A Cool Change

**

What’s your favorite time of year?

My mother always used to say her favorite time of year was autumn. She thought perhaps it was because her birthday was in September. But I never understand how anyone could possibly love the fall, even though my birthday is in September, too.

For me, autumn meant going back to school (I hated school as a kid). It meant waking up to frigid wet mornings and dark grey skies and the looming gloom of endless winter to come. But summer… Ah, summer meant long carefree days of blue skies and golden warmth; it meant running through sun-kissed fields with my horse or curling up on a shady porch with a book. Even later, after I moved away from the frigid northwest, I still loved summer. Summer meant my girls home from school, days spent searching for seashells beside a roaring surf or exploring castles on a sunblasted Spanish hillside or hiking through the Australian bush.

Then I moved to New Orleans, where summer brings a wet suffocating heat that never relents, not even at night, along with a wary realization that a hurricane might be forming just over the horizon. It is my practice every morning when I wake up to throw open my doors and windows. The cats love it and it airs out the houses, but in the dog days of summer that humid blast of heat is a real penance I can tolerate for only so long. Well, this morning I opened the front door and literally squealed with delight as a soft cool breeze buffeted my face and actually raised goosebumps on my arms. Ah, I thought, fall at last!

And then I remembered my mother and how fall was always her favorite time of year, and for the first time I understood why that little girl growing up in New Orleans had loved autumn so much.

**

Still Alive

**

Writing and life (including plumbing problems you don't want to hear about) have consumed my days too much lately to leave time for blogging, but I hope to do better next week.

I'll be going to Bouchercon in San Francisco in October and will be on a panel on Saturday, for those of you who'll be in the area. More on that later.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the engraving, it's of Covent Garden Theatre.

Eid Mubarak and Happy New Year

**

'Eid al-Fitr is one of two major holidays in Islam, the festival of the breaking of the month-long fast of Ramadan. For Muslims, it's a time for eating and drinking, visiting friends, giving presents, wearing new clothes, and visiting the graves of the dead. Think Christmas and Easter and All Saints Day, rolled into one. "Eid" is of course the holiday itself, while "mubarak" means "blessed." So, to all my Muslim friends, Eid Mubarak.

Coincidentally, this weekend is also Rosh Hashanah. So to all my Jewish friends, Happy New Year!

**

Dropping the Veil on Jumping the Shark

**

Remember when you were a kid and you heard words but didn't quite interpret them correctly? How you could happily sing, “My country, Tisovee”? Or think people get “Oldtimer’s Disease” when they start getting forgetful? Well, I have a confession to make: I did something similar with the expression “jumping the shark.” And I only just realized it.

After a bit of research, I’ve learned that the expression dates not to the time when the infamous Happy Days episode first ran in 1977, but to a decade later when (to quote Fred Fox, the poor guy who actually wrote the episode in question) “Jon Hein and his roommates at the University of Michigan were drinking beer and had Nick at Nite playing in the background. They started talking about classic TV shows when someone asked, ‘What was the precise moment you knew it was downhill for your favorite show?’ One said it was when Vicki came on board ‘The Love Boat.’ Another thought it was when the Great Gazoo appeared on ‘The Flintstones.’ Sean Connolly offered, ‘That's easy: It was when Fonzie jumped the shark.’ As Hein later recounted, there was silence in the room: ‘No explanation necessary, the phrase said it all.’ ”

Well, it just so happens that in 1987, I was living in the Middle East. In those pre-ubiquitous-Internet days, that meant I was effectively cut off from popular American culture. I then moved to Australia. I first ran across the expression sometime in the late 90s in a book on writing I’d checked out of my local Adelaide library. I’d never seen the original Happy Days episode (I was in Germany at the time that aired!), so the association didn’t click. But I did know a movie about sharks, so somehow I got the idea fixed in my head that “don’t jump the shark” was based on the suspense-building technique used in the movie Jaws and basically referred to the principle of increasing viewer tension by revealing the extent and nature of a threat gradually rather than letting readers see it clearly in its entirety from the get-go.

I didn’t realize my mistake until just a few weeks ago, when I read a blog post by John Connolly in which he wonders if he’s jumped the sharp with his latest book (verdict from Steve, who just finished it: no). And then, in that way these things have of happening, I ran across Fox’s article "First Person: In defense of 'Happy Days' ' 'Jump the Shark' episode" in the in the LA Times.

So now, in addition to chuckling over another instance of my oft-exposed ignorance of American culture from decades past, I am also left with a writing truism in need of a colorful descriptive expression. I guess I just need some college kids and a lot of beer.

For those of you who know Steve Malley and are wondering how he fared in the recent earthquake, he left this message on the previous post: "Hi Candy, just wanted to let you know that I'm all right. Conditions aren't too bad here-- having to boil our water is about the worst of it."

Katrina Plus Five

**
I suppose eventually a time will come when August 29th rolls around and passes without me giving it a second thought.

I’m not there yet. Every year, New Orleanians watch with an uneasy kind of awareness as the temperature climbs and the anniversary of Katrina approaches. Part of it can be put down to good old fashioned fear: when the Gulf heats up and we enter those six dangerous weeks that stretch from August 15th to September 30th, it’s hard not to start each morning by nervously casting an eye over the “Tropical & Hurricane” section of weatherunderground.com. But there’s also the realization that even if we squeak through another season without getting clobbered again, during this last week in August we’ll still be hearing those howling winds in our dreams, still find ourselves in quiet moments remembering sights and smells and moments of weakness and despair we don’t really want to revisit again.

For the first couple of years after the storm, I used to mark the day by getting together with a group of Katrina survivors for lunch at Voodoo Barbecue on St. Charles Avenue. We’d eat and talk and laugh about the ridiculous horrors of those days, then we’d go on a “Misery Tour” to assess the city’s progress or lack thereof. But in 2008 our anniversary luncheon had to be cancelled because we were all evacuated for Hurricane Gustav, and after that we never started the tradition up again.

This year, Steve and I will be spending the day working on one of the rebuilding projects on our house that is still not quite finished, five years on. But at some point I know we’ll stop to open a bottle of wine and sit around with my two daughters and laugh about the days when roofs hung in trees and the phones didn’t work for eight months and National Guardsmen with machine guns patrolled our streets.

Notice I said, “laugh about” it? In reality, there was probably nothing funny about those days. What’s funny about seeing a coffin and a jet ski washed up on a railroad embankment? About feeding a couple dozen cats in two different neighborhoods for months because their owners abandoned them and then couldn’t pluck up the courage to come back for them? About burying your aunt in a graveyard up the river because the cemetery where her husband is buried is still underwater?

But laugh, we will. For as the years pass and life as we once lived it in Katrinaville becomes a memory rather than a current reality, I’ve realized that the two most important lessons I’ve carried away from those days are both contradictory and yet oddly complementary. Katrina left me with an unflinching, visceral understanding of the fragility of all that we tend to take for granted in our everyday lives. You never forget that kind of up-close and personal demonstration of one of life’s most fundamental but easily ignored realities, which is that the veil of civilization is whisper thin and unbelievably fragile and can be shredded and ripped away in an instant.

And yet I don’t think I ever laughed as much as I did in those months after the storm, when every day confronted us with startling, sublimely ridiculous new examples of a world gone topsy-turvy. It wasn’t just me; we all laughed. We made jokes about stinking refrigerators and blue tarps and a few things we probably really shouldn’t have been joking about. Which brings me to the second lesson I learned, or what perhaps could more accurately be called a new appreciation or even a sense of awe, for the power of the human spirit to keep on laughing, no matter how dark the days.

Cheers, everyone.