here’s my morning joe, super creamy, hold the sugar, but not the Sugar.

I’ve read and heard a lot of writers talk about their relationship with a particular talisman–I forget who has a mug with Gold Letters that spell Writer across it. Some of my friends paste quotations in their writing spaces. Some writers advise the utmost in tidiness, a veritable sensory vacuum, or discomfort, or writing with the lights off, or writing with your back to the monitor, or writing at a treadmill desk.

I’m not overly superstitious, nor am I overly tidy, so This Mug, which I advised you to buy on Monday, has helped me get back on the express line to my draft. I got derailed a bit just before AWP. It doesn’t hurt that I’ve got pages due on Saturday.

It’s okay to get derailed, as long as you remember–sooner rather than later–to get back to writing like a motherfucker.

Strayed & Bassist

To catch you up: Write Like a Motherfucker is a mantra that originated on the Rumpus column “Dear Sugar.”

*It does not escape me, the misogyny inherent in the word Motherfucker, but it strikes me as meaningful especially for that reason, and readable as a colloquailism whose meaning would be more aptly conveyed as “badass” or “person (male or female) of particular bravado.”

Sugar = Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild, some other books, once secretly a Rumpus advice columnist, and probably a million other things, too.

Write like a motherfucker is what she advised Elissa Bassist to do. Bassist is a New York dwelling woman writer who wrote to Sugar saying, “how do women become the writers they want to be?”

You can read all about it in the most recent issue of Creative Nonfiction, or online, if you’re cheap or broke.

There, Strayed & Bassist’s conversation is a beacon of hope for writers of both genders: encouraging and witty and funny and warm and delicious, a hamlet of surety–to my mind–that women writers will not always be considered twee and lesser, just because they have vaginae.

Twee is a word I learned at AWP. Go on, look it up. At first I thought the woman who said it was being onomatopoeic. But then I whipped out my M-W app & was assured that she was not.

The most important thing to do is to write. Write like a motherfucker.

I can tell you that I’ve been writing like a motherfucker, the most mothers fucked I’ve ever written like, since January.

I have churned out 160 Manuscript pages (mostly nonfiction, some fiction), maybe 50 of these are recycled or expanded material.

I do not say this to brag. I say this because I have written loads and loads of stuff since I was a small child, so I have always written like a motherfucker by most people’s standards. If I had all of my journals from forever, they would probably stand in a stack to my chest. I can’t imagine the stack of paper if I printed everything I’ve written, every draft I’ve revised.

Now, I’m writing like a motherfucker to my standards. And mine are the only ones that matter.

My point is that you can always up your game.

So however much time you spend writing now, double it. Then double that. But don’t freak out if you get off the track a little bit, or if you have to take a day off. Take it, then get back to it.

Remind yourself, as often as you have to, to Write Like a Motherfucker.

Get the T-shirt, or a mug. A talisman. Or clean your writing space till it looks like an ascetic monk lives there. If you write best when you’re doing a yoga pose, do that. If you need to engineer a device by which you can hang by your feet from the ceiling, do that. If you love those quiet morning hours as I do, before everybody starts to need you, get up early.

Any writers reading want to share their talismans or rituals? Advice? Words to the wise?

My friend Beth enlisted a food service professional to snap this shot. Yes, those beers ARE that big.

There’s a whole bunch of post-AWP posts this morning.

Here’s one I like most, my friend Beth wrote it. Beth is my new in-person friend.  My friend Jamie is why we know each other. Jamie is a good yenta.

The Missouri review posted this.

This guy I met is the editor of this great site, and I encourage all of you to read The Rumpus every day. And buy that incredible coffee mug. I did.

I met Jane Friedman. In person. Jane Friedman is a social media/author platform/online savvy hero of mine.

VIDA is fucking great.

Julianna Baggott wrote a serious blog post about AWP that is worth your consideration.

There is too much to give you a total rundown of the people I saw, met, and was excited to be in the same town with. AWP is rad. Exhilirating. Happy-making.

I spent most of my time at the book fair. I can’t wait to go next year.

Anybody from Seattle reading? Want a 4-day couch surfer in March?

Inked

I stayed in Gloucester which is a bit north of Boston.

I got a tattoo on my arm that says Strident Feminist.

COOL!

That’s not a great picture. I’ll get a better one & show you soon. Promise.

I got the tattoo from James LaCroix at Compass Rose in Gloucester, I recommend both.

Blissed Out

While I was there, I felt great. I felt special. I tweeted about it, and I’m still trying to reckon out how it works that I felt special–like I’m doing what I ought to be doing, unintimidated by the huge number of other writers, most of whom are far bigger deals than I am. I should’ve felt like an imposter, like I feel every time I sit down in front of a blank screen or page. I should’ve felt like there’s no hope for my success in this world. But I felt the precise opposite.

It was affirmative. Encouraging. And gave me more tools for moving forward, even though I failed to make as much use of the conference as I wanted to. As I should have.

My Brain Feels Mushy

And I want to take a nap. A two-day nap. I think I can manage a two-hour one sometime tomorrow.

from Flickr user CraigeMorsels

One of the many things that I laugh at myself about is that I’m 32. There’s really no call for me to be writing a memoir. I’ve got no business.

I don’t think it would matter what I was working on, I’d feel like I had no business writing it.

Another thing that gives me chuckles and massive, intestine-twisting anxiety in equal parts is that I’m writing a lot about alive people.

Some of these alive people are people with whom I’ve not been on the greatest terms for some time. A lot of them are members of my family.

And this is shitty, but I really am not worried too much about writing stuff about my parents. They might be upset with me for a while, but they won’t stop talking to me forever, because they love the hell out of their grandchild. Who knew that having a baby at 24, which is one of the many things I’m writing about, would protect me from memoir backlash in the future? Ha!

I’m working through an edition of Writing the Memoir: From Truth To Art, and the section on writing about people who are alive says (this is a paraphrase),

You have a responsibility to the people you’re writing about other than yourself, you don’t necessarily have to stop what you’re doing, but you have to understand that what you’re doing may have larger consequences for them, and is it worth it? The limits of responsibility and how to define them vary from writer to writer, from story to story. Some people do it this way, others do it another way, your answer will depend on your sense of ethics and your willingness to open yourself to legal trouble. More on that in the appendix.

The appendix says that memoirists have to worry about defamation and invasion of privacy. There are a bunch of things that a work has to be in order to be defaming, and one of the things is false, so I feel fairly safe from that one. It also says you’re probably okay if you change names and avoid specifically identifiable information, which I would do anyway, because I worry about getting sued, and when pressed, about potential harm to the people I know or have known, even though some of them deserve my ire.

I’m not sure I’m fond of the idea of literary revenge. It strikes me as unproductive and ultimately unsatisfactory. I am trying to be fair, even when it is hard.

Of course, I’ve thought a lot about this.

Good Chap

Over the past several weeks, you’ve read some stories involving others. Sometimes those stories have been intimate, like in the post about my sister and I showering together.

I sent my sister the copy I intended to use, and she said, “well, that’s not exactly how I remember it, but that’s the beauty of narrative, right?” She gave me her blessing.

Earlier this week, I wrote about the first time I ever gave a guy a blow job. It was a thing I really hadn’t thought about in probably years, and it just leapt off my fingers.

And that hasn’t been posted yet, but it will be.

And I felt like, since that guy is still alive, and since we have friends in common, and since I thought it would be shitty for him to get a phone call something like this:

“Hello.”

“OH MY GOD, DUDE, APRIL WROTE ABOUT YOU ON HER BLOG!”

[silence]

“I DIDN’T KNOW YOUR PENIS IS RED!”

it would be classy of me to spare him by getting his permission, or at least say, “This is what I’m doing.  I’d love to use your real name. What are your thoughts?”

Because that guy possesses Mad Literary Respec, he said, (paraphrasing again, to protect the innocent) You totally weren’t required to ask me, but I appreciate it that you did. I’m cool as long as you don’t use my real name.

Then I said, “Dangit. Your real name is perfect.”

Then he said, “How about Leo?”

Then I said, “Baller.”

But Penelope says that you should never be afraid to get permission or to negotiate.

And doing that, which is sometimes way out of my comfort zone, is one of the many ways in which I shall grow, a lot, by writing this thing, and already have, and some of the other gajillion reasons I really don’t care if it never sees the light of day beyond this blog (though I’m totally operating under the assumption that somebody will publish it. How’s that for self-aggrandizing paradox?).

So what I’m saying here is that the more I write, the more I find that there are so, so few hard-and-fast rules that I should just do it, go with my gut, and work out the rest of it later.

I offer the same to you: Just do it. Carpe Diem. Now or never. Feliz Navidad. Etc.

Been wanting to give you and me a break from the memoir drafting stuff.

From flickr user MrsDKrebs

It is hard, hard, hard to be in self-examination mode, and to stay there, and to stay sane. I spent a lot of last week weeping. Part of it is I was half sick, but I’m feeling good today, forward momentum for the first time in like nine days.

It doesn’t usually take me that long to get it back.

I’ve learned some shit about myself and some of it ain’t easy to deal with. And none of it is easy to accept responsibility for. But at the end of all of this, I hope I’ll be a better person.

But that’s not what I mean by Real.

What I mean is that I am finally, finally, finally actualizing. I have been thinking about myself as a writer since I was a kid. But I have spent an absurd amount of energy and ambition and intellect trying not to be a writer.

And for about the last year, I’ve paid lip service to being a writer, and have been looking for the way home, and have been doing a lot of right things, but somehow missing the mark.

And it’s true that almost no writers get to be only writers. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about centering myself around my sense of myself as a writer.

Doing that helps me to make better choices about all the other things that are compulsory owing to adult responsibilities.

I suddenly do not feel like I’m missing out on some mirage on the horizon if I take an afternoon off, or if I take a long walk for no reason other than to walk, or if I take a day off, or if I just don’t do anything for a little while. I feel like I’m recharging. I feel like I’m getting back to the bricks of the story I’m always writing in my head.

I feel like a writer, I am all right with it. It is the rightest, goodest thing in my life. Owning it is the best thing I have ever done for my mental health.

Yes, Child is superb, but I generally feel like a fuckup of a parent. I am a better writer than I am a mother. I’ve had loads more practice

How I got home:

1. I write every day. My own work. Not stuff I’m getting paid to write, not articles, not blog posts. I make my own art five out of seven days. I view the writing I’m being paid for or the blog as other work, and I do it at a different time of day, and I think of it as separate from my own writing.

2. I read every day. Not shit I’m getting paid to read, shit that helps me be a better writer. Shit that is neither shit, nor uses the word shit as liberally as I have in this blog post.

3. I learned the value of spending time around other writers sometimes. I am giddy, giddy, giddy about going to AWP in like eight days.  I will hear smart people talk about writing for an entire weekend, and if I am brave, I will hunt down writers whose work I like and tell them I like it. I will also get a literary tattoo with my friend, Brooke.

4. I feel comfortable with my sense of myself in a way that is difficult to describe. It is like finding the perfect pair of Jeans? I have spent my life looking for this perfect cut, color, fit, and here they are, and now that I’m wearing them, I never want to take them off? That they make me feel and look so, so fucking good that I am more confident and capable willing to wrestle adversity to the floor? That’s an imperfect analog, because it feels even better than that.

In my next memoir

I will try to figure out how and why I have always known I am a writer, but got the idea that it was an invalid thing to be, or that I could never make any part of a living at it, or that I should try like hell to be something, anything else.

In the meantime, I’ve got about 145 pages out, another ten or so in progress, and ideas for at least a hundred after that, not counting the fleshing-out I’ll do in revision, or all of the trash I’ll make of things I’ve put in that don’t belong. This reminds me of that old joke: How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

Paydirt:

If you are an artist, be an artist. There are lots of people who will tell you why that’s a damn fool thing to want to be, and they might be right, but you’ll know if you have a choice, and if you don’t, don’t fight it. Just do it. And celebrate it. You won’t be thwarting that central part of yourself, so you’ll do better in all the other parts.

Recent picture of my sisters and I from Summer 2012 in State College. Apparently, Child took this photo. Ellen is the one on the left.

I was pregnant.  I was also unwed, reading The Scarlet Letter, and really knowing what an utter turd ball Dimmesdale is. It was near the holidays, and I was still “seeing” the fetus’s father. But not seeing him in the forever way, in the “we’re in this mess together” way.

I visited home for Christmastime and Ellen was completely fascinated by my breasts.  I was, too. They were blue-veined moons. In my dark bedroom in my college apartment, I had taken my shirt off and stood in a mirror and took flash-bright, grainy photographs of them with a disposable camera. I wanted to remember forever the last time my tits were perfect. Ellen asked if she could touch them.

“Sure.” I called her bluff. She wouldn’t really touch them.

Her own breasts are tiny, A-cups, and are on the list of things I envy about Ellen. She tentatively patted me through my clothes, offered, “I love boobs” by way of apology.

I want to be more surprised that my naïve, thoughtful, Christian honor student of a sister loves boobs. She asked if I would shower with her, she would like to see my breasts.

“Yes.” I said, without hesitating, surprising myself and my parents who are standing right there, looking on with a mixture of pride and horror. I secretly hoped Ellen was a lesbian.

I forgot about the sex bruises on my shoulders and chest, from recent and rambunctious lovemaking with the father.

Ellen and I undress in our parents’ bathroom. We only look at each other’s faces.

“How’s school?” I ask.

“Busy. How about you?”

“Wonderful and unimportant.”

“Yeah,” she lets out a nervous laugh, the only signal that she’s feeling odd, “I bet.”

My parents had one of those large, tile box showers with two shower heads and about 8 square feet of space.  Designed for the co-shower.  “It came with the house,” they said. “We don’t use it like that!” But then my mother’s most prevalent piece of advice regarding love relationships is, “Keep your husband well-fed and well-sexed.”

Ellen was puzzled by my slightly puffy body as the water and steam mingled between us.

We soaped ourselves in silence. Ellen’s gaze drifted to my breasts. I did not look at her body. I cannot recall the color of her pubic hair.

She asked, “What are those bruises from?”

I wanted to protect her, so I said, “You don’t want to know.”

Being perfect, she dropped it.

I was grateful, but I regret now that I didn’t tell her.

I wish I said instead, “From the best sex ever. I mean, at least there’s that. At least I got knocked up from sensational fucking, and not from getting raped or the first time I did it. You should not wait till you’re married to have sex, Ellen. Sex is fun.”

In the conversation we should’ve had, Ellen would angle a look of teenaged incredulity at me.

“Pregnant sex is fun, too. I guess it’s all the extra blood down there. That’s what the book says.  Sounds kooky to me. But you should get on birth control. And don’t feel guilty about it.”

From Flickr user InaFrenzy, used under CC lisense

Dear Paddy,

That’s what I call you now, in my mind. It is more interesting than your proper name, and you’ll know why I picked it. I’ve been meaning to write to you, to say thank you for the girl. It’s two days less than a month until your 32nd birthday.

On your birthday I make corned beef and cabbage and soda bread from scratch. Someday I’ll explain why to my girl. I do this even when I’m not eating meat. Even when the raw brisket makes me gag a little.

Your birthday strikes me as significant owing to the layers of meaning in birthdays, and how you helped me give someone a birthday. I wouldn’t actually send you this letter. I wouldn’t write to you, personally. I write this letter to you, now, but I write it for me, for other women who have babies with men they don’t know.

I think there are more of us than people talk about. I think we are a secret club that even we don’t know about. I think we don’t seek each other out because of the ugly things society says about us, and that some of us believe about ourselves. That we are sluts. That we are irresponsible. That we are unfit mothers.

I don’t want to think about you, but I do. My girl’s chin is yours, the shape of her eyes, too. I am glad we parted ways before there could be many bad memories between us. I am glad there are good times to recall with you, ones I can shake my head at and think, “God, I was young and dumb.”

I try to think about you meditatively and beam happy thoughts and hopes for success your way. But I can’t avoid bitterness. I ask myself rhetorically, “How can he be so callous?” I ask myself rhetorically, “How can his mom be so proud of him?” She is. You should know.

When I met her last summer, she told me about your hair and your job with the moisture of pride in her eyes. I am a mother, and I recognize that irrationality, and I love your mother for it, because maybe if I love her, she can beam extra love your way, and maybe when my girl decides to hop a train to check out her “real father,” you’ll be better at life than you were then, than you are now.

Sincerely,

My daughter’s mother

This is from Flickr user Camerakarrie

Hi All,

I’m a bit behind. My apologies.

Warmly & Enjoy,

-April

______________________

Learning to Bleed

My mother was confused by the way I chose to alert her that I started my period in December. I’d recently turned eleven, and when I woke up with red stuff in my underpants, I changed them, put a pad in there—I’d seen Mom do this a thousand times—and put my bloody panties in a green Christmas box that I’d gotten from the Santa’s Workshop junk store my elementary school hosted each year, where we children purchased ugly mugs and paperweights and penlights for our parents.

I arranged the offending garment in the box so that the crotch faced upward and would be the first thing my mother saw when she opened it. She would surely wonder why I gave her my panties in a box if I did otherwise. I had the distinct impression that my mother was very excited for me to become a woman, which was a term that confused me deeply. I knew what “making sex” was, but I had no clue how menstruation figured into that. I didn’t want to know why women had to bleed. The Bible only said that Eve’s punishment for the deception was that birthing children would be painful. There was nothing about this other bleeding.

Still, I thought one of us should be happy. I was horrified, but I hoped maybe Mom’s excitement would be contagious somehow.

I laid the box in her room, and when she woke up, I heard her in the bathroom, so after the toilet flushed, I went to her and laid in her bed and wept.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“D-didn’t you get your present?” I blubbered.

Silence. She looked. It seemed to take forever.

“Oh, Sweetie,” she said. She rubbed my back in long lines, from the nape of my neck to my bottom.

The official story became, quickly, that my mother was as messed up over my uterus shedding as I was.

I wonder now if she knew she would not be happy about it. If she was, as I sometimes am, swept up in the energy of those summer afternoons on the porch with my aunt, talking as their children swam, tiffing along because her sister-in-law was certainly excited for my cousin’s menarche. Being competitive because that is what people do. Knowing that there was no point, that it didn’t matter, because of course I wouldn’t menstruate first—my cousin was two years older.

The whole thing struck me as horribly unfair. I was in grade school, for crying out loud! And I did. Cry that is. Often. Still do. Though my mother says my moods were much more predictable after that holiday season in 1991. So it began that I thought of myself as a slave to my hormones, and internalized lessons that included generalizations about women, though I did not yet think of myself as a woman, which turns out to be a good thing.

My mother became insufferably impatient around her period, slamming cabinets, drawers, throwing things, going through the house with big, black garbage bags, collecting loot, never her own, and rushing it to the garbage, before, she hoped, anybody would notice and begin asking about their McDonalds Happy Meal toy, or their raggedy T-shirt they’d slept in for years, despite growth. I remember a few times frantically chasing after her, grabbing for things she’d put in the bag. When she let me capture them she would roar, “Put it in your room, then!”

Of course, though this strikes me now as one of the hypocritical, short-sighted things parents say to their children, it turned out to be advice from which I could extrapolate that it’s a lie that women have no influence over their own monthly hormones. Whenever I was behaving poorly because I had my period, I was admonished to knock it off. I was told that my period was no reason to act that way. I was told that I should learn to control myself.

None of this is to say that at thirty-two, as a mother, I have perfect control of everything that leaps into my mind during the days surrounding my period, or every heightened sense of annoyance or injustice; but awareness is everything. I can have saner ideas about these feelings, I can sort out what is reasonable, most of the time, and I have learned to force myself to table decisions until after the flow. Were I a richer woman, or had I health insurance, I could probably medicate myself. But that is a set of injustices to discuss another day.

This video is a montage from a quizzing tournament in 2006. It was posted on YouTube by WhyteRavyne.

And in case you were wondering, Bible Quizzing is like Quiz Bowl, but for church kids.

Day in the Life

Me, Alicia, John, Justin, and Laura sit in a row on incredibly uncomfortable, cold metal folding chairs. The point is not comfort. We are poised on the brink of fame and notoriety. We are crouched in a position that is not unlike running takeoff posture. Everybody’s got their own style. John hangs on to the bottommost lace of his Chuck Taylor high top sneaker. He has asthma, and whenever I am next to him, I can hear his anticipatory wheeze at the end of each breath out. I feel badly for him. He is one of my only friends. I like to press on my red Chucks’s toes. Alicia looks bored, but she’s ready. Laura is a frightened rodent, long and lean and she can touch the floor with her reedy fingers, they splay next to her feet. Justin is also long and lean and seems to have become one giant muscle in the past few years. I remember him doughy. I have known him my whole life. Unlike the others, who are either new to our church or who I recruited. Justin grabs the backs of his ankles as he waits to leap.

We are on a raised platform in the front of a crowd of adults, mostly parents, aunts, uncles, and coaches. The coaches are distinct because they have clipboards. Some of them wear T-shirts that match those of their team. Our coaches are incognito in mom gear: cardigan sweaters, tennis visors, and coolers full of juice boxes and water bottles and tiny bags of Combos and apples and string cheese and granola bars.

My mom is not looking at me. I focus on the Quizmaster who’s at a table facing us at the front of the crowd, off the raised platform. He’s wearing an official, non-distracting gray T-shirt with the official Church of God logo, and holds a stop watch and has a stack of goldenrod ditto paper in front of him with a staple in the upper left-hand corner. The ditto paper is sealed with a paper sticker that the Quizmaster will cut ceremonially after the opening prayer, before the round begins. The whole business is somber and official.

There are 2” binders full of rules and regulations which rest in front of the woman next to the Quizmaster. A woman on the other side of the Quizmaster has a set of stopwatches, sharpened pencils, and score sheets. These three are employees of the church denomination, and impartial, and in charge or organizing the program. Two more volunteers, usually from the hosting church’s youth group or staff, have the same sealed stacks as the Quizmaster, but in different colors. They follow along as he reads the question, making sure everybody hears the questions and answers correctly.

This is from Flickr user, Chillihead

Until recently, half of what I own was books. Now, perhaps a quarter. I sat down with my book collection and I culled it. I looked at titles that I’d read, and would probably not read again, even my recently usurped *favorite* book which I owned in hardcover was tossed into a bin for donating.

It was hard.

The librophile inside me shouted out in anguish every time one hit the bottom of the bin with an unceremonious thud. I looked back, then stopped looking. I forced myself to go forward, chucking books into piles for riddance. I couldn’t think about it.

I even got rid of some books I haven’t read, I told myself that couldn’t be the metric. I told myself that if I got rid of the book and I wanted to read it at some future point, even though I hadn’t read it in the decade and a half during which I’d moved it from shitty apartment to shitty apartment, I could get a copy from the library or from AbeBooks, delivered to my house for $4.

And even though my books have been my compatriots, my solace, my joy, I simply do not need them. I do not want my daughter to dig me out of an avalanche of books in forty years because I cannot let go.

And Christ those things are heavy.

I did not want to move them again, and for the foreseeable future, I will be a person who moves often. After the culling was through, and my indoor-rummage sale relieved me of many fewer than I’d hoped, I couldn’t bring myself to send them off in the truck with the American Rescue Workers. But I stopped myself from putting them back on my shelves.

Instead, I put them back into big plastic bins and back into my studio where they sat for months. And every time I went to my studio, I would look at my bins of books for getting rid of and feel sad, and compelled to go through them “just to be sure.”

I was irritated that they were taking up so much real estate in my already cramped space, angry for the way in which the books were an albatross.

And though the old saying holds, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder,” I am not fonder of my books as I live farther away from them. I experience the space of perspective. I yearn to cull my collection further, to own the best six books I have ever read, the ones I “need” for reference, and keep the rest filtering through my eReader, which I do not yet own. But I want one.

Wanting an eReader is a new thing. But I don’t want it yet. I need more time to idealize.

And so my frenzied affection, emotional yearning for the heavy, paper book continues to supersede my better plans, but I am growing. I am learning to create boundaries for myself and books.

From Flickr user srqpix

I am probably eight years old. We are at Rehoboth Beach in one of the many junk shops where we purchased two hermit crabs earlier in the week: one for me, one for my brother, with whom I have stopped bathing since he noted the first sprouts of pubic hair as I held a contortionist’s position in order to give him enough room to wash his hair.

Our hermits are in tiny plastic cages with chunks of natural sponge soaked in water, strange little cornmeal cakes, and the next-size shell on the bedside tables at our condo. This is around the time that The Noid from Dominoes pizza is a thing, and there are five-inch tall plush Noid dolls as well as Spuds McKenzie, a dog, which is for beer, I think, but I am not sure because I have learned to read and I do not do a lot of TV.

There are shelves of curious objects of which I have no understanding, very tiny drinking glasses—are these for dolls? Why do they have ladies in bikinis on them? There are snow globes that snow glitter on the beach, and I feel—even at eight—that they are silly. There are a lot of fashionable fluorescent designs and words I don’t read on piles of T-shirts.

There are rows of plastic dolls that I do not like, buckets and shovels for sand castles, and shallow cartoon molds of crabs and fish for sand sculpting.

Then I see a thing that is extremely interesting. There is a Santa doll.

He is about three inches tall. Why is there a Santa in the gift shop on the beach? Isn’t it summer? Who would buy a Santa in summer? I approach Santa. He wears tiny plastic sunglasses.  Haha, I think. Then I notice that Santa’s tiny felt pants are more like a skirt and I think huh?

So I lift the tiny pants to see if Santa is broken, and I find a very long, presumably flaccid flesh-colored Santa penis, complete with little horizontal wrinkles and a circumcision, that nearly hits the glass shelf on which Santa is standing next to all of the other adult-themed gift items that suddenly fill me with shame and send me to the part of the store where my mom is glancing through post cards and swaying my very tiny baby sister on her hip.