City at night

At the end of West 23rd Street, sunset over Hoboken; the sky turns topaz, the Hudson River deep violet.  Horns blast, and boats leave Chelsea Piers, their lights twinkling.  It's Thursday night, and people are out.  The Half King's sidewalk cafe is packed.   Tenth Avenue is a combination of restaurants and shadows.  Taxi garages ("flats fixed!") and shuttered storefronts.  A "checks cashed here" place closed for the night, streetlight reflected in bulletproof glass, next door to a brightly lit bodega.

Clement Clark Moore Park, small and square, is dark; tall trees sway in the summer breeze, leaves whispering when the traffic light is red, the street momentarily quiet.  1840s Brownstones line the side streets.  The High Line, a park by day, goes back to being a ghostly abandoned elevated railway bed by night.  I remember being young, a different Luanne Rice.

It's August, no gallery openings.  Usually Thursday nights are party time in Chelsea, but there's a sense that all the art people have gone to Montauk, Martha's Vineyard, or an olive orchard in Tuscany.

The cafes are lively, the temperature lovely.  A constant breeze blows off the river, up from the harbor and the ocean beyond.  Manhattan is surrounded by water.  I could walk to Battery Park and back, loving the city and feeling my place in it.

Maura Fogarty

Maura was such a dear friend.  She was an amazing singer-songwriter, and I was always touched and honored when she would come to my apartment and play music with me.  We shared being Irish Catholic, living in New York, having sisters, seeing the dark behind the light.  I wrote a song, You’re the Sea, and Maura sang on the recording.

One summer morning Maura and I went to the Irish Hunger Memorial in lower Manhattan.  There was a slight drizzle, and the fog rolling up the Hudson obscured the tallest buildings, enhancing the feeling we’d stepped out of time, out of New York.  We walked through the ruins of a stone cottage, up the winding path through a field to the hilltop.

“Feels like Ireland,” she said.

“Because of the weather?” I asked.

She nodded.  “And because every stone, every plant on the memorial comes from the different counties, all thirty two of them.”

She carried a certain knowledge, a bone-deep connection with that memorial.  It symbolized suffering, and striving, and Maura’s love of Ireland.  Maura had a heart unlike anyone I’ve ever known.  She felt other people’s pain right through her skin, and it came out in her songs.  She found a great songwriting partner, John Bertsche, and to hear her describe their sessions, there was something mystical at work.

Maura’s music broke your heart.  She sang with such deep emotion—every song.  And it was real, as if she was truly reliving the experience about which she sang.  She loved fiercely, starting with her family.  She spoke of her mother so often, with great devotion.  I remember when she played “Our Lady of Fatima” for me, telling me she’d written it for her mother.

She loved her sisters, and her cousins, her dearest friends, her writing partner.  All of that love poured into her music, yet there was often a sense of loss, or melancholy, an unspoken understanding that nothing, not even the strongest love could last forever.  She grasped the truth of impermanence.  Some songwriters compose around it, but Maura faced it head-on.  Perhaps it was her father’s death that taught her, or perhaps it was just that Maura was an old soul.

A mutual friend says Maura had the voice of an angel.  She did, but not your every-day-pious white-winged Seraphim.  Her voice broke with emotion.  She was an angel of the Bronx.  I think of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris’s Grievous Angel.  For Maura and her work with John, it was more like Heartstruck Angel, Devastated Angel, take your pick.  Her voice was like no other, and her inspiration was earthbound.   She and John wove together songs of the here and now: love, loss, betrayal, and—with into the sun—hope.

We lost her too soon.

Random wonderful thing

A great beach friend from childhood and, in some ways, even before--our parents had been friends when they were young, and our grandparents before that--posted on my facebook page today.  We were reminiscing about Helen Hubbard--a neighbor who lived on the Point, and for whom my fictional beach town "Hubbard's Point" is named. Betty reminded me of how we used to crouch under Helen's window to listen to her practice.  Helen was an opera singer and voice teacher, and when she sang it was beach music--as much a natural sound as seagulls and wind blowing through the pine needles.  Once or twice a summer she would give recitals and invite grownups from the Point.  That didn't stop us kids from sitting outside and enjoying the performance.

Betty and her sisters and brother and my sisters and I were across-the-road neighbors, and pretty much inseparable from Memorial Day through Labor Day.  We loved summer and each other.  The beach was OURS.  As I wrote back to her, we swam and laughed all day.  Mim, my grandmother, and her great-aunt Florence would hang out together too, tell old stories, go for swims in their skirted bathing suits and white bathing caps.

When Betty's family visited Ireland--often--they would come home with Irish linens, wall-hangings, and tea towels.  My cottage is still filled with the many gifts they brought us.

Her family had a party every Labor Day.  Such a bittersweet gathering!  The weather would still be summery, but fall and school and--especially-leaving the beach--were in the air.  We'd walk down the steep steps from their cottage to glacial rock ledge sloping into Long Island Sound.  Black-eyed Susans, bright pink sweet peas, and lavender flowered spearmint grew at the top of the rocks.  A picnic table would be set with plates of sandwiches, platters of sliced honeydew and musk-melon, and--the piece de resistance--Aunt Florence's soda bread and blueberry buckle.

We'd make that party last as long as possible, because as soon as it was over it was time to pack the station wagon and head up to New Britain for the school year.

As Betty says, our memories are a treasure in themselves.  She is so right.  Just connecting with her today makes me remember everything, and smile, and feel so happy.  I wish I had a picture of us all as children--if I did, no doubt our hair would be wet, someone would be adorned with seaweed, there'd be sunglasses, flip-flops, and a few Good Humors in the picture.  And we'd be doing our best and not succeeding to keep from laughing.

Secret path

Hidden paths don't reveal themselves often.  They're best when you stumble upon one far from home, away from the familiar.  Taking a walk you might catch sight of of a shadowy opening, calling you to duck through a canopy of interlocked branches, or through an up-island gorse-covered dune Do you accept the invitation, follow the path?  I've done that many times.  They've led to buried treasure.  Not pirate's gold, but beautiful sights I wouldn't otherwise have seen.

On Swan's Island, Maine, through the thickest pine forest, the almost invisible narrow path paved with soft, golden needles, leading to a private crescent beach.

In Normandy, uphill through an apple orchard, to the crest with a view of wildflower fields, once painted by Boudin and Monet, sloping down to the English Channel.  Other byways through gardens, Impressionist landscapes filled with light and flowers.

In Ireland, in Youghal, following a path within sight of the River Blackwater, coming upon a medieval church dating back to St. Declan and the year 450.

Another day in East Cork, the Ballycotton Cliff Walk, a steep climb from the road, leads along the coast, high above the sea, with views of small islands grazed by sheep and goats, sea birds including terns and fulmars riding the air currents, white gannets plunging down into the rough blue sea, and the Old Head of Kinsale shimmering in the distance.  That walk, and a day spent in Kinsale, provided much inspiration for The Silver Boat.

Our own Cliff Walk in Newport, Rhode Island, a mystical experience every time I take it, whether on a brilliant September day, or a snowy December dusk, or the hottest August morning.  Cliff Walk has figured in at least three novels of mine (Angels All Over Town, What Matters Most, The Geometry of Sisters) and probably more...  It hugs the coast for ten miles, past mansions of the gilded age on one side, the wild Atlantic on the other, through tunnels, past Marble House's Chinese Tea House.

Perhaps most dear to me, and not at all far from home: the secret path in all my Hubbard's Point novels, leading to a hidden beach where people fall in love and pick beach plums to make tea and jelly and see shooting stars and take midnight swims under the full moon's silver light.

(Painting by Claude Monet, Garden Path at Giverny.)

Child's Vow

I am thinking of someone lost to me.  The stories we told each other, the ghosts we summoned.  We thought it would last forever.  I don't even know what "it" is: our home, our closeness, our lives together.     As she would say, "Nobody knows how I feel."

To love a place so much it hurts.  When I go there I am haunted by someone ten miles down the road.  Our mother used to say, "You'll have many friends, but only two sisters."  Hey--Willoughby Moon.  Going to keep this up forever?  This seems an appropriate day to ask.  M's summer birthday.

A favorite poem, and I know you get it.  The beach is the valley our fathers called their home.  Lost love...

Under Saturn by William Butler Yeats

Do not because this day I have grown saturnine Imagine that lost love, inseparable from my thought Because I have no other youth, can make me pine; For how should I forget the wisdom that you brought, The comfort that you made? Although my wits have gone On a fantastic ride, my horse's flanks are spurred By childish memories of an old cross Pollexfen, And of a Middleton, whose name you never heard, And of a red-haired Yeats whose looks, although he died Before my time, seem like a vivid memory. You heard that labouring man who had served my people. He said Upon the open road, near to the Sligo quay - No, no, not said, but cried it out - 'You have come again, And surely after twenty years it was time to come.' I am thinking of a child's vow sworn in vain Never to leave that valley his fathers called their home.

White sail, blue water

White sails stark against blue sky and sea.   Bluefish are running and spark the surface in feeding frenzy.  The sailboats leave fine white wakes.  They are on their way to Newport, Cuttyhunk, Edgartown, Christmas Cove.  I'm going with them. Photo: Merci (aka La Belle Poule) Maureen, Olivier, and Mia Onorato's new boat, Maureen at the helm.

P.S. I Love Ya

A while back now, I unplugged.  Not from everything--I kept my computer, mobile phone, coffeemaker--you know, the necessities.  But I got rid of my TV.  I found that I was tired of noise--professionally happy voices trying to sell me things, dismal voices telling me the world is spinning out of control.  One too many real housewife of somewhere tipped the balance, and goodbye television.  Before I continue with why I gave it away, I must tell you it's back. I enjoyed the year of quiet.  I believe my TV-less time was about that long.  I didn't tell many people.  It makes a statement to say you don't watch television.  It can sound morally and culturally superior, an attitude I remember flinching from in childhood.  I grew up near families who didn't have televisions and, if they did, only watched PBS, back then known as "educational tv."  Perhaps it was just me, but it felt as if they were looking down at those of us who ran home from school in time to catch Ranger Andy, or who stayed up late to watch Hawaii 5-0.  I'm not a TV snob.  I love a good Boston Pops concert, but few TV moments make me happier than Kojak reruns.  And so many more: Dexter, 30 Rock, Shark Week, the Inspector Lynley mysteries, Ice Road Truckers, Iconoclasts (especially the one with Eddie Vedder and Laird Hamilton,) frequent reruns of "The Daytrippers" on IFC.

I'd started to notice that even when I couldn't find a show I liked, I'd settle down just for the sake of watching something.  More often there were too many choices.  How can one decide what to watch when there are hundreds of channels?  I felt inundated.  It could take an hour just to go through the guide, and by they I'd feel like someone wandering the desert, parched and pixilated, in need of an oasis.  The news stations made me anxious.  My side hates your side and your side hates my side.  It made my stomach hurt.  I get the newspaper delivered every day; that's enough.  Ever-present was the joyful and/or soothing sound of selling.  Ads for everything, mainly in pill form, and with a list of really ugly side effects.

I gave the TV to a man who works in my building.  He took it away, and everyone was happy.  Life was quiet.  The words "incessant chatter" were gone from my vocabulary.  I read so much more.  I relearned what it was to get lost in a book every night, feel the alchemy of story, characters, setting, and me.  The latest stack of finished books is piled high next to Maisie's favorite chair.

So why did I spend a whole day last week waiting for the technician to come back and hook up the cable?   I'm not sure.  TV was an old love.  We'd been together since each other's childhood.  I don't like everything about it, all the housewives and such.  But there are great shows, stories, characters.  I don't plan to give up my reconfigured love affair with reading.  Just me and the book, no background noise.

But the TV is here for when I want it.  There are new shows I want to try.  Dexter will be back soon.  There's a lovely documentary about sharks near an island off Baja with dreamy photography and Dr. Sylvia Earle diving with other oceanographers.  Sometimes I feel like watching a movie, and there is no shortage.   A rerun of Kojak will come along and I'll remember New York when it was still badass.  Seriously--who loves ya, baby?  Once in a while I'll stumble across a Luanne Rice movie, and it always shocks and thrills me.  I'm pretty sure another hundred or so channels have been added since I ditched my last TV.  So many choices in life, ways to spend time.  Some of the choices begin with the "menu" button on the remote.  Still others begin with the "off" button.  I look forward to exercising both.

Since it's a bright summer day, I'm off with a novel  to the lighthouse path.  I know a good bench in the tower's shade, my Surfrider beach bag contains the book, sunscreen, and a peach, the background noise will be breaking waves and crying seagulls.  I'll be living the Nat Geo channel.

P.S. I love ya.

Strangers on a Train

We don't see each other enough.  Sometimes once a year, often less.  But that we know each other at all is a gift, a twist of fate. Our friendship began on a train from New York in 2002.  She, her husband and daughter, and I, occupied the last seats in the car, two-and-two, separated by the aisle.  David and their daughter sat together; Paula sat next to me.  I noticed she was wearing a Bruce Springsteen tee-shirt. The night before I had gone to one of the Rising Tour shows at Madison Square Garden.  I commented on her shirt, and Paula said they'd been at the same show.  A man two rows ahead of us was speaking loudly on a cell phone, letting us know all the details of his day, week, and life, and Paula and I exchanged smiles.  I commented on her tee-shirt.  We rode north along the coastline, talking about the concert, Bruce's music, and other things: her family, my family, how I'd be getting off in Connecticut and they'd be riding all the way to Boston.  I told her I was a writer and she told me she'd been a lawyer but had given it up for a love of books.  She worked in a Boston-area Borders book store.

We exchanged numbers, addresses.  Paula Breger, Luanne Rice, take care, nice to meet you, stay in touch!  It could have ended there--it most often does, right?  You meet an interesting person on a train or plane, pass a few pleasant hours, and never see each other again.

It wasn't that way with Paula.  We wrote and called.  We had family tragedy in common.  We'd lost our parents too soon.  We'd seen them through long illnesses, and it was healing to talk to someone who knew, who'd felt some of the same things.  When i went to Newburyport on book tour, she met me at Jabberwocky Bookshop.  The next day she and her daughter took me to the beach on Plum Island, a six-mile long barrier beach and Parker River Wildlife Refuge, to swim and walk along the hard sand looking for sand dollars.

One year we met at the Newark (NJ) Museum for an exhibit, Springsteen: Troubadour of the Highway.  Photographs by Annie Liebovitz, Frank Stefanko, and others illustrated the cars and road motif used in some of Bruce's songs.  While we were there, "The Ghost of Tom Joad" played in the background.  We both liked the picture of Bruce leaning on his Corvette (1978; Frank Stefanko, shown above.) The exhibit was haunting; I loved seeing visual proof of an artist's inspiration.  But mainly it was a focus for Paula and I to meet.

Other meetings: Philadelphia to attend a concert.  I rode the Acela beside the late Danny Federici.  Paula and I happened to be staying in the same hotel as Bruce and the band, and saw Little Steven on the treadmill while we swam in the pool.  Sitting in the lobby, after the show, we heard someone call, "Tim!"  Then, in case we'd missed seeing Tim pass by, the voice called more loudly to make sure we knew, "Tim, Tim Robbins!"  The next day Paula and I walked around the old streets, climbed the great stairs to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to tour the collection.  But that trip will be forever known to us as the "Tim, Tim Robbins" weekend.

For a long time we seemed to believe we needed an event to shape our time together.  It started out as a shared love of Bruce, his music and lyrics, the wild and mysterious energy that explodes at his shows.  We live far enough apart so it's not easy to just get together.  But along the way, something has shifted.  We don't seem to need a reason anymore.  It wasn't so hard for her to email me this time, say she and her family were heading to the Jersey Shore, could she and I spend an afternoon together.  Yes, I said, of course, in spite of my hermit tendencies.  She has hermit tendencies too.  Go figure...

She'll be here soon.  I'm thinking about friends and what they mean to me.  How each friendship has a different context: how we met, where we met, how long we've known each other.  Sometimes friendships are in rhythm, other times they can be, as my college roommate put it once, "out of synch."  But if we sit tight, let time come around again, what we loved is still there.   Mim, my grandmother sang, "Make new friends, but keep the old; one is silver and the other gold."

And to think we were once strangers on a train.

Summer reading

Today was gray and overcast, the perfect time to curl up with a book ("The Wave Watcher's Companion" by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, a gift from Adrian,) some iced tea (made with mint from my sister's garden,) and three cats.  They came and went--Maggie slept by my right knee, Maisie dropped a catnip apple at my feet and wanted to play, and Mae-Mae reclined on the windowsill watching birds fly by.  Madeleine stopped on her way home from the library, and she had iced tea but wanted fresh ginger grated into her glass, and we visited for awhile, and told me she's currently rereading "Gift From the Sea" by Anne Morrow Lindbergh. As you can see, Maggie is enjoying both the book and the catnip apple.  Some summer days are nothing but bliss.

Video message from Luanne

Geometry of Sisters

Geometry of Sisters is out in paperback, and I'm so happy to revisit the characters Beck, Travis, Pell, and Lucy. They, and this novel where they first began, are very dear to my heart. Two sets of sisters converge at boarding school in Newport, Rhode Island, each lost in her own way. A reader recently wrote me, "I just read Geometry of Sisters and loved it—your descriptions of Beck's relationship with math totally blew me away." I so appreciate that she "got it." Because Beck and Lucy use geometry with such creative, magical logic—to try to regain what they most love.

Pell and Travis have no need of geometric help to find first love, forbidden by the school, but how do you stop a freight train?

Beck and Travis's mother Maura has been long estranged from her sister Katharine. There's almost nothing worse or more unthinkable, and writing their scenes both touched something painful in my heart and made me believe in possibility and goodness.

It's strange, because although I didn't love math in school, I felt something about geometry. The spatial plane, invisible connections. Researching this novel, I rediscovered the poetry and beauty of geometry. Don't think of it as math; think of it as a set of equations leading to love.

If you enjoy the characters in this novel, please read their continuing story in The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners...

Luanne's New Website

Welcome to Luanne's new online home. A creative team of talented writers, artists, photographers and film makers have worked together with Luanne to make this happen. Luanne herself  has created pieces exclusively for this new website and she will continue to add work that you will not find anywhere else. This is also a great place to keep up to date with Luanne's published work and new books, as well as posting old articles that could only be found in print. Don't forget to add the site to your RSS feed, or simply add your email to Luanne's letter list in the form at the right.

If you'd like to find out more about Luanne you can browse her section, there's also the full collection of her books and we will be adding a gallery of Luanne's personal images and work from her friends.

Enjoy the site!

Sandcastles: Book Trailer

News from Luanne

Sandcastles is out in trade paperback! I love the new cover, which shows me running down the beach late for a swim with mermaids.  This novel came from deep inside.  It's about three sisters with artist parents, a devastating family secret, a dreamlike convent school on the edge of the sea, and love: within the family, among the sisters, first-kiss beach boy love, and, my favorite, the love of a nun for her longterm friend and groundskeeper.  The Thorn Birds on the Connecticut Shoreline!

Other news:

I’d like to introduce you to Madeleine Arrigan, librarian and archivist. Madeleine spends most of her time in our library high in the turret, reshelving books, repairing bindings of the much-loved and much-read ones, occasionally losing herself in a book she can’t put down. She does story hour for kids of all ages—without notice, whenever the mood strikes her.

She loves connecting with readers, so you’ll be encountering Madeleine here quite often. Also, she has started a Luanne Rice fan page on Facebook. After you friend me, please “like” the fan page and you will be eligible to win contests designed by Madeleine for book-lovers like you.

And of course, knowing Madeleine, she may present impromptu story hours. That would be so like her.

Impact

I wrote this in 2009. Impact

by Luanne Rice

1977 seems a long time ago.  I was twenty-one, a research assistant at the National Academy of Sciences.  My job included attending hearings of the United States Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on the impact of offshore drilling.  The hearing room in the Senate office building was beautiful but overwhelming.  I sat in the gallery with my pad and pencil, taking notes as Senator Lowell Weicker, from my home state of Connecticut, questioned witnesses.  Senator J. Bennett Johnson of Louisiana was on the same committee, and his questions were quite different.  This was a battle--they couldn't have been on more opposite sides of the issue.  I felt proud that Senator Weicker so clearly wanted to protect the shoreline.

Decisions would be made to determine whether oil leases would be sold to allow oil development on the Outer Continental Shelf of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.  At the end of each day I returned to the Academy building, wrote up my notes, gave them to Dr. Rick Burroughs, the project's staff officer.

My job included reporting on studies about oil exploration and impact in the Shetland and Orkney Islands; the disaster at Union Oil’s Platform A five and a half miles south of Santa Barbara; the Torrey Canyon tanker stranding on Seven Stones Reef off Lands End, and the devastating effect of oil spills on offshore, near-shore, and onshore environments.  I read about the composition of crude oil, relative toxicity of its parts, the carcinogenic activity of hydrocarbons, the fact that petroleum contains acutely poisonous compounds.

Exhibits presented at the Senate hearings included photos of oil spills: oil-tar lumps along tide lines, oil-coated shore birds struggling, dead lobsters, dead cod, tidal creeks glistening with gas rainbows, bilge leakage from oil rigs.  There were photos of funnels, booms, and skimmers trying to contain spills, hugging quantities of sticky, slimy oil against the spartina of marsh banks.

It wasn't just a job to me.  I had grown up loving the beach and all the coastal wildlife.  Working as a research assistant on the NRC study felt like a great privilege.  More than anything I wanted our marine environment to be protected.

The scientists working on the study were Chairman Philip L. Johnson of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities; James H. Carpenter of University of Miami; Chuck Drake of Dartmouth College; Robert A. Frosch of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Claude R. Hocott of University of Texas; Ralph W. Johnson of the University of Washington; Don E. Kash of the University of Oklahoma; James J. O’Brien of Florida State University; and Lawrence R. Pomeroy of the University of Georgia.

The scientists convened that summer at Dartmouth’s Minary Center and made their conclusions:  “Where vulnerable bays, beaches, estuaries, and marshes are present, special studies are needed to determine precautions to be stipulated in the leases; the technology for protecting these susceptible environments appears to be readily available.  It is essential that concerned environmental groups be involved in these surveys.”  (p. 61, NRC National Research Council. 1978. OCS Oil and Gas.  National Academy of Sciences, Washington DC.)

A ban on offshore drilling was imposed, protecting our coastlines and marine environments.  That ban has been renewed every year for the past twenty-six years until now; this year our legislators have given in and will lift it, a devastating development to those of us who love the oceans and shorelines.  Oil companies and the builders of drilling rigs will make money.  Shorebirds, marine mammals, bluefish, crabs, and people will be at risk.  Small towns and ways of life will change.

If drilling takes place off your beach, your marsh, your favorite dusty beach road will turn into a four lane highway before you know it.  Can you say you're not affected by photos from the Exxon Valdez spill, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, the stories that have come out about death to animals and habitats?  I can't.

The prospect of drilling seemed unthinkable in 1977.    It's even more so now.

---

[1] “Oil Pollution of the Ocean,” Max Blumer, Contribution Number 2336 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

up in the sky

Written on a random flight, who knows when, on one book tour or another. up in the sky

by Luanne Rice

when i fly, i go up in the sky.

it's true, and i'm up here now.

all around me is blue, except for long cloud highways leading to and from canada and other places.  below me, there is haze.  through it i can see rivers, ponds, towns, hills, roads. i am in a dream.

in the dream i join a parade of people, strangers, pulling suitcases on wheels, bumping along the jetway and over the narrow space between it and the jet door, and onto this large conveyance.  it is a jet plane.  i almost never dream of parades.  and as a waking hermit, i rarely, well, never, march in them--but that's not even the strange part.  the surreal part of this dream is taking off from the ground, going up into the sky, in a flying machine.  this is not my natural element.

i did not always feel this way.

when i was young, i was as one with the sky.  i flew with abandon.  i'd go flying with my cousin--a true beach boy with whom i used to go crabbing at the rocky end of the half-moon beach known as hubbard's point, an experience about which i wrote my very first published story.  his name is tom.  when tom was 16, even before he could drive, he got his pilot's license.  he wanted to get as many flight hours as possible, and i was right there beside him.  we flew everywhere.  we buzzed his teacher's house in harwinton.  we flew home from the airstrip near waitsfield, vermont in a snowstorm.

we used to charter an old seaplane.  he would land in the boats-only area right by the crabbing rocks at the end of the beach, to pick me up.  i'd swim out to the plane and climb onto the pontoon and into the cockpit.  my seat would be soaked with salt water.  he'd turn us out to sea, and we'd bounce over the waves.  the plane was so old that when he took off and banked right, the passenger door would flap open and i'd be looking straight down at long island sound.

fearless children we were.

then there were the paris years.  i lived in paris with my first husband.  his name was also tom.  we were young and in love.  with each other, with everything.  every day i would walk along the seine for hours, trying to memorize the exercises my tutor, madame piochelle, had given me.  "allo, allo, ici george, qui est la?"  "c'est moi, jean!" "vien jouer avec moi?"  "oui, j'arrive."  "a tout a l'heure."  "a tout a l'heure."  i would also shop at the marches, especially rue cler, for our dinner.  once i bought a whole rabbit.  i don't remember how i cooked it, but i do know that i have bad dreams about it now.  tom loved my cooking, and i loved doing it for him.  to me, that was the essence of love.

once on the terrace of chez francois, near the pont de l'alma, i met bono.  actually he said his name was paul , I  didn’t figure out  he was bono until a bit later.  this was just before joshua tree.  we started talking--about love, being irish, being american, being writers, and love again.  what else was there but love?  nothing.

during that time, my mother developed a brain tumor.  i flew home a lot, to see her.  that was the first time i remember feeling skeptical of flying.  would the plane get airborne?  would it actually land?  maybe i was really afraid of something else, like losing her.  i'm not sure.  but the way i got myself through those feelings was to think of my father, who had been in the air force.

his name was tom, too.

world war ll, he was stationed at a base at north pickenham on the wash, north of london.  he was only 23.  he trained for a year in colorado springs.  before that, he'd never been in a plane.  he grew so close to his crew--as close as brothers.  he was navigator-bombardier.  once in england, flying missions over france and germany, he stood out and was promoted to the lead plane in the eighth air force.  he refused to leave his old crew--his new crew had to literally carry him and his possessions to their nissan hut.  the very next mission, his old crew was shot down over helgoland.

that's not the part that inspired me, exactly.  although writing it, i see that it sort of did.  somehow my father kept going.  i can only imagine his grief.  he flew on d-day, over normandy.  his was the first plane over dresden, shot down on his way home.  he was irish-catholic.  i think of him, a beloved and sheltered boy from a close hartford family, thrown into war.  he had a very sensitive soul.

promoted to the lead plane in the 8^th air force, he was the very first plane over Dresden.  on his way back from that dreadful bomb run he was shot down.  other planes, his friends, went down in flames all around him.  he parachuted out, crash-landed in a tree in occupied france and broke his back.  he was rescued by a family with three daughters; they hid him in their barn.  after he got home and married my mother, they had three daughters.  my sister rosemary also has three daughters.

cosmic, non?

bien sur.

during my paris flying years, i would quell doubt and fear by thinking of all the times my father flew without getting shot down.  over 25 missions.  back and forth over the english channel, during tempests of all kinds.  wild winds blew, making the plane shake.  they would lose altitude, but just keep going.  i imagined his old bomber, strafed with shrapnel, taking off and landing again and again.

there i was on the concorde--who was i to worry?  i was really just a spoiled traveler.  anyway, my mother wound up coming to paris to have her chemo at the american hospital.  i didn't fly as much after that.  although tom took me to venice for my 30th birthday.  we stayed in a sweet hotel behind la fenice.

i heard placido domingo singing in the courtyard.

one night tom and i took a water taxi to the lido.  i had to put my feet in the sand and feel the salt of a brand new, to me, sea.  i thought of thomas mann.  there are times when i'm an existential beach girl.  but i guess if you're reading this, you know that by now.

the next time i felt tense about flying was many years later.

fast forward.

through life, life, life.

many beaches later.  mistakes, mysteries, flights and passions later.

marriages, too.

okay, here's the story.  i was on book tour in summer, 2001.  trans-canada, from fredericton to vancouver.  at the time, i was in the midst of a tragic, unbecoming, and completely abusive non-love situation.  my third marriage.  snares had risen from the depths, wrapped themselves around my ankles.  that made it hard to fly.  how can you rise--above the earth, above anything--if you are tethered from below?

my itinerary took me amazing places.  halifax, toronto, calgary, banff, lake louise.  being so far away and so often up in the air let me see my life with some persective.

look down through the clouds and see what is.

that book tour saved my life.  it showed me my strength, and that I didn’t have to stay with him.  kick him out, reclaim myself.  surround myself with real love—not twisted, psycho control masquerading as a marriage.  I was out of there.

thank you, sky, for holding me aloft.

thank you, plane, for taking me away.

thank you, my own strong heart, for never giving up.

i know i can fly because guess what?  i’m doing it right now.

still, it's a dream.

God Moves in a Mysterious Way

First published in Good Housekeeping Magazine’s Blessings column. Later reprinted in the book Blessings: Reflections on Gratitude, Love, and What Makes us Happy. God Moves in a Mysterious Way

by Luanne Rice

I’m the oldest of three sisters, something that defines me as much as my name.  “You’ll have many friends,” our mother used to tell me.  “But you’ll only have two sisters.”  I knew she said that to them, too.  She didn’t want us to take each other for granted, but she was an only child and didn’t understand: life without them would be like life without air, water, or blood—things I wouldn’t last long without.

When we were young, my sisters and I shared a room.  Sometimes after they fell asleep, I’d walk around the room touching the bedposts.  Talisman, prayer, or just craziness, I’m not sure.  I shared that room with them for eighteen years, until I went to college.  My first nights away, I couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t hear them breathing.

That doesn’t mean I was a perfect oldest sister.  I raided their sweater drawers.  My middle sister got a beautiful fair-isle sweater—sky blue with white and pale green around the neckline—for her sixteenth birthday—but I wore it without asking whenever I could.   Also, I flirted with my youngest sister’s boyfriend, danced with him too long at a winter dance one time.

We were all two years apart in age, walked each other to and from school.  The day I got my license, I taught them to drive.  We could make each other laugh with one word or glance.  When I saw my mother trying to balance the checkbook, fretting about making the mortgage payments, I vowed to protect my sisters from them; I remember feeling the weight on my shoulders, knowing that I wanted them to stay happy and innocent.  I wanted our complicated family to be simple and predictable, so my sisters wouldn’t have to worry about anything.

Was that where it all started?  Arrogance on my part, to think that they couldn’t handle life as it was, that I had to run interference for them?  Or was I just a not-good-enough older sister, a bad example, selfish in sweaters and selfish in life?

As adults, I moved to a city, they stayed by the sea.  I have cats and a career, they have beautiful children.  They got married and built lives; I got married and divorced.  Three times.  I felt like the family embarrassment and failure.

When I look back now, I can’t even define the precise moment that we stopped speaking to each other.   I know that it happened after our mother died, when we no longer had the glue of her long, terrible illness to hold us together.

At first we stopped getting together as often.  The time between calls grew longer and longer.  After a while, the calls stopped, and I remember a moment when it dawned on me—maybe the worst moment in my life—that they had decided to cut themselves off from me and my untoward life.  Looking back now, I realize that my life was difficult for them to deal with, and they had to step back.  And because I didn’t know how to stop them, I let them.

The silence was so terrible, even now it hurts to remember.  Being alone is one thing—but after having grown up with such closeness, it was almost unbearable.  I began to have holidays with friends—people I love a lot.  But every Thanksgiving morning I’d feel bereft, wanting my sisters instead.

One day I couldn’t take it any more.  Literally.  I was in a rocky, abusive marriage—my last.  It pushed me over the edge.  An early winter night in 2002, I jumped into Long Island Sound with my computer.  I ended up at McLean Hospital, frozen inside and out, swimming in grief.

I called my sisters.

They came to me.  Not in their cars, not up the highway, but straight back into my life.  They let me know they loved me.  It took a little time, but we saw each other.  We talked.  They know me better than anyone.  Our history is in our hearts, in our skin.  Maybe that’s why our time apart was so excruciating—I felt I had been ripped in half.  Coming back together has been the greatest blessing I can imagine, and it has shown me that with sisters, love means never having to say “I was a jerk.”  It means forgiveness and never having to touch the bedpost to ensure that we’ll always have each other.

Nightbirds in Central Park

Nightbirds in Central Park by Luanne Rice

When I was young and under the complete command of my heart, I moved to New York.  I was searching for art and artists and writers and a place that could accommodate my life’s intensity and call it “creativity.”

My friend Brendan Gill, drama critic at The New Yorker, gave me several invaluable instructions.  One was, “Writers always think they have to drink a lot and be miserable, but don’t,” and another was, “Go to Central Park.”  He told me that as Connecticut natives we required a lot of nature to balance urban thrills, and over the years I have discovered that he was completely right.

Although I love Poets’ Walk, the Bandshell, Cleopatra’s Needle, and the allées of crabapple trees in Conservatory Garden, my favorite places in Central Park are the most wild—the Ramble and the North Woods.  The park is situated along the Atlantic Flyway, a migration corridor traveled by birds that fly at night, navigating by the stars, landing at sunrise in the greenest spots they see.  Central Park is a great oasis for birds.

Last weekend was the Bio-Blitz, a twenty-four biological survey of the park.  Organized by the Explorer’s Club, it attracted many nature-lovers to participate.  In all, they counted 838 species.  I had planned to join the Friday night moth-counting contingent, but during peak hours I found myself engaged in a different exploration: walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with two friends from Hartford, one of them thirteen, on a search for the Brooklyn roots of the rapper Jay-Z.

But I visit the park frequently and have remembrances of observations past…  During the Christmas Bird Count on December 19th, 2004, the word went out that a Boreal Owl, rare for these parts, had been spotted in a tall pine behind Tavern on the Green.  I headed over, and stood with Cal Vornberger as he photographed the shy, beautiful bird.  Another favorite time was the night I went owling.  In March, 2002, my friend E.J. McAdams, then an Urban Park Ranger, invited me to join an expedition to track screech owls.  We met at the Boathouse, and our party consisted of several avid birders, including Charles, Lee, and Noreen, famous to people who know the story of Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who for ten years has courted, hunted, nested, and raised seventeen chicks atop the penthouse next to Woody Allen’s.

At night the city is enchanted.  It just is.  You stand at the edge of the park and look around at all the buildings twinkling with lights—the Plaza, the Dakota, the San Remo, the Beresford, the limestone palaces on Fifth Avenue—and New York City is a magical landscape of wit and glamour, and there’s an orchestra of taxi horns and boom boxes, and at any second someone wonderful will come along and ask you to dance.  Just outside the park, New York City is still a place of human dreams.

But walk inside the park’s perimeter, and suddenly you are solidly with nature—the place Brendan warned me that I must find.  After sunset, Central Park is the wilderness, vast and dark.  That March night was chilly.  E.J. told us that to find owls at night, we had to look for unexpected shapes in the bare trees.  We tried to walk silently, like trackers, scanning branches overhead with an unfocussed gaze.

We made our way around the Lake, and our first sighting was just south of Bow Bridge.  As promised, the screech owl looked “unexpected”: an out-of-place smudge in a graceful network of maple branches.  We stood still, watching for a long time, until she flew.  And then we followed her into the Ramble.

A screech owl’s call is the opposite of its name, mysterious and descending, like a backwards horse whinny.  We tracked that owl till we lost her, and then we looked and listened for others.  During that whole night, our group rarely spoke.  We each had our own reasons for being there, in the wilds of Central Park on a cold not-yet-spring night, and I know that I was lost in a combination of meditation, awe, and gratitude for my Connecticut-born connection with nature.

On Cedar Hill, in the east-seventies, there is a stand of red cedar trees where in recent years four Long-ear owls have roosted.  Like other owls, they sleep by day and hunt by night.  By staking out the trees at dusk, it is possible, with patience, to observe the “fly out.”  I witnessed it once; E.J. pointed out how each of the four owls left the trees in a completely idiosyncratic way.  One hopped to the end of a branch, then flapped toward the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Another zoomed straight up, like the Concorde.  One hulked like a gargoyle, seeming to indict everyone and everything on the ground, and then flew menacingly into the night.  The last waited a long time, as if deciding whether to actually go or not, and then looped west, toward Belvedere Castle.

It is a great thrill and honor to observe the fly-out; only one person I have ever heard of has ever seen the fly-in, and I was with her on the Night of the Screech Owls.  Noreen.  Tall and stately, she has a cascade of bright white hair and eyes that are steady and compassionate.  One New Year’s Eve, it is said, after watching the Cedar Hill fly-out, she decided to stick around the park till just before dawn and wait for the owls to come home.

That’s a much more difficult proposition, because they don’t return all at the same time, and they arrive from different directions, and the sun hasn’t yet risen over the East Side, and the owls fly in so fast you’re not quite sure you’ve seen them.  But according to park legend, Noreen did—that New Year’s Day, she saw the fly-in.

Although I walked beside her that March night, I didn’t ask her about the story.  Our screech owl-seeking group progressed north in silence, over the Seventy-Ninth Street Transverse and past Shakespeare Garden, into more relatively tame park regions as we made for the North Woods—the dense woodlands and steep bluffs in the northernmost reaches of the park.

But we never got that far.  We spotted an owl along Central Park West.  Just across the busy street, the exhibit “Baseball as America” was opening on at the American Museum of Natural History.  The great columned entrance was stunningly illuminated red, white and blue as limousines discharged various Yankees, Mets, and other baseball and museum lovers.

There, bathed in the museum’s patriotic glow, was a screech owl perched on a low branch. To get the best view, we had to actually exit the park and stand on the sidewalk at West 81st Street. People were clustered, watching for Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams and Joe Torres, who were rumored to be attending the opening. We had to edge through the throng, to get closer to the owl. Two crowds of people standing in the same spot, facing in opposite directions.

The owl was oblivious.  He was gray and white, eight inches tall, so close I could look into his ferocious yellow eyes.  In true New York fashion, he let everyone else go about their business while he went about his: killing a mouse.  Wings spread, he slashed downward, hit his prey as it ran, and ripped it apart—gobbling bloody entrails made redder by the gala museum lights.

Most of the bystanders missed seeing that murderous show.  They forgot to glance over the wall into the wilds of Central Park, fixed as they were on the American pastime, on the enchantment of Manhattan, on their own human dreams.

I have my own human dreams.  I have made many of them come true in New York City.  But part of me is still a Connecticut girl at heart, and Brendan’s words are never too far from my consciousness: “Go to Central Park.”  Oracle, sage: thank you for knowing me, for reminding me of who I am.  Nature is in my nature.

Besides, I still have to see the fly-in.

(Photograph by Cal Vornberger: Two fledgling Eastern screech owls, Central Park, North Woods.  www.calvorn.com)