Ask me on Tuesday*

This should be an interesting week. Though our weather has turned windy and chilly, it still is brilliantly sunny as well. Everything that can grow, is doing just that.



Colors splash across our yards and the empty places deep in this inner-city neighborhood. Every crack in a sidewalk, every empty lot, even many rooftops are sprouting grasses, flowers, vines.



Several massive Sequoias grace Garfield Park in the Mission, which used to be a drug dealer haven but now is a busy soccer field for kids. Still, this neighborhood is host to gang warfare. Wear the wrong color in the wrong place and you pay for it with your life.

Friday night an apparently innocent man wearing the wrong color was murdered several blocks from here, at Mission & 19th. Tonight, my little daughter and I took a short walk just before sunset to get some ice cream. An hour later, as we passed the store where we made our purchase in our car, headed back to her Mom's place, the entire block was taped off and under occupation by police cars.

It looked like a probable robbery. It looked like a probable shooting scene. It made my stomach sick (which isn't all that hard to do, unfortunately.)



Some plants grow better when I don't plant them. This one grew from a bulb.

Some stories improve when you don't plan them. They just emerge from underground, much as if some spore or bulb had been waiting for the precise moment at which it should appear.

Poof! We have a live one. Who knows where or what it will become but the energy is undeniable. Just a castoff seed or pit or (in the case of what birds and land creatures do best) an excreted seed or pit. Several months later, courtesy of rain and sun, suddenly a new member of that plant's race takes its place in this complicated ecosystem.



It can get a bit too cold to work in here, but a hooded sweatshirt helps.



For the first time in months (money is tight) we had a boneless leg of lamb for dinner, cooked to perfection courtesy of Ask.com. Everybody said they loved it. As a single Mom, working from home and having trouble making ends meet, this result made me happy.

As I was preparing the food, I thought about writing and the irony of success. I've published so many articles in so many publications, won so many awards, and gotten so much positive feedback for a long, long time.

I've also suffered blistering criticism, smothering rejection, and the utter lack of enough self-confidence to continue with this work. Objectively, by my late '30s, I decided that I could only be good, not great, as a writer. That decision, combined with practical concerns (supporting my ever-growing families) dictated my next set of decisions, to bank on my managerial ability and my interest in running efficient businesses, to make far more money than even my most successful writings could ever provide.

In the middle of this mid-career change of direction, I also discovered that my life-long interest in numbers, combined with a frugal sense of staying with budgets, formed a managerial strength that was (how to put it?) unusual in the brave new world of the web. The Wild West had been replaced a century later by the Wild Web.

Our companies' budgeting process, I was told, was simply to "keep track" of expenses, as we expanded rapidly, devouring the funds either venture capitalists or public investors had given us.

Over those halcyon years, I always brought my departments, divisions, and units in under budget. It's wasn't that hard, frankly.

This post has now wandered far away from where I thought it was going. Or maybe not. I wanted to tell a story, and I suppose I just have. There is no ending to this story, yet, because I am still awaiting my next opportunity.

It can go two ways. Some company will need an editorial leader and appoint me as such. Or, at long last, defying a life-long pattern, I will finally settle in and believe in myself enough as a writer to just spend the rest of my years writing...living and dying, as it were, on whatever talent I may -- or may not -- possess.

The answer, for me, is blowing in this cold western wind.

-30-

p.s. The Pennsylvania primary, two days from now, is the next key link in this year's election cycle. I'll have predictions by late tomorrow...