J.F. Riordan

And the earth stands still

/ J. F. Riordan

I found myself in the position, recently,  of explaining Holy Week to someone who does not believe. Perhaps a bit too earnestly, I tried to describe what happens: The triumph of Palm Sunday with its awful portent, the congregation taking the part of Christ’s accusers, facing-whether we want to or not–our own sins; the washing of the feet, and the ritual vigil, kept with Christ throughout the night on Maundy Thursday. On Friday, the awful full-eyed clarity of the torture and agony of the crucifixion, and then at last, the breath of life gone, the Pascal candle extinguished, the altar stripped, and the deep internal stillness of grief hanging over the congregants.

We are all diminished by every death. But this one death is ours and His. The fear of it lingers in our hearts as we wait in hope.

It is Good Friday. And the earth stands still.

Another Sign of Spring

/ J. F. Riordan / 2 Comments

For some reason, my husband decided yesterday to take Moses to the barber shop with him.

Don’t ask.

Perhaps one factor may have been that the night before Moses had had a rather thorough bath, complete with shampoo and conditioner, as opposed to the daily rinse in the dog shower he usually gets to clean his feet. He smells good now, and he’s all soft and shiny, and this seemed like an opportunity to give him a good brushing. Thought for the day: Never brush a wet dog. Especially not in the house. No, not even if it’s really cold and miserable outside.

German Shepherds are a breed that have a spring molt, which is referred to as “blowing their coats”. An odd expression, I thought, in my innocence. But that was before. Now that he is four, and officially fully mature, Moses is having his first real blowing-of-the-coat, and I have come to think that whoever coined the phrase had a gift for understatement. Moses’s long black hair with its creamy roots is coming out in massive tufts which do, indeed, blow. Everywhere.  Piling up in insane quantities in the corner behind the kitchen door.  Stuck to the stamp on the Easter card I sent to my aunt.  Appearing, unexpectedly—and disturbingly— in my coffee cup at work.  But this was nothing compared to the wet dog hair that he and I, together, artfully distributed about the mud room, on the white kitchen cabinets, and on my person. There is no broom, no vacuum, no lint roller sufficient to the task. It’s like glue, and your only hope is to wait for it to dry and then wipe it off with a dry rag.

NASA ought to look into potential applications.

In any case, and for whatever reason, Moses had a trip to the barber shop. He was permitted to wander around and sniff at things, he obligingly lay on his back to have his tummy rubbed by several admirers, and when asked, he lay quietly on the floor nearby while my husband had his hair cut, all amidst the chaos of dryers, and razors,  and customers coming and going. He was, in short, a very good dog.

It would have been nice if a trip to the barber shop had resulted in a bit less dog hair, but I suppose I should just be grateful that he was shedding somewhere else for a while.

 

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New Date for Door County Book Launch Party!

/ J. F. Riordan

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Image courtesy of GalleyCat

One of my favorite new friends in the world of books is Peter Sloma at Peninsula Bookman in Fish Creek, Wisconsin. He is a serious book person, with a serious store: the kind you can’t get out of without buying half a dozen things you didn’t know you needed. He has been particularly supportive in offering advice and connections to a first time author, and he has included in me in his Wisconsin Writers’ events, which are worth coming to, and not just because I’m there, although that’s certainly a key element.

Peter has been kind enough to host the Door County launch of my new book the weekend of the Door County Half Marathon. So, if you are on the Door on June 4th, 2016, please stop by that evening to celebrate the publication of Book Two in the North of the Tension Line series, The Audacity of Goats.  You can come to meet me (in case you want to), and, more important, to support one the world’s increasingly endangered endeavors: a local bookstore.

And I’m sure he’d be happy to accept your order for a pre-sale!

Mark your calendars. More details to follow.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to drinking whisky with Peter.

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4083 Hwy 42
PO Box 381
Fish Creek, WI 54212
920-868-1467

sales@peninsulabookman.com

 

 

The Demography of Goats

/ J. F. Riordan / 3 Comments
Goat photo courtesy the Washington Post (Flickr/Bagsgroove)

Goat photo courtesy the Washington Post (Flickr/Bagsgroove)

Is that an oxymoron, since the root of the word demography is demos, meaning (common) people? Perhaps gidagraphy would be more correct?

In any case, I was reminded recently of this story, that ran in The Washington Post last January.

I am not a numbers person. Nor a measurer. Nor a keeper of statistics of any kind. And yet, this particular set of numbers fascinates me.

Go ahead and click on the map in the article. I’ll wait.

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One dot equals 500 goats?? I had no idea that goats were so much a part of the American landscape.

Texas, in particular, seems to be a hotbed of goatishness.

And by the way, please note from the article: “Goats are having a moment.”

 

Star-crossed Love

/ J. F. Riordan

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I had to stop at a store yesterday to return something, a task I detest, but which you might think was among my very favorite activities, given how often I find myself doing it.

The clerk and I started chatting, and one thing leading to another, I mentioned my two dogs in the car. “What kind of dogs?” she asked. I gave my standard answer: Pete, an Indiana Spotted Dog (Pete is a rescue from a kill shelter in Indiana, and of indeterminate breed, but with a speckled coat that looks like granite), and Moses, a German Shepherd.

Her attention was instantly riveted by the words “German Shepherd.”

“I had a German Shepherd,” she said. “But I had to put him down.” I felt a wave of sympathy. The shortness of dogs’ lives is a looming loss for those of us who love them, and the thought of it can shatter me if I linger on it.

She knew what I have learned: that there is something different about German Shepherd Dogs, no matter what other kinds of dogs you have had or how much you have loved them. I told her what the vet told me when Moses was a tiny puppy: “Nothing and no one on earth will ever love you as much as a German Shepherd will.”

Her eyes filled with tears, and mine did, too. She told me how true that was, and how smart her dog had been, and what a clever jailbreak artist he was. She told me that even when his hip dysplasia had made it impossible for him to walk she had cared for him until his pain became too much.

She seemed so sad. When I suggested that somewhere in the world there was a dog who desperately needed someone like her to love him she shook her head. No. She could never endure that loss again. It was too much.

The store was busy, and people were waiting for her attention, but I wished I could have taken her out for a cup of coffee, and brought her over to meet Moses and Pete, waiting patiently, if a bit odoriferously, in the car.

I have writing to do, and I have to go to Washington for work tomorrow, and I don’t know how I’m going to get everything done before I leave the house at 5:30 in the morning.

But Moses and Pete and I are going for a ramble. Life is all about priorities.

Upcoming Appearances

/ J. F. Riordan

North of the Tension Line is coming home to Door County next weekend.

Peninsula Bookman

Novel poster

September 26

10 am to 5 pm

The Peninsula Bookman–next door to the Oilerie

4083 Hwy 42, Fish Creek, WI 54212

And then back to Lake Country:

Hartland Public Library

October 7

7 pm.

Hartland Public Library 110 East Park Ave.  Hartland, WI 53029

I would love to meet you and sign your book. Stop by and say hello!

Living in the moment

/ J. F. Riordan / 2 Comments

My husband and I have a treehouse. At least, it feels like one. It is an upstairs deck under the branches of a very large old crabapple tree that can only be accessed via secret door. It was an accident of design in our new addition, but a delightful one. Last year, when it was new, I surprised him by having adirondack chairs delivered and hoisted up by ladder and ropes. On nice nights we go up there with the dogs to drink wine and enjoy the last light of the day before the mosquitoes get too aggressive.

We are both early risers, and go to bed absurdly early, but tonight when he was ready to go in, I was about to follow when it suddenly occurred to me that I could do my evening yoga practice there.

It’s not a particularly convenient location, what with the tiny secret doors and all, but I gathered my yoga things, and accompanied by two faithful dogs went back into the twilight among the branches. It is utterly private, and the night was one of those late-summer-feels-like-fall-is-coming nights.

Afterward I lay on my back for the final pose of relaxation, and instead of closing my eyes, I looked up into the deepening blue sky, the scene rimmed by the branches of enormous trees.  Two nighthawks were whirling, and, I hope, dining on mosquitoes.

It was the best moment of the day.

Moving Forward

/ J. F. Riordan

So, I have been engrossed in writing the sequel to North of the Tension Line, and then, this past month, immersed in a long and lovely visit from family.

But it has been the writing, mainly, that has engaged my entire heart and mind these past eighteen months. I have done nothing but go to work and write, and in the process have ignored everything from friendships to laundry, and all the common attentions to little things that comprise daily life. The weight of a deadline was heavy, and I simply did not have room in my head for anything else.

With the novel finished and in the hands of my editor, I have begun the process of digging out. I am attempting to renew my connections to the people I care about, to do the laundry, sort the mail and the many dropped details of life, and to attend to this blog. The neglect has left a field strewn with casualties.

So yesterday, alone and unscheduled for the first time in almost a year, I sat down to re-engage here. In the process I re-read old postings, and began, with some dismay, to discover how heavily the theme of death marches through my thoughts. I suppose that I have played out my grief here more thoroughly than I had been conscious of.

I heard someone say recently that we get sadder as we get older. That is clearly the natural trend of things. We are battered by life, by the struggles and the losses, and as we lose our people we become less sheltered from it all. The multiple losses these past eight years have made me acutely aware of my own mortality, and it looms.

This is the struggle. I look back at my parents’ lives, at the lives of my godmother, my 95 year old aunt–who is still with us and struggling herself to find meaning in her loneliness–and I wish I had known enough to listen more closely to them. I did try. I did my best. I still do. But then we get caught up in our own lives. And that is right, too.

I am sure Fiona Campbell would have a quote from Marcus Aurelius to fit here.

So anyway. Getting older and facing loss requires strength and courage and determination and a whole lot of cussedness. We cannot succumb to despair. We must accept the new landscapes of our lives and get on with it. Not with sadness, but with joy and gratitude and, well, cussedness.

Damned if I won’t be happy today.

It’s Finished! Publication date: April 2016

/ J. F. Riordan

Yesterday the manuscript for the sequel to North of the Tension Line was delivered to my editor at Beaufort Books in New York. Although this is just the beginning of the process of making a book, we have a schedule and a publication date.

For my faithful blog readers–both of you–I apologize for being invisible and pledge to be a more regular correspondent. At least until the next proofs are due.