Remodeling

shhh! It's not me.

I mean, it is, but my name here is Rosie North, traveler and teller of truths, woman of history and mystery, former stealer of kisses, steeler of backbone, hater of flying insects except the pretty ones.

Here I may still look like that woman with the bared arms and blue headscarf in the cartoon avatar. Here, if I've a mind to, I can print that in color and tape it to every mirror. Or I, as Rosie, can be wizened, learning scratched deep in my skin, every cigarette and snort recorded. I can cry and choke on sobs, wipe my hot, snotty face with my shirt. Rosie will take a deep breath and fix those blue eyes on you and tell what happened, who's guilty and who's not. 

Not some smudged version of the story, details erased and names changed because -- shhh! -- someone might read it and tell You-Know-Who or because some-one-or-more is taking notes and keeping score or someone's jealous or a Big L for Lifelong loser or is wearing the Can't Get Over It hat. 

Besides my brief but bad Husband #1 sliming my lovely website, there were Watchers. And Tattlers, like in first grade. Even Nora Ephron, who said her mother taught her that life is copy, had to stop telling stories about a family member who saw them as humiliating instead of funny. Some of my step-relatives were mightily offended by subjects I wrote about, and there were so effing many of them - step-relatives and Subjects Now Off Limits - that the walls of the box I was writing in started chafing my elbows and pressing down on the top of my head. It got so bad that one person bitched that I wrote too glowingly about my own kid and her kid, claiming I did it just to make Complainer look bad by comparison. As if Complainer needs help in that endeavor.

I started writing four years ago to say what needed saying, to put what I had lived and what I knew and how it felt into words for people to read, because it feels great to write, to tell stories, to get it off my chest, whatever. Because I wanted to. I didn't do it to find myself in a cell, certainly not one made by people I'd cross off my Contacts list in a nanosecond if it weren't for the unhappy accident of their births.

The New York Times had a long, lovely article in yesterday's Sunday edition about Linda Ronstadt. She has written a book that will be out soon, and in it she talks about the recent news that she has Parkinson's and can't sing, her musical career from beginning to end, the things she did along the way. She lives in San Francisco and has two kids, 19 and 22 years old who, one presumes, can read. About drugs, she admits to trying everything and using so much cocaine that she had to have her nose cauterized twice. Ms. Ronstadt is only a few years older than a white-haired writer I once knew, who was afraid to tell stories like that because doing so would have cost her dearly.

Whatever story Rosie tells, she's gonna own it.