Dateline: Hilton World Headquarters Branch, San Francisco.

The Scene:  A writers’ conference, the ballroom of the Intercontinental Mark Hopkins Hotel…high on Nob Hill.  The room is magic.  The guest speaker is to be a woman whose memoir (The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less) was made into a movie starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson.

As writers, we’re a thoroughly insecure lot…and before meeting the guest speaker, the room is electric with admiration and envy at the same time.  The writer’s wonderful and supportive agent, Amy Rennert introduces the movie from the stage. We still haven’t seen the writing star.    

The writer is Terry Ryan.   Returning to her family home after the death of her mother, she had gone through closets and chests, as all of us must at those times. While clearing the out her mother’s things, Terry came upon the jingles her mother had written to win prizes from companies like Proctor and Gamble, and Post Cereals…prizes which literally kept the family of a housewife, a working man with a serious drinking problem, and ten children…afloat.

We watch the movie. 

Terry Ryan had served in an advisory capacity for the film, Amy Rennert explains from the stage after the movie. Amy gives a signal. The huge ballroom crowded with would be storytellers…enjoying our wine and ready to praise the movie…wait.  Wondering why the woman living out our dreams doesn’t bounce in from the wings.

Instead, we follow as Amy’s eyes drop to the floor in front of the stage. Four men lift Terry Ryan’s wheelchair up on the platform.  Two men would have been plenty.  Terry is bald and so whispy, she looks as if ready to blow away at any moment. She is in the end stage of cancer.  She knows it.  We know it.

The microphone is situated to catch her slight voice. She smiles…and shares with each of us how much finding those jingles changed her life.  We’re thinking…well, yes…you’re the lucky woman whose story was made into a movie starring Julianne Moore and Woody Harrelson. 

But we’re wrong. Terry’s excitement comes from remembering the incredible positive face her mother put on every family fear and disappointment, and there were many. Her father was frequently unemployed….and did I mention?…10 kids….

Terry is here to share her mother’s strength with a bunch of people she doesn’t know. She hopes people who see the movie realize how powerful her mother was in her life and the lives of many others.  And we do.  Oh, how we do.  The night is magic and we know how privileged we are to hear this incredible, brave woman….We know her mother is with her now, speaking through her daughter’s beautiful face, taking time to pass on her wisdom to all of us fools in our ivory tower.

Fools?  Oh, yes.  Idiots.  Idiots thinking….I’m not so happy now….but when ____happens….when I get a great agent….when I lose thirty pounds…when I fall in love…when…when…when…yes…fools, all.

Ms. Rennert asks if Terry feels up to a few questions and she agrees.  The first questioner asks, “What about the movie-making process surprised you the most?”

Terry answers, “How many people are actually on the set for each shot…inches out of camera.  There are hundreds.”  Her genuineness comes through and we send her every healing vibe we can. “But the most fun was seeing things that actually happened come back to life.”  She smiled then, and shared a few mother stories that didn’t make the cut.  We laugh with the tiny fading woman on the stage.

She tells us how privileged she feels to have had the incredible childhood she had.   

Then the “Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Therapy” waving in the second row, is acknowledged by Ms. Rennert. 

The “Woman Who” clears her throat and asks Terry Ryan:  “I was wondering….Have you ever been able to forgive your father?”

The frail lady with the bald head and the shaky voice, tilted her face as if briefly confused. “Forgive him for what?” she asked.   

The “Woman Who Couldn’t Stop Therapy” stayed true to her name. (Sometimes you have to up the ante, have to shout or repeat yourself to get another person to see things the way you do.)  “But your father punched in a wall.  He came home drunk so many times!”

Terry Ryan peered from her sunken shoulders as if looking at a creature from another planet.  “I don’t know you, Ma’am (I’m paraphrasing, it’s been a while)…But I think you’re talking about how you see my life, not the way I see my life.  I haven’t spent any of my lifetime forgiving anyone.  I didn’t need to.”

Terry Alan died 5-17-2007 at 11:11:07 PDT.

Okay, guys, Anxiety Management Pop Quiz Challenge.

Tomorrow… Okay, that’s asking too much.  Pick a day next week. A sudden change in your personality could lead friends and relatives to the wrong conclusion. You know…bring up that troublesome branch of the family…and how you do look just like Aunt Franny…you know, when you get that look in your eyes…

So, we’re talking about change here, but no sudden moves.

First, think about your typical day…from the moment you open your eyes until you close them again.  Now, find an event, person, wardrobe, phone user, disaster, profession, religion, publication, television show, politician, political viewpoint….that when you encounter “it” you just can’t stop yourself from making a negative comment.

I tried this, and I didn’t make it out of bed.  I didn’t even make it to a sitting position before my tiny brain was awash in negative thoughts the world really needed to hear.

You see, my special person was watching ESPN “Around the Horn”…with no sound of course, because he wouldn’t want to disturb me. (At least, I like to think that is the reason, though I strongly suspect he mistakenly thinks that with the sound off, it’s possible I won’t start his day off with an arrogant remark about the ESPN, Tiger Woods and his trumped up “disease,” Lance Armstrong and how he made a big deal out of saving his sperm so that he and his wife who saw him through cancer could have children later…then left her and the kids for Cheryl Crow, or how the NBA is such a height-elitist sport, or how if the overweight, over fiftyish man delivering the sports was a woman, she wouldn’t have a job, how I don’t get soccer, how boxing shouldn’t be a sport, how it doesn’t make sense that young boys are supposed to consider sports figures as role models…and the Olympics, what’s that about?  A kid spends seventeen hours a day ice-skating and I’m supposed to proclaim her a national hero?    

Or, there’s the more personal route, in which I take a dig at my special person’s character by pointing out that ESPN just repeats the same stories over and over (This from a woman with an addiction to true crime shows, Reno 911, and, yes, there was the embarrassing streak of Nancy Grace back before Casey Anthony went to jail…)…To accomplish the more personal complaint, I turn to him and say, “You’re not buying this, are you?” with the thinly veiled implication that, if he is enjoying the show, he’s clearly mentally defective.

Okay.  You pick your little sore spot.  And challenge yourself to…just for one day…keep your (clever) but negative remarks to yourself.

Oh, sure. Laugh. It’s not that easy.

See Part 1, if you’re not with us on this.  I stumbled into three more motels in desperate search for a room on the way to drop up the un-savy travellers with the Motel 6 reservation.  I followed them inside.  ”No room at the Motel 6, lady.  Rodeo in town, you know.” 

Let me say that the world I now had running in my head was unfair, uncomfy, and a mess.  The light catches the gold on the plastic Motel 6 key flaunted by Mr. Sensible and his lucky wife.  My special person and I race from motel to motel going down the order from luxury to less dangerous-looking than the others.  Lucky for my special person, he had me there to point out the flaws of each motel as we lowered our standards.  At last, one desk clerk knew of one room left.  He’d call ahead and make sure they held the accommodation.

WELL.  We hobbled up three flights of cement stairs one yard off Interstate 44 and entered our abode at the Value Inn.  My special person ignores the various tics I’ve developed along with my running update on the horrors I noticed on the walk to our room.  Once inside, he takes off his shoes, slides out of his jeans, and plops on the bed watching ESPN as I provide a blustering, item by item inventory of our circumstances.

“I can’t believe this!  How long since you’ve seen a plastic shower in the bedroom?  Oh, but look.  We have a matching plastic sink on stilts.  How can you touch that bedspread?  I see wiggly things crawling on it from here…though standing on this indoor-outdoor carpet retrieved from some fishing dock is probably more dangerous!  Check these towels, ha!  Like I’m taking a shower in this place.  How can you even see the stupid television?  How long since you’ve seen one that small?”

No answer, of course.  The man isn’t crazy.  He knows objections only feed the beast.

“I’ll never get to sleep in this rathole.  Tomorrow will be awful.  This was going to be such a fun trip and now this!”   (Usually, an escape would be possible.  I’d have gladly paid for a room for Mr. Sensible and spouse in Dallas 50 miles away, as well as paid for the fabulous (and it was looking prit-tee fabulous) Motel 6.  This solution wasn’t an option as Mr. Sensible, in order to come on the trip had flown into Dallas at 7a.m., leaving his house at 4:30a.m., based on the promise of stopping for the night in Lawton.)

While my special person watched sports scores, I complained.  The features I complained about grew larger and more disgusting as I pointed out details….single use soap sliver, plastic cups sealed in cellophane, chips around the doorframe showing a one-time break-in, rickety table (I demonstrated rocking the legs as though I’d planned on having company in for dinner and now that was ruined). “No luggage rack!” I spouting slamming my suitcase on the floor.  I threw myself on the bed.  “Just as I thought!  Mattress is a rock. These places order their mattresses from China, you know, because they last a hundred years.”

He bounced a little, but remained aloof.  His decision on how to respond to my provocative raging is important.  Part 3 in ‘Small Oklahoma Town Tradegy’ contains the single best response to a raging idiot I’ve ever seen demonstrated.  For now, he’s watching scores, foolishly oblivious to the tradgedy of our circumstances. 

Then he asks, ”So, are we going to get something to eat at that restaurant in the parking lot downstairs?” 

Outside, just beyond the marquee promising plenty of truck parking…is a Homestyle Kettle Cafe.  His question is of particular significanc since we haven’t eaten for six hours and we usually eat this late.  Also, when I’m making a point about how unfair my life is…I always refuse to eat.

Thus, I replied in a snap.  “Of course, I’m not going to eat anything from that dump.  Do you want me to spend the night throwing up into that hideous toilet… Is that what you want?”

“Not so much,” he says.  I cross my arms and stare at the television…the room, to me, is a torture chamber.  

Which is more important?  The world that exists, the one you can touch?  Or the one you are responding to?  The world you are making up in your head?”