In the first few months of this blog’s existence, I was pretty much talking to myself. I didn’t mind this, exactly, for I was still experimenting. But I was, I admit, a wee bit lonely.
This post from April 2012, in its tiny way, got things off the ground for me. After it went live, readers started visiting my blog. More importantly, they stuck around to see what I would say next.
Wanna know my secret to building a modest online following? Two words: “Monkey Poo.”
You’re welcome.
***
Yummers.
The other day I was hunched over the breakfast table so miserable, tired, and achy that I felt like I was recovering from a hangover. As I had not imbibed anything stronger than orange juice the night before, this all seemed horribly unfair. I could do little more than stare at my waffle, inhale my coffee, and hope that my head would stop throbbing. It was barely 7 a.m. and I had already chalked the day up as a loss.
Ellen and Alex were at the table, too. She was eating a Fluffernutter on a toasted English muffin. He was picking at dry cereal while suspiciously eying the Fluff jar. Alex loves marshmallows, but there’s something about Fluff that he doesn’t quite trust. He won’t go near the stuff.
After a long, silent pause, with each of us absorbed in his and her own private thoughts (My thought being, “I hate everything!”), Alex broke the silence with a question that oozed disgust: “Where does that come from?” he asked, pointing to the Fluff.
The words flew out of my mouth so quickly they surprised my brain.
“Fluff Monkeys,” I said.
“What?” Alex sputtered, eyes wide.
Then he said: “Noooooo. It does not. It does not.”
Then, a millisecond later: “Does it really? Really, daddy? Daddy. Daddy. Does it really?”
“It really does,” I said. “Fluff Monkeys live deep in the jungles of Borneo and explorers go there to look for them.” I wasn’t quite sure where I was going with this, so I sipped my coffee to buy time. It turned out I didn’t really need to do this; before I finished slurping, the rest of the tale came into focus. “When the explorers see a Fluff Monkey, they poke it with a stick to annoy it. Well, as you know, annoyed monkeys throw their poop. And that’s good, because Fluff Monkeys poop Fluff.”
To a six-year-old, there is no better punchline to any joke than “poop.” Alex was in giggle mode.
“So they poop the Fluff and throw it at the explorers. The explorers catch the poop and collect it in wheelbarrows,” I said. “Then the explorers wheel the poop away, put it in jars, and sell it to your mother.”
Ellen feigned the dry heaves. Alex leapt from his chair so he could literally fall on the floor laughing.
We had a few more laughs with the Fluff Monkey idea before we all wheezed a tired sigh and got back to eating. By then I was amazed to discover that my headache was gone.
Behold the healing power of nonsense!
What’s the most sublime bit of nonsense you had ever told another person?
My love and respect for Mom knows no bounds. She taught me persistence, how to deal with failure, and how to relentlessly — yet morally — pursue my passions. In other words, she is a big reason why I am a writer.
And, as the following proves, Mom also taught me how to become an early riser.
***
In the early 1980s, when my age finally reached the early double digits, Mom let me stay up late on weekends. Not just late, but as late as I liked. This was heady stuff to an 11-year old. If I wanted to stay up to watch the late, late movie on UHF, I could! It didn’t even matter if the movie was crappy (because it usually was). It was late late! Woo!
There was, however, a big catch to Mom’s flexible bedtime rules. Though Mom didn’t care what time I went to bed, she did care what time I got up. Anything after 9 a.m. was strictly forbidden. If there was even the slightest chance I’d oversleep, she would give me The Wakeup Call.
The Wakeup Call soon became a cruel, cruel Saturday morning tradition. It was divided into three parts.
Part One:
“It’s almost 9 o’clock,” Mom said brightly as she entered my room.
I squinted at my alarm clock. It said 7:30.
7:30 is not “almost 9 o’clock” to anyone. I tried to explain this to Mom, but she had already hustled off to another part of the house wielding a laundry hamper and a can of Pledge. Mom, then as now, couldn’t stand still for very long.
I, on the other hand, could, then as now, stand still for quite a while. I was even more skilled at lying still — and I demonstrated this skill by immediately falling back to sleep.
Part Two:
“It is now 9 o’clock!” Mom announced with a stridency in her voice that wasn’t there in Part One. “Get up!”
She turned on the lights and raised my shades, filling the room with the weak morning light. The morning light was weak because the sun had barely begun its journey over the horizon.
It was 7:45.
Then, as before, she exited just as quickly as she had come, leaving my door slightly ajar.
“OK,” I said to the empty room. “OK, OK, OK…” I put a blanket over my head and wondered how my mom became a teacher without ever learning how to tell time.
Part Three (which I believe is outlawed by The Geneva Convention):
Part Three began downstairs as Mom’s canister vacuum cleaner commenced its industrial strength assault on the family room carpet. Mom’s vacuum was not like other vacuums. I think she had it custom made with Harley-Davidson parts. No corner of the house could escape it’s iconic roar. Not even my dreams.
“What’s that noise?” a breathless, bespectacled Lynda Carter asks. “Is it an earthquake?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing” I reply with irresistible confidence and elan.
“You’re my superhero,” she sighs, looking deep into my eyes. We resume our embrace…
KA-TUNK! KA-TUNK! KA-TUNK!
With the ground floor now free of dust, Mom ascended to the second floor, slamming the vacuum against each step as she climbed. There were 13 steps. She ka-tunked every one.
And my lovely Lynda was only a wistful memory.
My childhood room was at the very end of a long, carpeted hallway. In my half sleep, I heard the vacuum’s slow, inexorable approach. It didn’t sound like a Harley anymore. It was more like a caged jaguar riding an elephant driving a combine harvester.
And, as each second passed, it grew louder and louder.
At the end of Part Two, Mom left the door to my room slightly ajar. Mom never did anything by accident. As the vacuum reached my room, she had no need to turn the knob. Without breaking stride, she used the head of the vacuum as a battering ram. The door slammed open and my room was alive with noise.
Mom didn’t tell me to get up. That ship had sailed. Now the vacuum did the talking. When I still failed to move, Mom rammed it against the legs of my bed, creating a noise I felt more than heard – one I couldn’t escape no matter how tightly I wrapped the pillow around my head. My teeth rattled. My head throbbed. My stomach flipped. My joints ached.
“I’M UP!” I shouted. “I’M UP! I SWEAR TO GOD I’M UP!”
And Mom couldn’t quite conceal her smile.
I stumbled downstairs and found Dad seated at the kitchen table looking as exhausted as I felt. When Dad was dog-tired, he would stare at his coffee as if he had suddenly forgotten what he was supposed to do with it. The kitchen clock read 8:05.
“Mom got me with the vacuum,” I said.
“Oh, poor you,” he replied. “I got up to go pee an hour ago, and by the time I got back, the bed was made.”
Through our haze we stared at the TV. On it was the scene at the end of Psycho where the psychiatrist rambles on about Norman’s condition. This, too, was part of The Wakeup Call. Every Saturday morning Mom slammed the Psycho VCR tape into the machine. It was, I suppose, her housework soundtrack. By the time I’d make my way downstairs, the psychiatrist speech was always about to begin. To this day, both Dad and I have his speech memorized. It is our party trick.
We were not allowed to turn the movie off. No matter where Mom was in the house, she always knew the moment we tried to change the channel.
“PUT THAT BACK ON!”
“OK!” Dad and I would shout back in unison.
We did as we were told, neither one of us daring to complain. For, despite our weariness, both of us noticed that the house was dust free. The furniture was polished. The clothes were laundered. The dishes were put away. The house was perfect in a way that only Germans can make a house perfect. Man oh man did we feel lazy.
So Dad and I sat and watched the movie as Mom half listened to the dialogue from some distant corner of the house with that vacuum by her side – a weapon she could wield with such terrible accuracy as to put Norman Bates and his pathetic butcher knife to shame.
I would’ve preferred Bert on my napkins, but I suppose this will have to do.
I don’t usually do blog awards. It’s not that don’t appreciate receiving them – because I do — I just don’t think I update my blog frequently enough to dedicate posts to answering questions about myself. So a big part of me is inclined to thank the nominator and beg off.
But sometimes another part of me — the part who doesn’t have a new post ready this week — is inclined to say, “Hey, why not?”
That “Hey, why not?” inclination is also more likely to surface when some of my favorite people nominate me. Laurel Leigh and Jilanne Hoffman selected me for the Versatile Blogger Award and Tess from Let’s Cut the Crap nominated me for a blog meme.
Versatile Blogger nominees are supposed to write seven tidbits about themselves. The meme-ers are supposed to answer four specific questions about their writing.
Since answering a question about my writing is sort of a tidbit, I answered Tess’s four questions and tacked on three extra tidbits at the end. Done and done!
By the way, if the above didn’t spell it out clearly enough, I think very highly of these folks. Follow their blogs if you don’t already. They’re good people who all have interesting things to say.
Onward with the meme-ing!
***
What am I working on at the moment?
I have three projects I’m working on right now:
I am revising a picture book manuscript about a science-minded mouse.
I am revising a picture book manuscript about a cow that is not exactly a cow.
And, using my Susanna Hill writing contest entry, Goldilockup, as inspiration, I am writing a middle grade novel about a Great Escape-style jailbreak in Fairy Tale Forest. The story’s hero works the broiler at a Burger King.
How does my work differ from others of its genre?
Most writers are peculiar, but each peculiar person is peculiar in a unique way. Those unique peculiarities influence the work. For example, Laurie Halse Anderson and I both wrote picture books about Sarah Josepha Hale. Anderson’s book came out long before mine, but I had no knowledge of its existence when I wrote my story. Even though Anderson and I wrote about the same person, our two books could not be more different in both tone and content.
In other words, if you own Anderson’s book but not mine, buy mine, too. It’s different!
Why do I write what I do?
I used to write a lot of plays. I enjoyed writing them, and found some success. The problem was that I was drawn to flawed, cynical and occasionally immoral characters, which made me delve into the darker side of my soul — a sad and musty place in desperate need of a coat of paint a more comfortable place to sit.
I prefer my silly soul. Writing children’s books nurtures my silliness. And school visits bring out my silliness in spades.
How does my writing process work?
My writing schedule is not as regimented as I would like. I do, however, always put aside a good chunk of time every weekend to write. I also find time to write a couple of nights each workweek. Sometimes, if there’s a lull in my day job schedule, I’ll write a little then, too.
But let’s just keep that information between us, OK?
I almost exclusively compose on the computer. I do, however, sometimes write out ideas in longhand. I often doodle for inspiration. Sometimes I doodle during meetings, because meetings are useless.
Ahem. Let’s just keep that information between us, too, OK?
In fact, let’s pretend I never answered this question.
And, as promised, three other tidbits:
1. When my son is disciplined for saying something inappropriate in school, he is almost always repeating something I had said at home. No, he is not swearing; I never use foul language around children. He did, however, called one of his classmates a “sucker.” He announced that a daunting classroom assignment “will drive him to drink.” And, the day before his winter break, he decreed that The Elf on the Shelf story was “horse pucky.”
Despite all the teacher’s phone calls, I’m still not very good at censoring myself. I recently told Alex the story about how Archimedes developed his principle of buoyancy while sitting in the bathtub. I explained that Archimedes was so excited with his discovery that he leapt from the tub and ran through the streets naked, shouting, “Eureka! I’ve got it!”
“And do you know what Archimedes’ neighbors said?” I asked.
“No.” Alex replied.
“Archimedes! I can see your dingle!”
Alex then laughed for the next six hours.
So, yes, I expect to get a call from my son’s teacher sometime this week.
“Hey, I got it, so I flaunt it!”
2. When I was a freshman in college, I was in a drawing class filled with artists who got offended by everything. This was the late 1980s, the dawn of the PC era where short people were described as “vertically challenged” and lazy people were “differently motivated.” I tend not to seek out things that make me angry, so I found their zealous, relentless ire fascinating. I also found it amusing.
I occasionally liked to poke the hornet’s next. For example, one day I decided to sketch a giant, reverential portrait of Richard Nixon. It produced the expected outrage (“How could you draw a portrait of that…that monster!”) and I was amused.
About a year later, I was working in a local bookstore when Nixon’s book, In the Arena, was published. Nixon’s office was located just a few towns away from where I lived, so I was asked to drop off a box of books for the former president to sign. I did as I was told. I also brought along my portrait bearing a note: “Could you please sign this?” He could and did.
About 15 years later, Antiques Roadshow came to Atlantic City so I decided to bring along my signed Nixon portrait for an appraisal. In case you’re wondering, a Nixon/Allegra collaboration is worth about a thousand bucks.
Not too shabby.
“You think you’re so hot, eh? Well, I don’t see Mike Allegra drawing a picture of you!”
3. My wife, Ellen, is one of the most moral and honest people I know. However, I live in constant fear that one day I’ll come home from work to discover that she has kidnapped a wombat from an area zoo.
Believe me, she loves wombats more than most people love wombats — and I’m worried that this love will someday give her a rap sheet. Pray for us!
“Take me home, Ellen! All I need is your looooove!”
***
So there you have it! Thanks again, Laurel, Jilanne and Tess! And thanks also to all the other people who have nominated me for blog awards in the past. I am very grateful.
So, in the spirit of this post, tell me a tidbit about yourself in the comments! C’mon, be a sport.
Hey, Look! A Writer Fellow! 