Today you must read this excellent (and funny) story by the talented Matthew M. Quick—The Black Abbey Revival:

He reassured himself that praying for mind-blowing sex was better than praying for money. Sex equals love, or at least it does when performed admirably. Ryan’s love for his wife was legitimate. So what was the problem?

Nominations for the Million Writers Award for Fiction are now CLOSED. The list of notable stories of the year will be released on March 15, 2006, with the top ten stories released on April 1, 2006.

Read Beth Alvarado’s short story Just Family yesterday. It’s an intense read. Every second I was tense, waiting for things to explode and yet I loved how quietly, how poignantly it ended:

As Ellen looked at the sleepy faces of the children, at Grace and Amelia as they lifted their sleeping kids and murmured to them, It’s all right, sshh, it’s all right, she could see what Grace had always seen: there was no way they could give up on Tony. The feeling was, if the fabric of the family held together, they could somehow keep him among the living. But it wasn’t just for his sake. Grace wanted the family to stay whole for all of them, for the children. Like her mother, she believed in holding the family together at any cost. One tear, and she was afraid it would all begin to unravel.

Did you read it in this most recent One Story? It is quite wild and fresh.

It is well worth the read, I say. It is about fertile ground that no one recognizes–snails in gardens who see all when everyone else sees nothing:

The doctors go back to work. The doctors’ wives go for cafe au lait at a new coffeehouse/gallery near the levee. The sun goes down. A storm blow several limbs off the oak tree. They were already dead–the oak tree is glad to shed them, happy to be rid of their weight.

Read about the New Delta Review Matt Clark Prize.

I have an irrational fear of bay leaves.

Growing up I remember my mother was insistent that if a renegade bay leaf remained in the pot and made it to someone’s dish that it not be ingested. What I recall was that to eat a bay leaf would mean instant, hideous death.

I made a dish this week (shrimp, cabbage, and beans) that calls for bay leaves for seasoning. I added four leaves. And then instead of plucking them out as I should have before serving, I forgot about them.

The last dish of shrimp, cabbage, and beans has just been consumed by Allen. When pushed he admits that he only picked out one bay leaf from the whole of what he has eaten. I found none. That means that one or both of us has eaten one or all of the remaining bay leaves.

We may not have long to live.

So when faced with such worries I do what is now normal, enter BAY LEAF DEATH and DEATH BY BAY LEAF INGESTION into Google and see what comes up.

Okay, so here is what I’ve found:

Other localized responses to herbs resulting in problems have been caused by ingestion of whole bay leaves. Three cases of bay leaf ingestion requiring endoscopic removal have been reported (25,26). The problem occurred when whole bay leaves were left in foods. The wavy edges of the leaves appear to make them prime candidates for adherence to the mucosa of the pharynx.

Oh. My. God.
prime candidates for adherence to the mucosa of the pharynxprime candidates for adherence to the mucosa of the pharynxprime candidates for adherence to the mucosa of the pharynx

Calm down. Search mucosa of the pharynx:

The lower nasal mucosa and the pharynx of thirty eastern and twenty-three western horses have been examined for streptococci.

What now? horses and streptococci:

Other Group C streptococci are also part of the normal flora of the human nasopharynx, skin and genital tract, and most Group C infections in people are of human origin.

Next? human origin:

journey through four million years of human evolution

Evolution.

And so now I know that if you eat a bay leaf and do not die, you will evolve.

Today, I offer you this funny and interesting piece–Words that really move us, By Ruth Walker:

As a collective verbal tic of a whole industry, airline-speak goes beyond needless emphatic verb forms (e.g., “we do realize” instead of the simpler “we realize”). It extends to time-filling verbosities (“We will be starting the boarding process,” instead of “We will board), peculiarities of intonation (especially odd stresses on prepositions, as in “Welcome to the Boston area), and the overgeneralized, all-things-to-all-people locutions such as “Welcome to the Boston area, or wherever your final destination happens to be,” as if someone has just remembered all those folks looking to make the last flight to Bangor, Maine, tonight.

I have tried to learn how to identify bird songs but there are only just a few that I know for sure. One that I do know without question is the song of the Wood Thrush. Thanks to Allen’s grandmother who taught me to listen for it, I can no longer mistake it. And really, once you learn it it would be hard to as it is one of the most beautiful.

But for the past several years I have been obsessed with finding the name and a recording of the song of a bird I grew up with. I heard it on a show we were watching once that took place in Northern Maine and I said to Allen, “Listen? Hear it? Now what is it?” But he didn’t know. He had grown up that much farther south than I.

Today, I have found it! My bird is the White-throated sparrow and to hear it sing makes my heart break right in two with joy.

And so now I think I might have to buy this Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs because this guy makes such incredible recordings. Phew!

For one more time this week, I will come back to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life and offer you this:

The body of literature, with its limits and edges, exists outside some people and inside others. Only after the writer lets literature shape her can she perhaps shape literature. In working-class France, when an apprentice got hurt, or when he got tired, the experienced worker said, “It is the trade entering his body.” The art must enter the body, too.

If you’ve not already checked it out, you might want to listen to this illuminating podcast:

How to Publish Your Short Story: A panel discussion with fiction editors from the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Open City, and One Story

Yesterday I had my five week follow up with the periodontist (those of you who read Diary of an Aggressive Brusher will remember him as the lip dancer) on my gum graft. It was quick and painless and my graft, apparently, looks great.

When I got home from my appointment, my dog was so excited to see me that when I bent down to give him a kiss on his head, he sort of twisted around and nipped me on the lip (he sometimes will do a soft bite on the tip of your chin when he’s excited). It was totally an accident but it hurt.

Fast forward several hours and Allen gets home from work and Darby and I are all crowding around him and it’s really noisy and boisterous and Allen asks me about the dentist.

Me: “The appointment was great. [When I got home], he was so excited that he bit my lip.” I was petting Darby at the time and I put that bit in brackets because apparently Allen did not hear it.

Allen stops and looks at me, “He bit your lip?”

Me: “Yeah. It hurt.”

Allen: “The dentist bit your lip?”

Me: “hahahahaa!” At this point rolling on the floor laughing and barely able to squeak out that no it was the dog and then Allen’s laughing, too.

Him: “I was thinking that was one weird dentist.”

Me: “Did you actually think I would have let the dentist bite my lip and not have called in a SWAT team?”

I laugh every time I picture what Allen must have seen in his head. The dentist bending down and then saying, “I’m so excited by this gum graft! It looks great! Here, let me just…” then he is over me, his teeth on my soft upper lip, biting, and me just keeping my place in the chair, not reacting. Perhaps even thanking him.

Speaking of lips, what was up with that guy’s mother’s lips on American Idol last night? People, we must STOP with the collagen. It looks creepy, okay?

Today for your reading pleasure, I offer you an essay from The Christian Science Monitor written by my dear friend Patricia Dunn–Cookies and 120 bookmarks: A Muslim mom shares Ramadan with the first and second grades:

When my son’s first-grade teacher asked during “meet the teacher night” if I would talk to the entire first and second grade about Ramadan, the Tricia in me wanted to scream, “You’re the teacher. You teach them about Ramadan!”

Tricia, the name my parents shouted whenever I acted up, is the name I’ve given to my adolescent self. Yes, in that moment, sitting on a chair too small to support my adult thighs, was an insecure teenager too angry to talk to 120 first and second graders. She was angry with a world where Muslims have become synonymous with suicide bombers and where a public school in California is sued for inviting a Muslim family to share its traditions at the school. But the Ali’s mom in me, the responsible parent, said, “I’d love to.”

I remember the first time I read the passge below from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life–it stuck with me. So much so that I heard it in my head over and over (that being a time in my life when I was being quite wasteful of time). I repeated it to people. I urged them to read it for themselvses:

After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age: “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.”