My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (24 page)

Once upon a time
is one of my favorite phrases in the world. Also,
a man walks into a bar
. Why? Because they begin a story.

I love to hear a good story. Everybody does. Maybe it started with a story told around a campfire, or a bedtime story told in your childhood room, with the outside world at bay.

I love to tell stories, too. I tell a story every year in a novel and plenty more at the dinner table. Lots of people like to tell stories, and it’s the same instinct whether it’s me talking or your best friend. Authors are just storytellers with a royalty rate.

Stories hold a power all their own. Think of Scheherazade, telling stories so good they saved her life. Or the thousands of fables and legends that have lasted through centuries. They answer a primal need to know about each other, to learn from each other, and to talk to each other.

And as we know, a story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story without an ending is like a sentence without a punctuation point. In my view, that’s what happened to
The Sopranos.
The story stopped, but it didn’t end, and they’re not the same thing. The promise of once-upon-a-time is that there will be a they-lived-happily-ever-after, or at least, they-all-got-whacked. The fact that so many
Sopranos
viewers got angry at its ending proves the power of a story. It didn’t matter to them that Tony Soprano was fictional. They still wanted to know what happened to him.

Sadly,
The Sopranos
was the only TV show I watched, and now it’s gone. There are no good stories on TV anymore; I mean normal, scripted shows like the ones I loved.
Sex and the City. Seinfeld.
Going farther back, I adored
M*A*S*H
and
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Those stories got people talking to each other the next morning around artifacts known as watercoolers. Star-bucks would do, too; no matter what the beverage, we’d all gab about the story we’d seen on TV the night before.

But now TV isn’t about story, but contest. Who is the best singer? Who the best inventor? Best chef? Dress designer? Men compete for women; women compete for men. We watch game shows, or shows about real lives, but reality TV is the antithesis of fiction and it has hijacked story.

So what happens to a popular culture without story?

Paris Hilton.

At the same time that story has disappeared, gossip has exploded on TV and in newspapers, magazines, and blogs. I think these two things are related. Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, and Nicole Ritchie have become our fictional characters. Angelina and Brad have replaced Edith and Archie; Tom and Katie took over from Lucy and Ricky.

Jennifer Aniston is the new Rachel Green.

Celebrities are our heroes and heroines now, discussed the next day over latte or lunch. We have such a strong need to talk to each other, to have some commonality of story, that we’re finding it in celebrities. In effect, we’re turning reality into fiction. Using actors and actresses, just off duty.

The plotlines of our celebrity characters tend to fall into a pattern—how the mighty have fallen—but that’s still juicy. They marry and divorce. They go to rehab and come out again. The paparazzi have become our new storytellers.

Some of the celebrity stories have unhappy endings, but mostly they go on and on. Next week there’s a new episode, like an arc in a plotline. The characters reproduce, shave their heads, get tattoos. Sometimes they get their tattoos on
Miami Ink
or buy a Harley customized on
American Chopper,
and we can watch that, too.

And if it’s not too meta to follow, sometimes the celebrities fictionalize themselves in a reality series. In
The Sarah Silverman Show,
the comedienne employs her real-life sister to play themselves in a scripted storyline. Tori Spelling fictionalized herself in NoTORIous. We’ve got plenty of actors, but no spare parts.

And how is this working for us? Not great.

It leaves us with a perennially empty feeling. We find the celebrities empty, and at some level, we find ourselves empty for paying them so much attention. We’ve become reluctant voyeurs, and at some level, we know they’re just people trying to live their lives. It hurts them, and it hurts us, too. Our culture begins to lack content, depth, and substance. We miss the richness of human experience that story embodies, reflects, and carries forward.

We might have to go back to reading books.

Yay!

I used to have only two dogs, golden retrievers, and everybody would ask me if they shed.

Answer? Yes.

I still have the goldens, plus now there are two Cavaliers and a corgi, but nobody asks me if the dogs shed.

Why?

It’s obvious.

I’m wearing the answer.

I’m covered with dog hair, all the time. It’s stuck on my T-shirts. It weaves itself into my sweatpants. My sweaters have sweaters of their own.

I read recently about this woman who makes sweaters from dog hair, and I would avoid her at all costs. The last thing I need is a dog-hair sweater. A dog-hair sweater covered with dog hair is redundant, at best.

On the plus side, I’m warm at all times, even in coldest winter. When I have a hot flash, I could spontaneously combust.

I’m not complaining, merely observing. If you’re the kind of person who acquires five dogs, you’re not the kind of person who worries about looking neat as a pin. It ain’t gonna happen.

And you can only lint-roll so often. I don’t even bother when I have a book signing, because my beloved readers have come to expect some degree of dishevelment in me, and I do not disappoint. On the contrary, I feel that dog hair adds to my credibility.

I write not only what I know, but what I wear.

I lint-roll only on the rare occasion when I have a date, because then I’m trying to act like something I’m not.

Sane. Clean. Superbly in control.

Take the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones. I read recently that she said something like, “Dogs and children belong in their own bed.”

Men love Catherine Zeta-Jones.

I’m not like her.

I think children, dogs, and cats belong in my bed, along with a great book, a box of piping-hot pizza, and a cold Diet Coke. Maybe some chocolate cake, too. Also
The Godfather
on TV.

Dog-hair party!

And dog hair blankets not only my clothes, but my couch, chairs, and rugs. I buy quilted covers that sit on top of the furniture and are supposed to protect it from dog hair and muddy paws, and I even had the covers personalized with THE GIRLS, RUBY, and LITTLE TONY.

But they should read DOG HAIR, MORE DOG HAIR, and DOG HAIR, THE SEQUEL.

Also they have to be moved every time you want to sit down, which gets old. So sometimes I end up leaving the covers on the floor, where the dogs go sit on them, covering them with dog hair. I regard this as efficient. Why should the dogs have to climb on the couch to shed?

Also, this way, I can get dog hair on the cover and the couch at the same time, because we both know that the dogs are going to climb up next to me on the couch, to watch the big TV.

The only thing I don’t love is when I find dog hair in the kitchen, or on a plate. And I admit it, this happens. When I cook, sometimes a dog hair on my sleeve will fall into the pan and I have to get it out with a fork. It puts me off my food, right there in the kitchen.

And the other day I had to pick a dog hair off my lip. It was long and yellow, so it had to be one of the goldens’.

You know it’s bad when you can identify which dog’s hair it is.

Then somebody gave me a plate and a matching mug that reads Everything Tastes Better With Dog Hair.

It’s a really cute gift, but I disagree. And I actually know.

So I sat down on my couch, went onto my laptop, and ordered a special pet vac made by Black & Decker. Peach sat beside me, eyeing the screen with concern.

I looked down and gave her a pat, which was when I saw it, on her head.

A long strand of fake-blond hair clung to her ear.

Gotcha.

I’m a library slut.

I visit libraries every year, speaking and fundraising, and nothing gives me greater pleasure than to know librarians and support public libraries.

I’ll tell you why.

I owe them.

I wouldn’t be an author, or a bookaholic, without libraries.

Mother Mary hates it when I say this, but I grew up in a household with lots of love and meatballs, but only one book.

No, not the Bible.

You know my mother better than that.

The book was
TV Guide.

Imagine my surprise when I got older and learned that not all books had Lucille Ball on the cover.

I discovered my love of reading in my school library, where the notion of a whole roomful of books seemed extraordinary. That librarian saw that I was a nascent bookworm and sent me home one day with a list of local libraries, and my father took me to all of them.

He waited in the car like a dog. There was no TV in the library.

Of course, once inside, I had no idea how to choose a book and was way too scared to ask anyone. But there were some books that had a picture of a man in profile on the spine, and the man had a big nose like my Uncle Rocky.

And me.

All of The Flying Scottolines have nice, big noses. Mother Mary likes to say that we get more oxygen than anyone else.

She’s right. If I’m breathing, you’re dead.

Anyway, because of his nose, the man on the spine felt like family, so his were the books I checked out and read like a fiend. Like our girl crush, Nancy Drew.

Only later did I find out that the man wasn’t Uncle Rocky, but some guy named Sherlock Holmes.

Who isn’t even Italian.

Bottom line, that’s why I’m a mystery writer today.

There was another way I chose my library books, then. When I was little, the card in back of the books stayed with the same book, so I used to slide the card from its tight manila pocket and look at the card to see how many people had checked out the book. If there were a lot of signatures, I’d choose that book.

Not the worst method, in a way. It may have been the low-tech equivalent of a bestseller.

But my favorite thing about the library was my library card. It was the first piece of grown-up ID that I got, and it felt like a veritable ticket to adulthood. I carried it proudly in a padded Barbie wallet that otherwise held only a photo of Troy Donahue.

You might have to look him up.

The Troy Donahue photo came with the wallet, from the days when wallets came with photos. Nowadays, you’re on your own. Your wallet has no friends.

But to stay on point, I will never forget my library card. It was small, stiff, and orange, and it bore my name in full. LISA MARIA SCOTTOLINE. Next to my name was a metal plate embossed with four numbers. I used to go home and press my finger against the numbers on the metal plate, which were freshly inked from my library trip.

Believe it or not, my numbers were 3937.

How do I remember that, when I can’t remember where I put my car keys?

Simple.

Any memory lasts when it’s linked with an emotion, and the library card meant the world to me. Its message was clear:

I read, therefore, I matter.

It gave me an identity, as a reader. It told me that others valued what I valued. That I wasn’t alone, like some weirdo bookworm.

It’s a powerful message, one that I got loud and clear. And it’s a message that librarians and libraries give every day, without knowing it, to children and to adults everywhere around the world.

That’s why I love libraries.

Librarians, I owe you.

And I’m yours.