“Veronica, Lucy is crying again. She cries a lot. Shes eight years old. You are only six but she cries a lot more than you do.”

“Mommy, It’s easier to listen to your heart when you are six.”

“Easier than it is when you are eight?”

“When I went here they didn’t have cell phone” Chris says.

“You know what they did instead?” I say.

” what?”

“Every body smoked. One minor addiction for another.”

“Welcome to Wonderblog!”

Those are the words I typed 13 years ago to launch this enterprise. I had just finished my coursework to graduate from college and I wanted to use my own voice.

So I started this blog.

Took me twelve years to get that little diploma piece of paper. After I spent years of night classes, balancing life, a job and the money, I finished the bingo card of required credits and got to wear the hat.

And I thought, That’s the end of the paved path. From here on out, it’s me in the jungle making my own way with a machete.

Off-roading. Scary. That’s the way of wonder and the way of art.

A year later, I started working on what has become The Russian American School of Tomorrow.

It is finished.

I did not expect it to take this long, to be so hard, or to turn out so beautifully.

We are looking down the barrel of this week’s holiday. Sunday is the glorious celebration of the resurrection, but before that comes Friday, the death, and the reference of my quote above: “It is finished.”

Living through the events of the story described in my book almost killed me the first time. Then writing them ground me up and spit me out in little pieces.

But it is finished. My story of escaping from spiritual abuse to the land of horrific political repression and finding my own way to happiness is now available. Here is an excerpt:

I still didn’t trust preachers. I wanted to read the Bible, but I knew the whole thing had been explained to me and explained wrong. What was God really saying? How could I see through the mask of lies that covered these pages for me?

I picked up the Bible my parents had bought me a few Christmases ago. Some Bibles were red-letter editions, printing the direct word of God and Jesus in red ink. “Let there be light” in Genesis was written in red. “It is finished” in the gospels, when Jesus died on the cross, was also red.

If I only read the red, just the words that God himself had spoken, maybe I could trust those to uncover the truth.

I wished the truth were not so hard to get to. I trusted the Bible, but I didn’t trust what my upbringing had made of my reading skills. There were four books, the gospel stories of the life of Jesus. I would read those and see what they actually said.

Go read what the rest of the book actually says. I long for you to know the story and to hear what you think after reading.

I am so grateful for you, my wonder readers. May your machete path be as magnificent and wonderful as I know it will be. Thank you for being part of mine.

Chris was reading me an article about gentrification yesterday. One of the problems with gentrification is, although it makes the housing values rise in the neighborhood it also makes the property taxes rise. That means that the previous people who have lived there for a long time can’t afford to live there even if they own their houses outright.

If a neighborhood has become a tight community people who are less affluent have resources they can draw on. It’s more than just borrowing a cup of sugar. Sometimes you need a ride when your car breaks down. Sometimes you need to borrow an outfit for interview.

People who can buy a home and then fix it up have extra resources. It looks great after the home is fixed up. But the people who have been there for a while living in the houses with delayed maintenance are not just irresponsible. Maybe they’re very responsible. Maybe they don’t have the resources to do all the beautiful maintenance and upgrades.

Maybe their responsibility extends towards things of more immediate need than granite countertops.

So those people get pushed out. They must move because they simply cannot afford the taxes. California has prop 13 but most States do not have a property tax cap. People with less means get pushed out of gentrified areas into somewhere else. And their support system is broken causing a crisis.

Which may mean they need to rely on some form of public assistance. Which is why some people want to raise property taxes. It’s a bit of a cycle.

But I also wonder about communities. If you need an instant community when you are new to an area that has often meant going to a church. And churches that have strong communities are often fostered by charismatic personalities. That sort of despotic personality-whim based leadership leaves me shuddering. A bunch of insecure people in a new place are very vulnerable to spiritual manipulation.

But leaving that aside. Are churches those sort of support communities or are they another form of public assistance? Are they real communities or are they a committee that might grant you a dispensation of cash or help? What kind of community are our churches now?

How easy is it to fit in? It is hard to ask for help. it helps if you know you can grant some in return. Being uprooted can also upset the confidence that one day you could also help someone.

Communities are changing.

I moved to Los Angeles in 2002. July, I think, or maybe August. I had just graduated from college, and so the I decide I missed classes. First thing I took a journalism class at a jr. College. It was barely worthy of the name “class.”

I decided LA county jr colleges sucked. So I went to an extension class. This must have been early 2003. I think. UCLA extension class on Memoir writing.

And after that class was done, I started. I began to work on what became The Russian American School of Tomorrow.

See that link? That means I published it.

I was very excited about it in the years 2003, 2004 and 2005. I really thought I would finish it in 2005.

I did not finish it.

In 2006 I published a book I wrote while mostly working on RASOT. The Parable of Miriam the Camel Driver. That’s my first one. It’s a real book too and I’m proud of it. But it didn’t feel like a serious book.

I published two others.

But here is the real one. Today. I did it. So long it took me.

And I did it.

How many times when I was feeling really low did I think about how long I”d worked on it, and if I didnt finish it how it would never exist. How if I died, no one would gather my notes and make the book for me.

Now it’s done.

I will never work this hard on another book ever again. I didn’t know it would take twelve years. There is an odd symmetry with how long it took to publish this book and how long it took me to graduate form college. That took twelve years too. And there were gaps when I wasn’t really pushing it forward either.

Imagine! Twelve years on a book that no one else could see but me. I guess that is what art means. twleve years. I wonder if my next book will matter that much. I can’t imagine that it would .

Maybe I should start on the sequel right away. Because, after all…the sequel, if I manage to tell it, has the TRUE meat of the matter.

I just couldn’t get to that meat without telling this part first

And maybe there is enough meat.

I’m full for today. This is a good feeling.

It’s coming friends! The Russian American School of Tomorrow, the book I’ve been working on for more than a decade, will be available for purchase soon. It is my true coming-of-age story starting in Alaska and ending in the crumbling Soviet Union Asian middle-of-nowhere.

When I went to Russia back in 1991, I didn’t speak the language. I knew the alphabet slightly when we landed. But I could barely ask where the bathroom was:”Gdye toilet?”

For sure I couldn’t understand the answers. Hand signals, please.

But I got better. I started to understand after a lot of trying and failing. I made friends with people who could speak my language and asked them to teach me.

After about a year I made friends with a neighbor who did not speak English at all. I delighted to visit their apartment and drink tea and talk. I could tell them about what I had done that day in Russian, and we had a grand time.

Here’s the thing: I could talk and I knew what I was saying. The conversations went smoothly and quickly if I was doing most of the talking. I felt a little bad about dominating the time with my stories, but as long as I was talking I knew what was being said. Once the sisters started talking, I couldn’t be sure of what they meant.

That was awkward, and required flipping out the translation dictionary to look up and be sure what was communicated.

I was learning. I was figuring out this country and it’s language.

But there is another thing I’ve learned since. It’s the inverse of the same thing. If I am the one talking, I know what is being said. That’s not a very powerful position to be in.

It doesn’t do me much good to repeat what I already know. How am I supposed to learn anything if I am always talking? Or, for that matter, if I am hanging out with people who are not going to say anything I don’t already know.

If it turns out I am the smartest person in the room, I better find a different room.

This morning I put the Bhagavad Gita on my kindle. It is way short! So I started reading it before church

There is a taste of cruel predestination about it.

I better finish it to get the whole picture

Veronica told me that winter is over, and that it is the first day of spring.

How wonderful! I almost always forget the equinox.

“Mrs. Applebee told us in science class.”

Which was all good until we got in the car, and she declared that she didn’t need to wear a coat.

“Winter is over. I do not need to wear a coat anymore.”

“It can still be cold sometimes in spring. You can take your coat off when it gets warmer.”

“We learned about nature today, Mommy. Where is nature?”

umm… “Nature is all around us. Anything that was made my God is nature.”

ooh…good one.

“So a tree is nature?”

“Yes, God made trees.”

“Are telephone poles nature?”

“No people made those.”

“yes! God made trees.  Anything that people made isn’t. A car isn’t nature.”

As soon as I say it, I see the flaw. She hones in on it within seconds.

“But mommy…we grow babies in tummies. Are babies made by people or are they nature?”

damn.

“Well, God makes the babies in our tummies. Things that people make using science and math and inventions, those re not nature.”

She seemed to accept it. And I am so proud that she found the flaw in my logic as fast as I did.

So my daughter started school this year and she loves math. She’ll tell anybody.

Mostly people say “Good for her! Math is important for girls.”

And I cringe a little. There is a huge SHOULD in this. There is a historic should coming from the cold war era, that America needs mathematicians to have primacy on the global arena. There is a more recent should, that females should be encouraged in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) so that gender imbalances and misogyny can be diminished.

She’s only in kindergarten. I want her to like what she likes. I wonder how she interprets these well-intentioned responses to her love of math.

She’s doing well in school, but I’m a little worried about how they are teaching reading. It doesn’t make sense to her or me. She reads fine for her age, but I want her to feel confident about what she’s doing when she reads.

I love her teacher, she’s great. But teachers don’t know everything. And I think my daughter needs more than what she’s getting.

I remember struggling with certain parts of reading. I remember so well. I remember a lot of things, and other things I forget.

I have had this box of old notebooks I needed to sort through. Some of the things in the notebooks were worth keeping, and some were not. Time to render down the pile.

I always keep notebooks. I write down grocery lists and phone numbers. I also write out my big projects plans. And poems and journal entries. I wanted to keep the big stuff.

And of course it brings me back to the times when those things were happening. I found letters I’d written but never sent to Chris when we were first dating. Oh! The agony of fresh love.

I was younger, for sure. I hesitate to say I was young. 27 years old and seen a bit of life.

I kept running across this idea in what I was writing to Chris, “I want you to hear my ideas and tell me what they mean.”

I was so sure that there was meaning. I didn’t know the meaning and I was looking outside myself for the answer. I was very confident that most people–well, the smart people that I liked and respected–would know more than I did, and could crack the puzzle box of my mind.

As a child I had heard so often that I should listen to my betters, and I had learned it. When I grew up I still clung to this idea that someone else knew better than I did and could explain it to me.

Waving my hand high, “Teacher! Teacher! I have a question.”

It is a nice dream to think that the answer to all my questions was so close by. That someone with the answer book was right there to help me.

So, when I first met Chris I put him on that pedestal. I wanted him to be the one with all the answers. Bless him; he didn’t take advantage of my insecurity. He was patient, and never pushed me into what I didn’t want

Our relationship has come past that immature expectation I had. Looking back at my old notebooks I see it now and realize I have changed.

And still, I have not changed that much. I can see a lot of ways that I still give away my authority to know.

It was only a couple of years ago that a teacher told me “All your empowerment comes from inside of you.”

When I heard it, it gonged my bones and I knew it was true. I still had to work hard to find a way to practice it. I’m still working on it. I have a feeling that I am going to want someone else to tell me the answer my whole life.

I also know that when it comes down to it, I am the one who has to figure it out. Especially when it is a question of something original- a new idea or a work of art. I’m the only one who can tell if it’s right because I’m the only one who thought of it.

Life doesn’t have letter grades. It is only attendance.