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Personal blog of christian
writer & fallible mom
Katy McKenna Raymond
in Kansas City, Missouri

Katy is represented by
Greg Johnson at
WordServe Literary

Read more Katy at
LateBoomer.net

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Recent Posts

• Try
• Becoming Brenda Starr
• Off Beat
• Scattered
• That’s It
• So I’ve Finally Signed With An Agent. Now What?
• The Spoon
• Sciatica
• Sweetheart
• A Woman’s Train of Thought Has No Caboose
• However much we own, we are all still living on borrowed time
• After all, when restaurants shrink portions, they don’t shrink prices.
• As with everything in life, balance is key.
• Slow down, you move too fast…
• Yeah, I know. I have issues.

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E me at katy @ ngenius.com

I Said, Clean Your Room! (#380)

Tell me this:

Why is it that a mom is never quite sure she wants to know that her son is sleeping in a $3 dingy room with a fan in Bangkok? Is it love, or is it something else?

Even if it's something else, the truth is that I am madly in love with Scott Raymond, Gentleman Adventurer.

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Typical (#381)

Typical conversation in the Raymond household, when I am recovering from a horrible migraine and feeling emotionally insecure:

Katy: "Do you love me at all?"

(Doug laughs the wonderful, self-assured laugh of a man in love.)

Doug: "You know I do."

Katy: "Yeah...I know."

(Kissing happens, during which Katy begins to feel slightly more secure.)

Doug: "I love all of you. I love all y'all."

(Katy's insecurities regain their foothold.)

Katy: "Now I just feel fat."

---

Small Print (#382)

Typically, I don't read the small print.

I sign contracts without so much as a peek at the part where it tells me all the many thousands of reasons why they will sue me if I screw up, and how every one of my possessions and all my hard-earned dollars will likely end up theirs.

For what will it profit a woman if she gains all the knowledge to be found in the small print, but loses her sanity?

In the middle of the night last night, I was presented with the contract from hell. I tried to poo-poo it, tried to ignore the tiny type, but I was prevailed upon by powers much stronger than I.

Throughout the night, entire paragraphs and then pages of small print grew just large enough so that I could read their threatening diatribe and be adequately terrorized. Then, as each section of small print magnified itself until it became the large print, it was replaced by unending and rapidly reproducing quantities of new, but not improved, small print.

Last night, I read the small print of my life for hours upon hours until, with the morning light, the migraine finally abated.

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Everywhere Else (#383)

Overheard in an enormous Barnes and Noble store:

A woman walks up to a salesperson and asks, "Excuse me, where's the non-fiction?"

I kept my elitist, snippy thoughts to myself and I won't divulge them here, but I will say that the bookseller was utterly gracious in her response. Kudos to B&N.

---

A Life of Letters (#384)

"What did you love as a child? When you love it again, you will find your bliss."

As a child, I loved letters. In kindergarten, I loved the printed alphabet hung high above the blackboard, loved it so much I wanted a border of it in my bedroom. Imagine my delight a couple of years later when the block letters became cursive, when the struggle to form words letter by detached letter became an easy flow--letters into words into sentences into stories.

With advanced age and increased responsibility came the tyranny of numbers. As if addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division weren't enough, I became enslaved to algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and even calculus. Beloved books and prized poems fell by the wayside as the supposed critical importance of numbers played itself out in my psyche.

I took a dreadful job just out of high school. A right-handed job, keypunching nine-digit numbers all day, filling orders without words for customers without names. In my few spare moments, I desperately pencilled poetry onto data entry cards. I furtively wrote love letters to the man of my dreams. I surreptitiously designed greeting cards for my co-workers.

I slowly died for want of words, but I learned my lesson, and it is this: Hang on to your first love. But if perchance you let it go, do not rest until you have it once again in your hand and in your heart.

If it is words you love, pursue them, for you will never be truly happy living a life of numbers.

Besides, with online banking, does anyone really balance his checkbook anymore?

---

Novel Idea (#385)

"You're losing us, Mom."

It's hard to hear these words from a daughter's lips. It makes a mother pause and reflect. What have I done to alienate her, to drive her from me? And who else am I losing?

"I got my roommate started reading your blog, and she got addicted. Then you didn't blog for over a week. She's been checking twice a day, and nothing. What is Lynnell supposed to do now?"

I have failed two young women, maybe more for all I know. I never meant for it to be this way.

Lynnell, in case you've checked in one last time, I'd like to somehow make it up to you...but how?

I've got to get back to work on my novel now, and a new character is just emerging from the shadows and making herself known. Guess what? Her name is Lynnell.

---

The Linguist (#386)

"He has a degree in linguistics," I say, when people ask about my oldest child.

But what does that mean? they say.

"I think it's the study of how the mind processes language, or something like that."

What does he do with it? they persist.

"That's easy. He's Scott Raymond, Gentleman Adventurer."

And then, just to be annoying, I ask how they use their degrees.

---

From Both Sides Now (#387)

The sky was the brightest autumn blue, the clouds horizontal, fluffy white tinged with gray.

Doug, Kevin, and I were racing down the highway, on our way to Kev's soccer game.

"Look at those clouds," I said. "Aren't they dreamy, aren't they fabulous?"

The guys agreed, and we all spent several silent seconds mesmerized, hypnotized, in love with all of nature and even in awe of each other.

"You know what they remind me of?" Kevin finally asked.

We waited for his insightful, poetic interpretation until, after a pause, he lifted his voice and began to sing.

"The Simp-sons...."

---

Work (#388)

An astute observation:

"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
--Thomas Mann

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Certifiable (#389)

You know how they say that it's not so bad to talk to yourself, but when you start answering yourself, watch out?

It doesn't help that I've been alone for most of 48 hours, with only the voices of novel characters to keep me company. But still.

Just now, as I was coming to the end of a three-minute long stretch of procrastination and about to get back to my writing, I heard myself say these words out loud:

(Spoken in a snotty voice) "So, are you gonna' get back to it?"

(In an even snottier voice) "I don't know. Are you?"

So, it's official.

---

Bond (#390)

"Guess what movie's on cable tonight?" I asked my daughter, Carrie.

She had said it was chick flick night at her apartment, and the girls were trying to choose among several selections.

Carrie probably thought I was going to refer her to "Sense and Sensibility" or "Little Women" or "Pride and Prejudice" or "Anne of Green Gables." It would be just like me.

But there's our relationship to consider. We've established a closeness you just can't arrive at with the classics. When I told her my pick, she was genuinely touched and said, "Mom, I love it that you love that movie, too. It's so nice to have that to share with you."

A couple of tender moments passed before we said our abrupt good-byes.

Neither of us wanted to miss the opening of "Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion."

---

No Pressure, Though (#391)

I came across this today, in the fallible archives from January, 2001. I can only hope I've done him proud:

"Mom," said Scott, "I think you might get pretty good at blogging if you keep at it. You could really leverage some proactive methodologies, exploit value-added intellectual capital, and monetize dynamic eyeballs."

---

Seasons (#392)

"Move it over there into the sun," my mother says of the flowering plant my sister Liz gave her just a few weeks ago. "Maybe we can bring it back."

Who knows why it has begun to prematurely fade? We are not horticulturists, my mother and I. We only know how to putz and putter, water and sun, and hope for the best.

"Jim James gave me the poinsettia for Christmas last year," she says, pointing to the only other vegetative life in her apartment. "It's looking pretty iffy to me."

The plant is leggy and gangly, pathetic looking, really. It passed its prime last winter sometime, and has somehow eluded being tossed out in the trash.

If its owner had been paying attention, she would have ditched it months ago. It's a good thing she's not overly-vigilent.

"Look closer at it, Mom. Look at all the new growth, the tiny, pale green leaves. I think it's going to be with us for another Christmas. What do you think?"

"Maybe so," she said, smiling "It's coming back around, isn't it?"

Yes, I thought. And so are you, Mom. So are you.

---

Lording It Over (#393)

Of all the mottos one could attach after the name of one's church, campground, plumbing business, or hardware store, the most perplexing has got to be, "Where Jesus Is Lord."

I've done business with my share of Christian-owned establishments over the years. I even keep a copy of the Christian Yellow Pages on hand, just in case. I wish I could say that my experience has been that Jesus manifested Himself in a more Lordly fashion over those businesses than over their secular counterparts, but that would be a lie.

Often, I've seen no evidence of His Lordship over any particular sump pump installation outfit, with or without compelling slogan. Sometimes, the opposite has been true, and it turns out that Jesus's name may have been ill-used to attract the business of naive customers.

In the case of the church, the tagline seems a bit anti-climactic, don't you think? Unless there is a Christian congregation somewhere with the worrisome claim, "Where Jesus Isn't Lord," what's the point? Are the marketing people really trying to say, "Where Jesus Is More Lord Than He Is Wherever You Go to Church"?

If so, they might as well just say it. We're going to figure out that's what they mean eventually, even if we are naive.

The real truth is, of course, that Jesus Is Lord Everywhere, claimed or unclaimed. Bidden or unbidden. Motto or not.

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Post! (#394)

So. It's 8:15 a.m. I've been up two hours already. Kev left for school an hour ago, and Doug is gone to all-day meetings. I'm alone in the house, which rarely happens in a two-career-self-employed-couple.

I've visited every blog in my favorites, including those who only post once every eleven months . Now I'm on my second go-round through all the sites I look at every day, just in case I missed something. All in an effort to avoid opening a Word doc and beginning a good day's work on my novel.

Question: When will I stop being such a chicken, and just face the fact that I don't have a clue what will happen with my book until I start to write today's words?

Second question: Will a whole bunch of you please blog RIGHT NOW? You have no idea how much this means to me.

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