bed in her bedroom. I was getting ready to leave Louisville to return to Lexington for the spring semester of my first year of medical school. My mother, realizing that the breast cancer was going to win, turned to me and said, "I want you to always be happy." That was it. The last piece of wisdom my mom ever bestowed.

And yet, it did not seem profound to me. I was climbing, climbing, up and up toward a dream of becoming a physician, and my mom was advising me to be happy. The advice seemed so cliche at the time that I filed it away into my memory archives and never really thought of it too much. To be honest, the advice she gave me one day in the Brown Cancer Center, upon watching a rather plain jane physician walk past us ( "Heather, when you are a doctor, at least put on lipstick in the morning") is advice I have mentioned to my daughter and to my friends because I thought it was clever. It was slightly more directive than, be happy. At that age I really craved substantive advice and lipstick seemed more substantive than happiness.

When I was able to pick the book back up, I mused that Barbara seemed fairly surprised that such an important man gave such simple advice.

Upon reflection, my mother's advice about happiness was much harder to follow than her advice about wearing makeup.

And so on this spring day, when the dog took one look at my inbox and whispered, "There's nothing to edit yet, take me on a walk," I did. We saw a mockingbird chasing a crow away from his turf. I felt amused. When the breeze whispered, "This may be the last spring day," I headed to Southern States for soil and fertilizer and worked on my patio garden past noon without sweating. I found the first tomato on the tomato plant. I felt happy.

The Specter of Disease

Well, it’s comforting to know that amid a growing swine flu outbreak in the United States, Arlen Specter can trump a virus. Maybe this isn’t going to be a pandemic. After all, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer covered Specter’s shift to the left before the swine flu tonight.

Since the weekend, the swine flu has spread to more states in the US, and given the incubation period and the laboratory identification lag phase, we can expect that just in time for the this weekend’s run for the roses in Louisville, Kentucky, some folks will find themselves wondering if they should make that trip to Churchill Downs or not. Three weeks from now there will likely be a spike in cases in Kentucky. Who can stay home sick from the Derby?

You can. It bears repeating that the CDC urges all of those who are ill to stay home one day beyond the day all symptoms subside. Yes, that is one day beyond, and not one day into symptoms, as is the usual practice in our capitalistic, thou must not call in sick society. The CDC is asking business owners to proactively consider the flu.

If you are well enough to go to the Derby though, put some money down on Advice for me.