Our first thought was that there must have been some kind of mistake, and we’d have to give it back.

But no. They read me the description over the phone. “A steep hill was terraced into a gorgeous triple-decker garden complete with waterfall.” There aren’t too many like that. Definitely had to be ours.

Tonight I went with my mother and my delighted landscape architect Vicki Hibbard to the awards ceremony. Where I was presented with a professional-looking certificate suitable for framing, and my picture was taken for all posterity.

As always during rainy, windy weather, I remember a story about Adam. Adam was only three years old in September, 1985, so he probably doesn’t remember this story. That’s why I’m the one who has to tell it. He had just started Montessori School a few weeks before, where they were learning, among other things, all about the seasons.

And that’s when Hurricane Gloria blew through. September 27, 1985.

Now, Gloria was a Category 4 hurricane with winds up to 145 miles per hour. There was a storm surge of almost seven feet–thank heavens it was low tide!–when the storm made landfall in southern Connecticut. Gloria dropped up to six inches of rain in Massachusetts and left over two million people without power. The storm killed eight people and did over $900 million in damage in New England. The name ‘Gloria’ has been retired.

While the storm was raging, I was–pretty much where I am now–on an upper floor of my house in the study by the window, working on my computer. But Gloria was raging. It broke whole large branches off the mature maple by the side of our house. These branches fell on our roof with a shaking thud, clawed their way down the roof slope, landed on the roof of the screen porch below with another thud, and slid from there down into the yard.

It was terrifying.

Afraid that a branch might blow through the window or worse, the storm might take the roof off the house, I shut down my computer and went downstairs to the first floor, where I found Dan with Adam in his arms, the two of them in the kitchen standing well back from the windows watching the branches falling from the screen porch roof into the yard.

“Daddy,” Adam asked, “is this fall?”

Well, yes, Adam, the leaves are falling down off the trees, but normally they come down without the branches still attached.

I looked up from my computer and smiled. “That’s what my mother always used to say.”

“These days,” my mother said, “sometimes you also have to use your car.”

My mom and me 03/12/2011

• Adding movies that look good in the trailers that come with other movies. This system works well for weeding out movies we *don’t* want to see, but there are some real duds out there whose only good moments are those incorporated into the trailer. Great trailer, lousy movie. Who was to know?
• Adding movies to the queue based on recommendations from friends. You’d think this would work really well, but we were surprised. Some of our extraordinary, smart, and delightful friends recommend the most ordinary and dull movies. In particular, we’ve learned never to trust the “hot” movies that everyone is seeing and talking about right now. By the time they make it to DVD they are no longer “hot” and often of little inherent worth.
• Using the Netflix recommendations (“Movies You’ll ‘Heart’”). The results of this, as nearly as I can tell, are totally random and useless.
• Adding movies directed by the same person as other movies we like. This isn’t a bad system if the director is consistently good. For example, Ridley Scott was, for the most part, a great success for us. However, any director’s oeuvre is limited, but our Netflix queue never ends.

But finally we have hit upon a system that works.

We ask my mother.

She is unerringly on the mark.

It’s gotten kind of scary. Dan always puts my mother’s recommendations at the top of the queue. And we always really like them. I think my mother is nervous now about recommending additional movies to us. The stakes keep getting higher.

Her most recent success was Vantage Point, a movie that tells the story of an attempted terrorist coup from a number of different but unexpectedly related perspectives, each layer adding depth and complexity to the story. It’s also a nonstop action movie that would do the TV series 24—the only ongoing TV show that I like—proud.

The movie that this reminds me of the most is Crash, which portrays the multifaceted interactions in the lives of a number of complete strangers in Los Angeles, some of whom meet by automobile crash or hijacking and some of whom never meet. We actually saw Crash twice, and enjoyed it both times. Frighteningly, this was another of my mother’s recommendations. Tonight I discovered that there is a name for this type of movie, and there are members of the genre Dan and I haven’t yet seen. Food for the queue monster.

Other movies that share this quality are Memento, Run Lola Run, and Babel. We liked all of these, too. I wish there were a Web site where you could enter the names of some particular movies, and it would tell you others that are in some way similar.

But meanwhile, Mom, you’ve scored again. Please keep those recommendations coming.

And, dear reader, I’m open to *your* recommendations, too!

Yeah, Mom, for better or for worse technology can definitely make things, well, different. In some ways.

]]> http://www.gskenney.com/ginger/my-family/quote-of-the-day/feed/ 0 http://www.gskenney.com/ginger/my-family/on-raising-a-writer/ http://www.gskenney.com/ginger/my-family/on-raising-a-writer/#comments Wed, 23 Sep 2009 16:35:47 +0000 gingersea http://www.gskenney.com/ginger/?p=360 This is way cool! Please check out my guest blog posted today at L. Jagi Lamplighter’s Wright’s Writing Corner. My son Adam was born with an innate and strong storytelling ability. This post is about nurturing that talent. I hope you enjoy it.

And if you’re interested in fantasy, check out Jagi’s new book, Prospero Lost.

I believe her. I refer to all people of any sex as “guys”. I do it all the time. Always have.

This used to drive my father crazy. “Do you guys have any plans for the weekend?” I might ask. My father would draw himself up to his full height and dignity and respond, “Your mother is not a guy!”

I didn’t mean anything by it. Still don’t.

But this little flurry on Jagi’s blog has me thinking. First, about my father, who has been dead for over two decades now. I still miss him.

And second, about why I should call everyone “guy”. And here’s what I think: At some level, I think of myself as a guy. As in “just one of the guys”, not as in interested in women. And I do have some “guy” traits: I’m more rational than emotional (of course, we women know that men are often more emotional than rational, but you know the stereotype); prefer blue to pink; dislike frills, ribbons, high heels, dresses; prefer science fiction to romance. You get the idea.

Now, if Jagi thinks of herself as a “girl”, then of course she means nothing when she refers to other women the same way. But our mutual colleague, Danielle Ackley-McPhail, author of Yesterday’s Dreams and other books, said it better than I could.

“Hard to make everyone happy when they are pre-disposed to taking offense. Of course, as writers, these are the types of things we should take note of for future use.”

I like in particular Danielle’s complete vagueness on how we should use these things.  :-)

Dan is not a fan of speculative fiction. He’s never picked up anything that might be called a “graphic novel”. He has little tolerance for the fantastical. Science fiction leaves him cold.

But he likes good design and he likes action. And Watchmen has these in abundance. Despite its bleak mood and noir atmosphere, it is an “up” movie. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether we are watching the plot, the effects, or the sheer beauty of the film.

Dan won’t say he likes this movie. In fact, he doesn’t have much to say about it at all. But he was on the edge of his seat. I was the one watching the watching man. He was glued to the screen for two and three quarters hours, about as long as I have ever seen him sit still.

That movie was good!

“Well, I’m not surprised,” I say. “The lobster in the ocean used to be so plentiful that they washed up onto the beaches. They fed lobster to the prisoners in the jails so frequently that the prisoners sent a petition to King George begging him to make them stop.”

“Let’s face it,” says Dan. “The planet isn’t what it used to be.”

No, it isn’t. “It’s going downhill fast,” I say, letting my pessimism get the better of me. “Time to move on. Time to get that colony ship ready to voyage out to the next planet.”

“I’ll be the first to volunteer,” says my science-fiction-averse husband.

Whoa.

Wasn’t there an article recently in The Boston Globe Magazine in which the author opines that “The baby boomers are the first generation that will… actually live too long. By refusing to expire after a reasonable number of years, the boomers are threatening the social order”? In arguing that the average lifespan of generations ago was in the forties meant that people in their forties were old, the author has succumbed to a common misunderstanding. She has overlooked the fact that over a third of the population died in infancy, in childhood, and in childbirth. And in war. It was not unusual for those that survived these catastrophes to live into their seventies or eighties or longer. But the author puts forth an argument that may be only too popular among the younger generations: The old folks have been around too long. Time to find a graceful, civilized way to get rid of them.

Well, young lady, this is your chance. We can solve the problem of the Earth on her last gasp and the overpopulation of healthy boomers growing older in one single, visionary stroke: Just pack us up in a space ship and send us off.

Hey, maybe a lot of us will go.

We baby boomers get a virgin planet where lobsters wash up on the beaches, and you get to deal with this dying Earth. Do you think you might actually do something about it before the human cancer kills the whole planet? Somehow, I don’t think so. Maybe it’s already too late.

And worse: Wouldn’t it be just like us to ruin the next planet, too?