Award-winning, bestselling, thought-provoking mysteries
Pour you a beer?
I’ll be working this great event along with Jonathan Franzen, Karen Joy Fowler, and Elizabeth McKenzie, raising money to support our local Planned Parenthood. But since this is a fundraiser, and you might live somewhat outside the driving area, you could just make a donation (…and we’ll owe you a beer.)
Bookshop’s donation page is here.
Mornings begin chez King with tea and Facebook. And because I have a ridiculous number of “friends” (many of whom are actual friends; others I’m sure would be if we ever met) I set up a “family” feed with the posts of, sure, family but also people I enjoy beginning my day with.
Two who show up on my screen pretty much every morning are Michael Sims (Henry David Thoreau, “Silver Blaze”) and Rebecca Solnit (Infinite City; Men Explain Things to Me). Michael drops wit and beauty into my pre-dawn morning. Rebecca gets my dander up. Between them, my Takeback Tuesdays are as balanced as the rest of my week.
I commend my two e-friends to you. Between his teasels and sunrises and her righteous fury and joy in community, the two of them will get you going right.
So, there’s new role coming up for Laurie: bartending for Planned Parenthood.
In August, I’ll join Jonathan Franzen, Karen Joy Fowler, and Elizabeth McKenzie
in serving drinks for a Planned Parenthood fundraiser at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Which should be interesting because I don’t know anything about cocktails—maybe they’ll put me in charge of the beer.
This is going to be crazy fun, and it’s also going to do good for an excellent, life-saving organization. Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes you to buy a ticket, and we can see what kind of beer you like.
Get your ticket here.
As public libraries are in a city’s streets or the Guardian or New York Times are in paper, so is your local PBS station in the air, broadcasting enlightenment, entertainment, and even wisdom. In that spirit, tonight I will be joining the fundraising night of my own local PBS station, KQED in San Francisco, to collect pledges.
If you are so inclined to join us, the station is here. Conversely, you could send some dollars to your own local station, and help to keep them on the air.
Thanks, and if you call in, let us know that you’re a Friend of Laurie.
Takeback Tuesdays are my small way of speaking out for what I perceive as sanity in the current political state of affairs. But in recent months, I’ve been struck time and again by how my life as a writer and my life as a person walk the same path. When I wrote Lockdown, I had no idea where 2017 was headed–in, for example, the fragile, tenacious strength of community. So although I don’t normally mix my Tuesday blogs with those for the rest of the week, today’s post occupies that overlap area of community.
Many, perhaps most of my books are about the strengths and triumphs of individuals: the Russell stories find our heroine standing alone, or with Holmes, against the winds of stupidity and wickedness. Stuyvesant & Gray only manage an occasional partnership; Kate Martinelli has partners both professional or personal, but is essentially on her own; Rae Newborn, Anne Waverley, Dian—these are protagonists whose feet are planted against the world.
Lockdown is the story of a community. Its strengths rise out of its parts which, seemingly adrift and unconnected, nonetheless link together during the course of the day. But its weaknesses come from those who, through fear or anger or a too-complicated history, remain apart. Such as Gordon:
5:17 am, Career Day
Gordon
Gordon ran beneath the waning moon, fighting the need to circle the park.
The fight lay not in the running, but the circling back—although granted, three and a half years ago when he’d first made this circuit, he thought his lungs would explode. He’d been old, then: washed up, worn out, ready for the knacker’s gun. Not put out to pasture, though. Men like Gordon Hugh-Kendrick were not generally granted a placid retirement. Men like him ran until they were brought down.To his astonishment, it turned out he’d merely been tired: bloody tired and older than his years, so wretched he’d made one last mad, whimsical, despairing lunge for shelter—only to hit pure gold. Instead of a farewell tour, he found haven, and comfort, and a degree of purpose. The affection of a good woman.
Forty-four months later, Gordon was . . . if not at the top of his form, certainly better than he could have dreamed. And surely the low cunning of age counted for more than the dumb muscle-mass of youth?
Which would be fine (he reflected, dodging a fallen crate on the road) but for two problems. One was specific: he’d got sloppy, back in September, and let his name appear where it should not. He couldn’t even blame Linda, not entirely. Despite thirty years of rigid habit, he’d failed to check a list he knew was headed for the police department. And though five months on, he seemed to have dodged that particular bullet, he couldn’t risk a second mistake.
The other problem was more general. With a fit body and faint return of optimism had come restlessness. The familiar itch of being in one place for too long; the inborn need for challenge—his kind of challenge, which was thin on the ground in a sleepy farm community of California’s Central Coast. Hence the hard joy of running a little too fast through a hazard-strewn dark, and the temptation to keep going.
But not today.
He’d been honest with Linda from the beginning—well, more honest than he’d been with anyone for many a year. And not only had she lived up to his terms (apart from that one slip), she’d only just begun to sleep through the night again, after the disappearance of Bee Cuomo. Gordon would cut his own throat before letting her down. Not forever—maybe not even for much longer, but today? Today was important to her.
So this morning he would circle the park and turn back. He would polish his shoes, shave his face, and don the appearance of an ordinary man, to spend the day walking amongst the unsuspecting.
**
Lockdown goes on sale two weeks from today, on June 13, but you can pre-order a copy from: Bookshop Santa Cruz (signed), Poisoned Pen (signed), your local Indie, Barnes & Noble, or Amazon.
Takeback Tuesday: when Laurie King voices her opinion about the responsibilities of life in America.
Insulated as I am in foreign travel and life in the Twenties, I still can’t overlook everything that’s going on at home. And this health care problem is immediate for me. Many of the people I know and love are dependent on government help with their health care. If my husband had retired a few years earlier, or if he’d worked in a job with a less active union, I’d be in the same boat.
You think Obamacare is flawed? I wouldn’t argue. You say Congress only passed that obscenity of a “reform” because they trusted that the Senate would block it? I don’t care.
If they want to play to their perceived audience at the cost of lives, what business do they have taking my money for their salary? I say it’s time to throwing out the bums who think a woman’s health is less important a man’s, or that a pre-existing condition should condemn a family to living on the streets.
Let’s SwingLeft, by making a donation: here.
Last week’s Tuesday post was from London, and this week I’m in Venice. Hard at work. (Yes, really!) One thing travel illustrates, to anyone who has ever doubted it: people all over got their troubles. Country borders don’t draw a line on doubt and fear and pain. Not joy and laughter and affection, but unless it’s one of the years when they’re gauging the World’s Happiest Country, the positive tends to get left behind.
As I move around, I find it interesting to see how other places confront their problems—particularly those without the massive resources of the west when it comes to helping the individual crawl out of a hole. Places like Zimbabwe.
God knows the country has it problems—problems too huge to solve with a conversation. As a Guardian article says, one in four of its citizens suffers from some kind of mental illness, often rooted in deep poverty, domestic violence, AIDS. And yet the country is too poor to give the merely depressed full-fledged psychiatric treatment—not with only thirteen psychiatrists in all of Zimbabwe.
So they give love.
From the MHIN web site: http://www.mhinnovation.net/innovations/friendship-bench
There is a bench under a tree, where an old woman waits to listen. She’s not a professional, although she is trained—to listen. Would-be suicides sit down and talk. Single mothers faced with hopelessness find someone who understands. Victims of violence discover a community. Neighbors discover a sympathetic ear, finding they’re not as alone as they thought. That life is not as hopeless as it had seemed.
My own country has embraced its divisions: us right-thinkers versus Those People who want to destroy our way of life. But I’ve always found it interesting that when the personal comes into play, political commitment takes second place. I may be in favor of stronger immigration laws, but that doesn’t mean I want the sweet Mexican family next door to be sent away, or to get rid of the Muslim guy at work who ran the marathon to raise money for a stranger’s medical treatments. Or, I may think the current administration is a nightmare, but when my brother-in-law loses his job to an immigrant, I might understand (a little) why he voted as he did.
The Friendship Bench Project has a Facebook page, here. You could “like” them, if you are so inclined. And you could think about how to lend a sympathetic ear to someone in your own community, to let them know they’re not alone. As the Friendship Bench motto says:
Let’s talk about it!
Today’s Takeback Tuesday comes from the wilds of London, where I’m doing research, seeing people, and commiserating with family about Brexit (them) and #45 (me). So far I seem to be winning that Sad Place on points.
But here’s a suggestion:
You can take a similar message down to your local sign shop, to upload it to one of the online order companies such as Staples, or just order this one from Amazon, here.
Yes, it seems ridiculous to have to declare your willingness to have neighbors that aren’t Xerox copies of you, but we in the USofA seem to be living in an age of the absurd, and that appears to be the only language that is currently understood.
So happy Tuesday, wherever you may live—and if you don’t need one of these, I celebrate the inclusiveness of your particular neighborhood.
Today’s TBT is a reminder from NASA and my friends at Boing Boing, that we are delicate and precious and the universe is very large.
That tiny dot between Saturn’s rings is us. You and me and everyone we love and hate and all our problems, right there. Our era may be one of strife and incredible idiocy, but it is also an age of miracles.
A lovely photo popped up on my Facebook feed yesterday:
The caption read:
A Taoist (me) gives up his seat so a Hasidic couple could sit together. They scoot over so a Muslim mother could sit and nurse her baby, on Easter Sunday. This is my America: People letting people be people.
–Jackie Summers