Guys have this annoying little thing called a prostate. Far as I can
tell, it’s about as useful as an appendix, and as troublesome. I’ve
never developed much appreciation for mine. Now I downright resent it.

It was bad enough when my prostate started waking me up at night five or
ten years ago. I tried swatting it with saw palmetto and other herbs and
that seemed to work for a few years. But the sucker just kept getting
bolder and bolder. Lately it thinks it can run my life.

Enter Dr. G., the kindly urologist. Girls, you can tune out now. You’ve
got your OB-GYNs and that should satisfy you. Guys don’t visit OB-GYNs
and, far as I can tell, girls don’t see urologists. Kindly Dr. G.
festoons his office with copies of Car and Driver, Sports Illustrated,
Success, Fortune, etc. I’ve never seen a copy of O The Oprah Magazine
there, nor do I expect to.

Dr. G. first put me on a prescription drug with a package warning I’d
never previously encountered. It says: Not to be taken by women.
Ever. Don’t even think about it, girls.

But the prostate waxed and battened. Probably liked the drug’s taste.

Sterner measures are called for, said Dr. G. as he removed his greasy
rubber glove from you-know-where. We’ve got lasers to incinerate it.
We’ve got microwaves to cook it. But my personal favorite, the gold
standard, is the rusty-trusty old scalpel.

(At this point I could get really gross and tell you what he planned to
do with that scalpel and where and how he planned to do it, but I won’t.
The procedure is called TURP, short for Transurethral Prostatectomy, and
my pals at Johns Hopkins will be glad to fill you in. Read about TURP at
www.johnshopkinshealthalerts.com/ppc/prostate/turp_reg_landing.html?st=ppc&s=GLP_005011_004&gclid=CP7qstyz-owCFRI7ZQodPT_eDg)

Enter Carol. You do not want that dirty old man messing with you
Down There, quoth she. Go to Dr. S.

Enter Dr. S., the acupuncturist. Dr. S. is a cackly old witch who speaks
an incomprehensible Taiwanese dialect of English and delights in poking
you where it hurts most. She also enjoys feeding you brackish liquids
and poisonous powders, while giving you baffling dietary instructions
and discoursing about Heat On Your Liver. She warms you. She ices you.
She sees mysterious energy flows where you see only bare skin. But what
Dr. S. enjoys most is sticking you all over with pins.

I hadn’t been to Dr. S. in years. When I’d gone, she’d actually helped
me with certain things. But her explanations made so little sense that
I wasn’t quite desperate enough to go back until … now.

This time, I was facing a 4- to 6-week recovery. Pain to be expected.
Hemorrhaging possible. Impotence and incontinency extremely unlikely but
… possible. No heavy lifting. No tennis. No exercise except walking.
No sex. And in the background is Dr. S., screeching: I can helrp you!
Twelrve treatments! Give it a try!

I visited Dr. G. and told him to schedule the surgery for a few weeks
hence, but that I was going to try twelve acupuncture visits in the interim.
To his credit, Dr. G. showed an open mind. I don’t know anything about
acupuncture, he said, but it can’t hurt. We’ll retest you after the twelve
treatments and do the surgery if it doesn’t help.

You know how this story is going to end. I started feeling better around
Treatment #4 but thought I must be imagining things. Around Treatment
#7, though, I was pretty sure it wasn’t my imagination. The retesting
proved it wasn’t. While not cured, I’ve gotten a lot of relief — enough that
I see no need for surgery.

Dr. G. thinks this relief will be temporary and the day will come that
I’ll need the surgery. I suspect he’s right.

But whatever. Acupuncture is working for now, and it got pretty much rid
of my morning backache in the bargain. Needle me again, doc!

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Getting boys to read is a big concern for educators and school
librarians. They often push “boy topics” — sports, cars, etc. — but I
think there’s a better approach. I think boys (like girls, like everyone)
respond to a good story, well told. On Saturday, Nov. 3, I have to
prove my theory. I’m speaking on the topic at the Illinois School Library
Media Assn. annual meeting in Springfield IL, my first stop on yet another
Chicago tour. This is a call to anyone out there who can adduce evidence
to support my position. Help! Please!!!

There are more adoptive parents reading these postings than I realized. After I wrote about our adoption experiences, I heard from some.

At least one of these correspondents did a so-called “open” adoption. When Carol and I adopted our son Sam in 1984, there barely was such a thing. The prevailing ethic was that the birth mother should give up the baby and get on with her life. Us adoption agencies will take over now, dearie. You just run along and forget you ever had this child.

Most people today will find this attitude ludicrous, but back then it was accepted — at least overtly — by all, including birth mothers. We now know the pain these mothers suffer at giving up their own offspring, with little hope they’ll ever see the child again. We know the pain adoptees feel at not being able to pry their biological information out of obdurate public agencies, and the obsessive birth-parent searches this pain may engender. But we didn’t then.

Frankly, Carol and I were feeling a little pain of our own at the time.

We’d tarried long while the old Bio Clock ticked away. When we finally got serious, we lost a baby to a tubal pregnancy. There followed months — years — of invasive, costly, humiliating fertility fun, none of which got us pregnant again.

Finally one day I had a flash. I said to Carol: We are not going to have a baby the natural way. Let’s adopt. OK, she said. You do it.

In the year it took to adopt Sam, the pain we experienced was of a different sort but real just the same. When an agency offers you a baby, you wouldn’t think anything could go wrong; but I am here to tell you it can, and did. Agency people change their minds. Mothers change their minds. We changed our minds. Long and short, a process that was supposed to take mere months took about a year, and Sam was the third or fourth baby offered us. When we finally got this treasured child, we were feeling pretty beat up.

Then I start reading stories about open adoptions. The stories were, as I remember, pretty gaga. I thought: No way, baby. Ain’t room in this household for but one set of parents. And that’s us.

But our situation with our daughter Shawn was, in a sense, an open adoption. We became her principal-caregivers-without-portfolio while her dad remained her dad. This situation went on from her teens into her 20s, when he died. (Then we adopted her. Talk about locking the barn after the horse is stolen.)

Now Shawn is the mother of her own adopted son, in an agency adoption that was, legally, quasi-open. Shawn has never met his biological parents but communicates with them by mail via the agency.

I still prefer closed to open. When Shawn’s dad was alive, Carol and I walked on eggs. If we’d felt more confident of our authority, I think we’d have been better parents to her. And Shawn’s dad was our friend — not likely the case in an open agency adoption. The idea of a birth mother taking active part in the rearing of my child gives me the willies. It’s hard enough staying on the same page with your spouse without some stranger sitting in the peanut gallery giving you the razzberry.

(For people of my turn of mind, international adoptions are great. There’s a snowball’s chance in hell that you or your kid will ever encouter the birth parents or they you.)

But the world turns. Some open adoptions clearly work. Some adoptive and birth parents work out the lines of authority that seem so daunting to me. I don’t know whether this is good or bad on balance for the kids, and I wish I did. But I’m pretty sure of one thing: Growing up with a biological parent in the picture would dispel that hollow craving that plagues some kids, not knowing who gave them birth.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Acupuncture works! Tell ya about it next time.

Any guy can be a dad. All it takes is opportunity and lively sperm. But just try to adopt a kid and see how easy that is.

First you have to find a kid to adopt. If you go the agency route, you can expect to be paperworked and home-studied to a fare-thee-well. You rarely wind up with a newborn. And you pay big bucks for the privilege — tens of thousands of dollars by the time you’re done. Adopting a baby  via an agency isn’t like having a baby; it’s like filing a lawsuit.

If you go the private adoption route, you’re in a gray (or black) market where you don’t know who to trust — and you’re still out big, possibly even bigger, bucks.

If you adopt domestically, you may have to wait a long time.

If you adopt internationally, the wait may be shorter but the uncertainty far greater. Your baby may arrive sick, or worse, due to abuse or neglect in a country with few or no controls on its orphanages. Your adoption may be derailed in mid-process because your country changes its laws, and countries change laws all the time — often in response to domestic scandals involving allegations of rich Americans “stealing” babies. The language and communications barriers add to your confusion, suspicion and mistrust as you bite your nails.

I’m speaking here from personal experience. Both our kids are adopted. We were involved in Shawn’s life since she was a little girl; taking over as her parents was a long but mostly private process. But we adopted Sam internationally via an agency and had to jump through hoops.

We had to ask friends and associates to write personal references attesting what great parents we’d make. We had to disclose facts about our private lives we’d have much preferred to keep private. We’ll never forget the home-study, where a social worker basically came into our house and white-gloved us. We had to travel to Chile, carrying cash — thousands of U.S. dollars — in a money-belt strapped around my waist.

Biological parents just go out and have kids; but adoptive parents must in effect get a license. And licensure, I am about to argue, leads to better parenting.

Biological parents tend to have kids early, adoptive parents late. We all know stories about young kids who weren’t ready for kids of their own, but adoptive parents are ready. They’ve been through failed pregnancies, miscarriages, repeated doctor visits featuring invasive medical procedures and violent drugs, IVF (which, by the way, costs a fortune and often doesn’t work), etc. etc. They are better established in life. They have a few bucks (or else they couldn’t afford adoption, let me tell you). Most important, they really want to have kids — and they’re willing to put up with tons of B.S. to do it.

They’ve given lots of thought to the mistakes their own parents made (and what they did right), and resolved to learn from those lessons. They’ve had plenty of time to consider what sort of parents they want to be, and what sort they don’t want to be. One small personal example: When Carol and I adopted Sam, I wanted to be an active dad. I figured I’d need strength — physical strength — to be that sort of parent, but I was 43 years old, overweight and out of shape. I joined a gym and set about changing myself. Regular exercise is a hard habit to gain, as anyone who’s tried knows, but I did it. I not only enjoyed Sam’s growing-up far more than I might otherwise have, but I changed my own life for the better. I still go to that gym.

I believe that, because I am not related by blood to my kids, I am actually a better parent. My ego is ever-so-slightly less at stake. I don’t fall into parenting traps quite so easily. At least, that’s what I’ve come to believe.

These thoughts were triggered by a conversation the other night with Shawn. She doesn’t like the term “adoptive parent” and neither do I. Of course it is factually correct to distinguish “adoptive” from “biological” parents, but she and I both resent the implication that “adoptive” parents are second class. Did I mention that Shawn adopted her son Kai as a single mom at age 38? That her desire to devote all her love, care and attention to a kid for some 20 years (and after that, forever, as all parents know) trumped not having a significant male other in her life; trumped workload; trumped career jeopardy; trumped cost; trumped everything? Now Kai is almost 7, loves the Nationals, and is his baseball team’s home-run hitter. And my only grandson (so far).

No family could be closer than ours. Shawn lives not 10 minutes away. We see her and Kai all the time, several times a week. She invited her closest friends to the beach house she rented last week, and we made the cut. Sam, who’s finishing up at NYU, talks to us all the time on the phone, often several times a day. They may not be perfect kids — nobody’s perfect — but there are no better kids in the world.

Happy Father’s Day.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. To Love Mercy wins another award! Honorable mention, teen fiction, New York Book Festival! Visit http://www.newyorkbookfestival.com/event/details.asp?event_id=9. TO LOVE MERCY has now won six awards, garnered 22 five-star reviews on Amazon, and is in its second printing. To Love Mercy [ISBN 0-9744785-3-9] is available in bookstores everywhere, on Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Love-Mercy-Frank-S-Joseph/dp/0974478539/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3906176-5275626?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1182086750&sr=8-1 or at our website where you can get autographed copies. Visit http://www.tolovemercy.com/to_love_mercy_online_sales.html.

I don’t have one, is what I now think.

I write on computer. I write in longhand. I write in the morning. I
write in the afternoon. I write every day. I miss a week. I plot and
plan. I stumble about in the dark. I follow advice. I ignore advice. I
write in “flow.” I quit for lunch. I concentrate. I procrastinate. I
follow rituals. I flaunt them. I go into my writing grotto and hide out.
Or I venture forth into anonymous writing spaces — coffee shops,
libraries, trains, the beach.

Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. It really makes you start
believing in this muse stuff.

She’s been visiting lately, thank God, though you never know when she’ll
take a powder. I am 71 pages into (working title) “To Walk Humbly,” the
sequel to my novel To Love Mercy, and I’m cooking.

I was feeling decidedly diffident (look it up) about this novel at
first. I’d never written a sequel so I felt compelled to put tons of
background into the first chapter. But when I read that stuff, it
sucked. It’s still sitting there, but it’s targeted for death.

Then I wrote a chapter that brought the tears to my eyes. Now I’ve
written a second such chapter and I’m feeling pretty plickin’ good about
the project. When you stare at a blank screen for two hours, you feel
like taking the gas pipe. But when you write something you feel good
about, the elation is indescribable.

I figured it would take me six months or so to write this novel but here
it is closing in on six months and I’ve only written 71 pages. Is this
good or bad? Discuss:

• It’s bad and you’re a procrastinating slacker. OK, I plead guilty.
When you don’t know what you’re going to write, procrastination is the
easiest thing in the world to do. I can sharpen pencils down to the
erasers and never get bored. But when La Musa comes to call, things
change. I find myself eager to write. I want to tell the story. I want
to find out what happens next.

• It’s bad but excusable. I didn’t write a word the first three months.
Unlike To Love Mercy, where I just tapped into my early childhood, this
novel is set in my adolescence and I don’t have the bone-in memory for
this period that I had for childhood. I spent the first three months
doing research to ground myself. I went to the Library of Congress and
read tons of microfilm of the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times and Defender.
Now that I’m writing, I view most of that research as a waste of time,
in that I’m not likely to “use” much of it; but at the time I was doing
it, I felt it was absolutely necessary. So I guess it was.

• It’s bad, but hey. Most days that’s where I am right now. I am
realizing that, in a sense, story tells itself. At the start, anything
and everything is possible. But the more you write, the clearer and more
alive the characters become, and the more inexorable the story becomes.
As this happens, you write faster. So maybe it’s OK that it took 2 1/2
months to squeeze out these first 71 pages; maybe the rest will “write
itself” in just a few months more. (I can dream, can’t I?)

It took approximately three years to write the draft of To Love Mercy.
That’s always embarrassed me. True, I was working a day job, but still.
Some people — lots of people — write 50,000 words in a month and have
day jobs. There’s this wonderful contest called NaNoWriMo, short for
National Novel Writing Month, that takes place every November. It costs
nothing to enter and you don’t win any prizes except a 50,000-word novel
draft on Nov. 30. Thousands of people participate and hundreds finish. I
signed up last year for the first time but didn’t participate. Maria
Thompson, my nephew’s wife, entered and knocked out 50,000+ words of a
romance novel and held down a day job and raised a teen-ager. Visit
www.nanowrimo.com.

I wrote To Love Mercy figuratively (and literally, see below) in the
dark. I had the belief that plotting amounts to painting by number, and
doing so would rob me of my spontaneity. I now believe this was a
misconception that was the direct reason TLM took three years, not six
months, to write. This time I’m doing it differently. While not in the
strict sense plotting, I have a yellow pad full of plot and story points
written in longhand. This narrative bounces from topic to topic and is
fragmentary, but every time I’m not sure what happens next I re-read it
for inspiration. When what I’m looking for isn’t there, I get out the
fountain pen my son Sam gave me for Father’s Day when he was about 12 –
also known as Dumbo’s Magic Feather — and write more story points.

All this said, I now dimly realize a few principles and tricks that help
me become more creative and consistent. Having established my bona fides
as an unreliable source, I don’t expect you to pay any attention
whatsoever to the advice that follows:

1. Put the writing first. Many sages say to write every day. Others say
to write X number of words per day. I can’t do either thing, but for me
resolving to put the writing ahead of all else seems to have the same
effect.

2. Just start writing. If you’re stuck, write blah blah blah if you
must. Write what you ate for breakfast or what you plan to eat. Write
what you dreamed last night. Write about your wife, your children, your
boss, your mama, but just write something until whatever you sat down to
write about starts to flow. This is pump-priming and, believe it or not,
it works.

3. Do whatever you have to do. I’ve heard of writers doing truly
outlandish things. I like to write in the dark, for example, but Kent
Haruf, author of a plangent (look it up) novel called Plainsong, says he
locks himself in a dark closet and pulls a knit cap down over his face.

Finally, get a prescription for Ritalin. Ritalin helps, I think. Then
again, that’s what Dumbo thought about his feather.

Frank Joseph
www.tolovemercy.com

P.S. Apologies for the blog-o-lag of the past week. Life got busy, then
we went to the beach for four days. The good news is, we had a great
time. Best of all, I wrote some lambent (look it up) prose at the beach.
Thanks to daughter Shawn for getting the great beach place yet again,
and for counting her Old Mom and Dad among the friends she invites.

P.P.S. I’ll be in Chicago next November for sure. Plans are shaping up.
Watch this space.