Today was a national day of action protesting the passage Prop. 8 which takes away the right to marry that the court had found gay men and lesbians to possess under the pre-discriminatory, pre-8 constitution of the State of California. (And protesting other discriminatory laws voted in this historic election.)  Everyone I knew was going over to San Francisco (if they didn’t already live there) or going over to Oakland (if they didn’t already live there). Angie, Leo, Charlie and I went to Berkeley. It was a nicely timed action–pre-nap–and nicely placed, right beside the Farmer’s Market where we go most Saturday mornings anyway to buy stone fruit and eat organic Thai food. To my surprise, there were maybe a couple of hundred people there. It was quite impressive. I couldn’t help but wonder where all these people were when Angie and Scott were alone on the overpass before the election trying to get the message out.

Angie says (referencing success guru Tony Robbins) that it is easier to pursue someone who has stolen $25,000 dollars from you than it is to work to save $25,000. In other words, people will put enormous effort into recovering something that has been taken away, even when they shirk the same effort that will save it in the first place. Is this true? I’ve certainly known a person or two who was like that when it came to relationships . . .

I don’t really know that these people weren’t standing on street corners, making phone calls and donating money before the election. I do know that we feel that we could have done more. I think it felt a lot worse to lose the right to be married than I expected it would. An old friend wrote with a historic perspective on how far we’ve come, etc. etc., and I know that is true. I know that we will have the right to marry, probably in my lifetime. But having your rights stripped still feels frightening as well as infuriating. The last time my people (different group) had their rights stripped, it was prelude to genocide.

So that’s the dark note. But today, people did turn out–all over the country. My mother is visiting Washington, D.C., and she went to a protest there in the pouring rain.

Just now, I went trolling over to Andrew Sullivan’s blog to see if I could dredge up his comments about not getting so caught up in this loss, but instead taking a more historical perspective. Instead, I was treated to a world tour of people in cities and small towns who came out today to protest for civil rights!

Check in out: http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2224950/35797320

I got all excited. How amazing to see this become an international movement. I have to say, I am also loving having an electronic community. This morning, my old friend Becky, from college, was briefly in town and stopped by to have breakfast. We are in touch with so many of our friends and comrades from college now, via Facebook: it’s time to plan a big reunion for our collective houses and activist groups from back in the day. Since we don’t all stay in the same town we grew up in (and please note that I am writing from the house my parents were living in when I was born), our tribal minds get a little lost in all this coming and going. But now I get to tuck myself in each night with bedtime stories and sweet dream status updates from people I have loved for a long, long time. And all around the world, people came out to say: this is what the world is going to look like, and you (H8ers) can’t stop it.

And it feels different, in fact. Everywhere I go, I have the feeling that people recognize my family in a way that they didn’t always before. They may have voted against us, but we aren’t invisible anymore, and that makes a big difference. Because to know us is to love us . . .  Actually, just because it is exhausting to have to explain oneself all the time or let oneself be invisible. The Mormon Church just spent $19 million dollars educating Californians on the fact that there are all kinds of lesbians and gay men who get married and have children. It isn’t radical, in one profound way, but it is a heck of a lot more comfortable than being asked (as one woman who knew we were “a two-mom family” asked us), are you sisters?

(Now I have to slog out another 1500 words on my novel of the month. More on writing in my next blog.)

This morning, Angie went down to our local freeway overpass to hold NO ON 8 signs, alongside the imported yes on 8ers. The boys and I started to clean the house, and then we got a call from Angie that the yessers had huge signs strung all along the fencing, and she was there with only one other person.

So I called someone and she called someone and then I called my mom. Then I changed diapers and went off to drop the boys at a park with my mom and join Angie. By the time I got there, there were just two yes guys and their one big yellow sign, and several older women (my mom’s age) had shown up and were pressing a no on 8 sign against the fence, with the wind pushing back at them. I held a big tarp sign with a woman who teaches at Los Positas Community College. She told me that many of her students were voting for the first time today.

It was freezing on the overpass, and while we got a lot of thumbs up and honking from the west-to-east side, the folks going the other direction–who had the yellow yes sign to react to as well–seemed a lot more conservative.

I found myself feeling so angry. I wanted to turn to those yes on 8 men and say, “What does it feel like to be on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of family and the wrong side of Christianity??” They seemed more jovial than I–sort of that “we’re all in this together” feeling that you can get when everyone is pressing signs against the wind, and streams of traffic are gushing under your feet, shaking the cement structure on which you stand. I did not share their joviality, perhaps because this is my family and my marriage we are voting on.

This could be the most momentous, historic occasion of my entire life, past and future, if things go my way. If things go really, really wrong, I’m going to feel like getting out of here, though some folks on Talk of the Nation today suggested that this was an unsportsman-like attitude. In general, my slogan is that of Mother Jones: “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”  But I do want to keep my loved ones on one side of that line for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve pounded out 6017 words on my novel in the past three days. (I will start chugging on my next 1667-2000  words when I finish this blog.)  I always say that it is easier to write than to think about writing, but of course it’s easiest of all to do neither. At the same time, I get irritable and draggy when I stop writing for long enough. My father used to say, “If only coffee tasted the way it smells . . . ” (Angie says that it does, but then she is on a slippery coffee slope.) I wish that writing felt like reading feels.

The closest I get to that is when I just keep writing, past the extreme judgments of my inner editor (how come my inner editor is in there with my inner child and she still has time and brain power to be so harsh and detailed? Shouldn’t she be changing diapers or something?), past the hiccups and the slow, uphill inclines, past the raging uncertainty . . . and did I mention the judgments?

I think critics, inner and otherwise, are a little like yes on 8ers. They are angry and negative about something that really had nothing to do with them. There are, for example, a certain number of people who are really angry about NaNoWriMo. They say that it brings thousands of crappy manuscripts into a world overrun with manuscripts and makes thousands of people believe that they are writers when they are not. And the people opposed to gay marriage seem to feel that marriage is unravelling if all these extra people get to get married, as if we are producing shoddy relationships in a world overrun with relationships . . . Okay, I might be working too hard or not hard enough at this metaphor. I am sugar-filled and caffine-walloped and sleep-deprived, so I hope you can bear with me.

What I am trying to say is that people writing crappy manuscripts and people creating unorthodox relationships are NOT A THREAT to the establishment. People who write crappy manuscripts are more likely to buy published books and to read them well. People who are getting up together each day to figure out how to make breakfast, get everyone dressed and out the door, keep the house clean and the laundry done, make a living and have quality time with the children and each other are not ripping at the fabric of traditional marriage.

One literary-political note. In plots, when things are looking really good for the hero and you’re fifteen, twenty minutes from the end of the movie or, say, a quarter of the way to an eighth of the way to the end of the book, what are you thinking?

You’re thinking, in the immortal words of my sons, Uh oh. We know the rhythms of plot so well when we are consuming it (creating it is a different story for some of us). It does not bode well for our guy when things are looking up too far out from the end. And it’s been going well for Obama for a while now. Better and better. I hope that real life will do as it often does and rebutt our understanding of plot and just soar right on to victory.

Because it felt incredible to walk around Whole Foods today, grocery shopping, and look at all the people who populate my world and think, “We just might be electing an African-American man president today.” I want my boys to come to consciousness with a man of color in the White house. I want them to think that if it was ever another way, that was a long time ago, back in the last century . . . Besides which, our Cobra insurance coverage runs out next year, and it would be great to have an alternative to Kaiser . . .

I have yet one more undeveloped thought. As you know, we’ve never made any kind of reparations to the many Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in this country. I know that Obama may not be one of these, except possibly on his mother’s side, since we are all quite a lot more mixed up than we pretend. But it occurs to me that all this fear of “redistribution of the wealth” taps into a national knowledge that the original distribution of the wealth was acquired by theft and murder, and that a Black president might look at reparations in an entirely different way. I think the fear of redistribution of the wealth is a fear of honest reparations being raised as a real issue–some seriously messed up mortages coming due with a big balloon payment.

But walking around today, I felt excited. I felt like we might be able to do something far beyond reparations, and move right on over to fairness and representation and something that actually looks like democracy.

I am on vacation. It’s a working vacation, in that I brought the kids and their attendant need to eat and have their diapers changed and go places to play, and I brought my computer and the online course I am teaching and my blog and everything else that can now e-follow me wherever I go. But still, this afternoon Angie and I left the kids with Grandpa and Nana and went into town to have a milkshake and hang out in the bookstore, Copperfields, which happens to be wonderful. And I have spent the past two mornings in a park on Valentine’s Street in Sebastopol, meeting conversational, open-minded, intelligent mothers (and a few fathers)  and their charges and the occasional friendly dog.

Maybe it’s because Sebastopol is a small town, but being in the park here is like being at a brunch. You really talk to people. Everyone who comes into the park smiles at you. There is a strong sense that we are all here together. Not just co-existing as we pass each other in our busy lives, but sharing an experience together.

Being at a park in Berkeley–especially Totland–is more like being at a dance club. There’s a lot going on–movement, frenzy, action–and you may smile at someone and then you may not smile at someone else and you might dance by someone and talk to another person and even buy a drink for a third, but most of the people there are involved with their own groups and it’s too loud to talk for long or to everybody.

Maybe it’s the way this Valentine park is designed. Maybe it’s the slightly lower cost of living here. Maybe it’s just my being on vacation, being relaxed. I loved it, whatever it was.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been a little overwhelmed. Launching an online course, working with editing clients, getting ready to write a novel next month, taking care of my little fellows, figuring out childcare options, watching my insufficient retirement resources (which, honestly, I am using now instead of when I am old, when I fully expect to be working until I die) plummet in quantity, dealing with trying to get married before the out-of-state Mormons yank my right to do so away, trying to get to picture-lock on my short film so it can be finished and sent out into the world, shoring up my old and falling apart house, not to mention cleaning it . . . I don’t know . . . I’m feeling tired.

Chai lattes help. Showers help. Vacations help. Grandparents help a lot. But I have again been reminded of the root of all my misery. I haven’t been reading novels.

I read The New Yorker, and I read some blogs, and I read Egri and this and that from my piles, but for some reason, I read novels in spats. I’ll read four in a couple of weeks and then go back to The New Yorker. Today, I picked up a couple of volumes at Copperfield’s, and just now, I cracked one, and suddenly . . . I relaxed.

It’s as if I trained, as a child, to lead these other lives, in secret gardens and dumb waiters, in attics and at Paddington Station and in Milwaukee and on the prairie and inside the walls of houses, with spools for tables and buttons for platters*. I learned to expect complications and growth and some resolution. The tangled threads of my own life, with its confusion of themes and uneven character arcs, bewilder the reader I am, first and foremost.

Entering the world of a book, the voice of the narrator capturing my attention, the story drawing itself across my imagination, makes everything feel right again. In a book, I know what to do, the right kind of attention to pay. An ardor rises up in me, a feeling of connecting to life itself, a life full (but not reeking) of meaning. Attending to it is pleasurable and worthwhile and productive.

I suppose that I am at my best as a writer when I feel that way about the actual world itself, when I can peruse the vegetables at the market with the same passion for sensate detail and follow the chaos at the playground with the same curiosity about humanity, believing that in time, it will all be ordered into a thing of beauty and character, into a story. And that surely I will be the one to do it.

*The first three people to name the greatest number of the books alluded to in this list,  will win free, transferable tuition to my Gathering Your Materials course. To enter, email me the list and your name and contact information by Oct. 20th Thanks.