I’m a famous quitter. Ask my family. They’ll tell you about all my big plans. If I had done half the things I planned to do, just in the last five years alone, I’d be a goat farmer, a maker of organic goat cheese, an organic poultry farmer, a volunteer EMT, an importer of Irish Sport Horses, a best-selling novelist, a campaigner for immigrant rights, a Labradoodle breeder, a teacher of English as a second language, a daily trampoline jumper, daily tread-mill jogger and the host of my own talk show. Each of these grand plans was presented to my husband, children, and whoever else would listen, with the same degree of gushing exhilaration as the next, and there was a time when they, too, would get whipped into a lather of excitement over each idea. But no longer. Over the years, my family has learned that there’s no point in preparing the backyard for goats or fantasizing over puppies and sport horses because once I begin to process the actual details of each thing, it always seems easier to just hold-off.

“Really?” my daughter now yawns, “An EMT? Good luck with that.”

“Sure,” my husband will mumble vacantly, staring at the TV, “goats are nice. Why don’t you get started on that?” There’s no need to go into it further with me because they know that as soon as I begin to uncover the minutiae about goat stink, or nightly EMT training sessions, the whole thing will be pushed to the back burner.

So, when I told them that I was starting a blog to go on my new website, a website created to help promote my forthcoming novel, Outtakes from a Marriage, they had a good laugh at my expense. Even a friend with her own blog urged me to be realistic about it. “Everyone plans to blog daily, but sometimes it’s hard to keep up. You really have to commit to it,” she said.

“I’m committed!” I declared, and who wouldn’t be committed to the rosy future I envisioned for my fledgling blog. When I thought about my blog, I could see it, fully formed, a computer screen filled with thousands upon thousands of my very own witty observations and poignant reminiscences. I imagined people quoting my blog, stealing all my funny material from my blog, gathering around the office water cooler to talk about my latest blog. There would be controversies over my blog. When my audience grew, there would be advertisers, book deals. And of course, my own talk show...

That was a month ago. Every day since then I have not started my blog. Because, again, when I took a good hard look at the details – the logistics of blogging, I started to become a little more realistic about the whole thing, and honestly, my prospects as a successful blogger look bleak. First of all, in order to have a blog entry each day, one must write each day. Although I think constantly about writing, the truth is that I often don’t write at all, for days on end. Now, not only will I not be writing my new novel while I’m parked at Marty’s the local coffee shop, swilling coffee and gossiping with my neighbors, but I’ll also not be writing in my blog. Well, I’m going to give it a shot anyway. I will write in my blog each day, even if it’s just a sentence. Then, when people ask that intensely annoying question – “Have you been writing?” I can, for once, say yes without lying.

So, welcome to my blog, which I have decided to call, “Wicked Good Life.”

I’ve spent the morning looking at writers’ blogs. I’ve never paid much attention to blogs before because, I have to admit, the idea that somebody would think that they should virtually publish themselves on a daily basis, and that anybody would be interested in reading their musings, seemed wildly grandiose and self-indulgent to me. Now that I’ve started my own blog, of course, I have a much more evolved view on blogging. My new point of view is: Everyone else has a blog, why shouldn’t I?

After my first entry, however, I realize that I don’t really know what I’m doing. Is a blog entry supposed to be like an essay? A diary entry? A shamelessly self-praising endorsement of one’s own book? The writer’s blogs I’ve read this morning are all of these things and more. I’ve read an author’s nostalgic recollection of her lost womb after a recent hysterectomy - the reader is treated to photos of the “fruits” of said womb; her two teenaged children (I know, my cheeks burned with shame for them too), an author’s outrage at plagiarism, a tour of a writer’s office and a series of photographs of a chair covered in snow. I read about an author’s family trip to New York City and another author’s mother’s tuna noodle casserole recipe. I read mostly blogs of female writers and I’ve come to the following conclusions about blogs: First, most writer’s blogs have titles that involve writing. Titles like: A Writer’s Edge, My Literary Underworld, and Literary Dreamscapes. I really hate naming things and am awful at it. I have a horse named Mark and another named Snoopy. Horses are majestic creatures who often inspire names like Dante, Charlemagne, Lord Byron, Allegro White Lightning, Ruffian or Man O’ War. The best names I could come up with were Mark and Snoopy. Now I’m rethinking “Wicked Good Life.” It seemed great yesterday. I have a good life. It’s “wicked good,” I’ve been told, more than once (I’m from Massachusetts, still have family there.) The other thing that has me worried is that most of the blogs I’ve read so far seem to be devoted to one’s “journey” as a writer and to the craft of writing. I hesitate to write about writing, because, I mean, who do I think I am - Charlotte Bronte? That’s exactly what I imagine the blog reader asking: Who the hell does she think she is?

I had coffee with a friend yesterday, a friend with a blog. A literary friend. As usual she had great insight and useful suggestions. She said that it’s nice if a blog has a theme of some sort. I said that my blog will be all about the great life I lead. This friend knows me very well and she looked perplexed for a moment, because, in addition to being a quitter, I’m also a bit of complainer, and I guess she had to adjust herself to the new grateful, Pollyanna persona that I have adopted for the sake of my blog. I told her that I plan to blog not only about all the colorful characters in our little Connecticut community but also to blog about all the parties and premiers I attend (well, I’ll start attending premiers now that I have a blog, and the characters in our community will seem colorful, once I embellish them up a little) And I’m going to do red-carpet podcasts. That’s right - I’m going to do interviews whenever I go to any showbiz related events but I am going to mostly interview celebrity spouses who are usually far more entertaining than the celebs themselves and usually offer far more revealing information. So keep coming to my blog, and I welcome your comments. But only the nice ones, please.

I’m working on a new novel and I’m sometimes led to interesting places while doing my “research” (procrastinating). The book I’m working on is set in a small town in New England and it involves a psychiatrist and a scandal. There is also a theme that involves witches, but you know, the modern kind. Anyway, my internet meanderings led me to this article that was published in TIME Magazine in 1956. You can find it here.

I cannot urge you strongly enough to open this link. It’s an article about a psychologist in 1956 who published a paper in a journal of psychology about modern day witches. This doctor used, as case studies, six young female patients “all of whom were loathed by everybody, including the analyst.” He referred to these loathsome patients as modern-day “hags.”

“ Stein's half-dozen "witches in modern dress" were all youthfully slender, lively of expression, some of them bucktoothed and "prancing" of gait. Although they were married and active sexually, they secretly dreaded the sex act and remained "psychically virgins." They had a "miniminy mouth"; that is, they were " 'mim,' prim, reticent, shy, affected." They tended to be frigid, attract weak, boyish men, hated kissing on the mouth (a witch's kiss was believed to draw out the soul). Often they had affairs, mainly with married men. They hated and hurt men, yet believed they were of loving disposition; they were charming, and yet tortured men.”

This Stein fellow had six of these bucktoothed, prancing, miniminy-mouthed hags in one practice? Honestly, while reading this it occurred to me that I bear more than a passing resemblance to these poor women. I’m not loathed by everybody and I do not have buck teeth, but the prancing gait thing worries me, because I do have a rather animated walk and although I certainly don’t “dread” the sex act, I do consider myself a psychic virgin. I like to think that I’m charming and yet that I torture men, but in reality, especially in recent years, men really seem to take little notice of me at all. The piece is fascinating to me, though, because it was really not written that long ago. The shrink actually used the word “hag” several times to describe these patients. Read it, I’m telling you.

The night before last I saw a dress rehearsal for The Country Girl, which is certain to be Broadway’s biggest hit this season. It’s directed by Mike Nichols and stars Peter Gallagher, Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand. The Country Girl is about the wife of an actor and I watched the rehearsal with the wife of one of the actors – my dear friend Paula Harwood Gallagher. Paula has agreed to do a Q&A with me for an upcoming blog in which we will discuss the actor’s wife life. I’ve never been in a Broadway theater during a rehearsal before and it was quite fun sitting up in the mezzanine, just Paula and me. It’s actually hard to decide where to sit in a grand old theater when you can have any seat you want. Some of the orchestra seats had been covered with large make-shift platforms that held Mr. Nichol’s notebooks and coffee machines but the mezzanine was so empty and eerie that I refused to look around for fear I would see a ghost. Then the curtains opened and I was absolutely riveted. The performances in this play are incredible – order your tickets now. Previews started last night, opening night is April 27th.

No, that’s not a goiter on my neck in the photo on the upper right-hand side of this page. That’s our dog Lulu.

You may be wondering why there are dogs all over my website. The answer is, because we share our home with a very splendid pack of four dogs who like to pose. When I was being photographed for this site, I first tried to pose by myself and I made these frightening, wide-eyed-with-dementia-looking smiling attempts and I suddenly had no idea how to make a smile. It feels incredibly stupid to be standing, grinning at a camera and no matter what Miki the photographer did or said, I couldn’t make a pleasant face. At some point, though, somebody let the dogs out and they joined us. When we resumed the picture-taking, the dogs immediately picked up on the gist of what we were doing and proceeded to sit beside me and strike very regal poses. Our dogs are mutts, except for the little one who is supposed to be a Chihuhua, but they are very beautiful mutts and they seemed to be under the impression that Miki had come expressly to photograph them. Lulu, the reddish-brown dog, especially, put on her Vogue face – I actually think she was sucking in her cheeks to give the illusion of cheekbones in the shot on my homepage. Daphne, the blond, kept offering her profile, which she seems to think is her best angle. Pongo, our only male dog, is fifteen and deaf and blind and castrated and was no doubt resting his smelly self someplace. Anyway, the only photos that came out of that shoot in which I look semi-normal are the ones where I’m smiling with my dogs, so that’s why they’re all over the site. Our daughter Devin is a really talented photographer and I'm trying to load some shots she took of the dogs today but I have no idea how to do that and don't want to bother Nancy, the INCREDIBLY generous and knowledgeable and fun web designer who helped set up this site, because it's a Sunday. But it occurs to me that the fact that I can't load the images might be some kind of divine intervention, because I actually don't love when other bloggers post pictures of their kids and animals. You've seen my dogs. I don't need to keep showing them to you - all 0 people who read and comment on my blogs.
Wait, I just had an idea. I might be able to link to the photos.
Okay, didn't work.

My friend Wendy sent me this very amusing story. I guess she figures I need a plan B in case this book doesn't sell. I think I'd be quite good at this actually. It's hysterical that women do almost all the writing and men do most of the reading of this genre. At least I think that's what the story said. I was actually sitting in a cabinet, a tiny cabinet awaiting a mammogram when I read this story. At my radiologist's office, they file the women into adjacent, very narrow dressing cabinets and ask them to change into a gown and then wait quietly with curtains drawn. All the women sit in these cabinets. I don't know why. So I was reading my emails, snorting with laughter, and then, when I was summoned, I was chastised for having a cell phone on, which I guess is a big no-no in radiologist's offices. They want you to have NO human contact before mammograms. Maybe they think you are sending out distress signals. HELP, LOCKED IN CABINET. ABOUT TO HAVE BOSOM CLAMPED IN VISE.

They’ve found another one. It’s been all over the news. They keep showing clips of her standing in front of what seems to be an ordinary suburban home, but when the front door opens, her awful secret is revealed. This sweet, innocent-looking old biddie hasn’t seen fit to throw anything out since the Nixon administration. She’s a hoarder and her grown-up children have ratted her out. It’s a disease, they say on the morning news, on CNN, on CNBC - a disease that creates chaos for those around the hoarder. How did her life get so out of control? To find out, I’m told, tune into Oprah Winfrey later today. These news spots about hoarders used to be a wake-up call to me and I’d spend the next several days trying to unearth my office from years worth of old manuscripts, bills, Christmas wrapping paper, empty hampster cages, sports bras, Easter baskets, dog bones, waffle irons, saddle pads, and magazines. Oh, and catalogs. Hundreds and hundreds of catalogs. Now, I’m so far gone that when I see a fellow hoarder being carted off, my eyes dart from side to side and my heart races. Is that a car I hear pulling up outside? A news van? Oprah’s limousine? I envision myself being led outside to a waiting team of behavioral psychologists, while men in hazmat suits and gas masks bravely enter my home.

I’m really not as bad as the people who end up on Oprah, but I’m getting there. I have children and sometimes they have friends over. Sometimes these friends have parents who pick them up and stop in to chat. I can’t bear the shame of a filthy home so I do what any sensible person would do. When I learn that somebody is about to arrive at my house, I run around grabbing newspapers off the floors, cable bills out of the sink, dog bones off the sofa, socks and sports bras off the kitchen table, etc., and I toss them into the only downstairs room with a door – my office. Then I close the door. When the person arrives, they see a relatively tidy home. I’ll sort out my office later, I tell myself.

I have sought help. I’ve watched the Oprah episodes, I’ve even watched home-improvement shows devoted to cleaning your home and organizing your life, but the extent to which they try to simplify the whole problem is absurd. The solution, according to the experts, is to throw stuff out. Throw out all the catalogs, more are coming, said some house-organizing fanatic on one of these shows. Right, I think, and never find that set of barbecue tools with the industrial-sized tongs I saw in one of them. I know it was a 2006 catalog but I’m not sure if it was Hammacher Schlemmer or the one with all the gardening stuff. I must have those tongs! I’ll never find them if I throw away the old catalogs.

In two months, my daughter will be getting her driver’s license and in order to do so, she will need to show her birth certificate. Her birth certificate is in the office … someplace, and she’s been pestering me about finding it. So, after watching the morning news and processing the shame-by-association, I decided to just get it over with. I would clean the office. Now, five hours later, although I am not even halfway through, there are five contractor sized garbage bags filled with junk in my front hall, and I have learned the following:

A) I have ADD

B) The accumulated stuff was/is crazily organized by stratum. It’s like an archeological dig. The top layer was all stuff from this month, the next layer last month, dating back to the turn of this century. It occurred to me that I should leave everything just as it is. When I want to find the title for our pick-up truck, for example, I need only to figure out what month and year we bought it, and then I can instantly thumb through the pile until I reach that date, and there it will be.

C) I have really bad ADD.

Finally figured out how to post photos. Am using this photo of Daphne as a test. She's one of those dogs that likes to carry things around (part retriever). Unfortunately, the thing she likes to carry is almost as big as she is, so her day-to-day life is sometimes laborious. She makes it that way.

My daughter Devin took these photos the other day. I know it's already spring in New York City but up here it looks like winter still, except for these few blossoms.

I have been trying to strip our beasts of their winter coats. This is Gabriel:

If you're wondering why the image of Gabriel is crisp and clear and the image of my face is so blurry that you can barely make out the features of a face, it's because I photoshopped out all my wrinkles and when that was done, I was barely left with eyes, nose and mouth. Gabriel, though doesn't need retouching, because he is very handsome, as you can see. I guess I could try to photoshop in a forelock - that little tuft of hair between his ears is all he's ever had. He has male pattern baldness, poor guy, always has.

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Michael Pollan and his lovely wife Judith at a dinner party. Michael is the author of the best-selling books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and he is as gracious and engaging a dinner companion as he is a writer. It was one of those affairs in which you are given a choice of a meat or a fish entree – in this instance the choice was Sea Bass or Filet Mignon. I gave the waiter my selection of the Sea Bass but in mid-sentence I cringed at the thought that Michael might think me wildly self-serving by ordering the reportedly endangered Sea Bass instead of the beef. But hadn’t he written that brilliant piece in the New York Times Magazine about what happens to beef from the moment the calf is born until it arrives on our plates? That article put me off beef for some time. After I ordered, it was Michael’s turn and I realized that I was about to witness the author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma faced with the very dilemma itself. The Sea Bass? Or the Beef? Support the fish by ordering the cruelly raised beef? Or reduce the demand for mass-produced beef by ordering the fish? Michael, I hope, will forgive me for reporting that he ordered the Sea Bass. When I asked him about his choice, he said, “I really don’t like to order beef unless I know where it comes from.”

Now, neither do I.

The very next day, I received a call from Libby Fitzgerald inviting me to visit some new calves. Libby, her husband Terry and their three sons own Greyledge Farm here in Bridgewater, CT, and they raise natural, grass-fed beef cattle. It was calving time and Libby said that I might get to see a calf being born that day. When I arrived in her barn, there were no births in progress but there were several sweet, long-lashed newborns lying beside their doting mothers. The Fitzgerald’s barn is so pristine and the cows are such amiable, welcoming gals that I was almost overcome with the urge to nestle down in the straw with them to swap birth stories. I waited until I was out of earshot to place my beef order with the farm manager. Denis is a lover of red meat, and the first time I cooked him a Greyledge Farm steak, I'm not kidding, he nearly wept with joy. Natural beef really tastes better than the mass-produced, hormone-pumped stuff. Now when we drive by the Fitgerald's farm, Denis and the dogs stare out the car window at the grazing cattle and they all drool and whine.

Our dog Lulu had hip surgery on Thursday. Lulu is young but has terrible hip dysplasia and had a total hip replacement at the Veterinary Referral and Emergency Center in Norwalk, CT. Less than 24 hours after the surgery, Lulu came home. She walked out of the hospital barely limping – which is far better than how she walked in. Dr. Matthew Palmisano, her surgeon, is a great vet and we thank all the kind staff at VREC.

I love Lulu, but it's a one-sided love because she's just not that into me. I’ve never had to say that about any dog I’ve shared a home with before. All our dogs have always been totally into me, but not Lulu. I mean, she’s cordial and everything but she doesn't really care what I do, as long as I don't keep Denis away from her. She's Denis's dog - she's completely besotted with him.

Denis has spent the winter finishing a book he's writing called WHY WE SUCK, by Dr. Denis Leary (he has an honorary PhD. Really!) It's very funny. He has a deadline and he works all day in a barn that has been converted into his office. Lulu spends her days watching Denis play hockey or watching Denis write. When I brought her home from the hospital yesterday, she refused to come into the house, but stared, whining at Denis’s barn. We very carefully walked up to the barn and she was reunited with her master and I managed to photograph her smile.

Yesterday, somebody told me that it looks like I’m trying to look like the Dog Whisperer on my website’s homepage. This I took as a compliment because, in fact, I am always trying to be like Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. I wish to emulate him in the same way that some people wish to emulate the Dalai Lama. Anybody who’s a fan of The Dog Whisperer show will understand why. Cesar Millan is a mastermind of canine and human psychological and spiritual healing and I have often thought that he should sell bumper stickers that read WWCD (What Would Cesar Do?)

I think in WWCD terms all the time. Recently I was confronted by a very aggressive man at Stew Leonard’s (it’s a Connecticut grocery store/theme park) who believed that my leaving my shopping cart parked in front of the bagels for two minutes violated all laws of decency.
“Move your f____ing cart,” he barked at me when I wandered back from the cold cuts, and then he actually shoved my cart at me. The man was in what Cesar would call an aggressive/dominant state. In the past I would probably have either joined him in the red zone by cursing angrily back at him, or I would have slunk off with a whining apology and my tail between my legs. But I didn’t do either this time. I did what Cesar Millan would have done. I stood my ground, maintaining calm, assertive energy. I placed my salami in the cart and when the man snapped at me again, I said, suddenly (but still calmly and assertively) “HEY! in a clipped tone – the human version of the “tchhhhh” noise Cesar uses on dogs and the man clammed up and wandered off! If you haven’t seen the show, Netflix an entire season. You really don’t have to be a dog owner to benefit from the teachings of Cesar Millan.

Last year, Denis’s publicist said the Dog Whisperer people were interested in having Denis and our dogs on the show, as they sometimes do segments on celebrity dog owners. Denis loves The Dog Whisper and his first response was “great, I'll get to meet Cesar Millan,” but I wasn’t so sure he should do it, and this is why: Cesar has a tendency to make men cry about their dogs on his show. Especially men with tough exteriors. I’ve seen it more than once. One minute, a man is chopping wood and talking about his years as a combat Marine, the next minute he’s weeping into the fur of his beloved Cock-a-poo. “I just l-l-ove her soooo much, and I wa-wa-ant her to he happy,” he sobs, and Cesar, in a calm, listening state, nods. He understands. He understands everything. One recent weekend while Denis and I were watching a Dog Whisperer marathon, I heard a strange croaking sound coming from Denis’s end of the couch. I think it was during the episode about the Yorkie who goes berserk when the vacuum cleaner is turned on. When Cesar told the owner that she was letting the dog down by treating her with “human psychology not dog psychology,” Denis began making these choking, gurgling noises.

“Are you …okay?” I asked.

“What? Yeah, I just have something stuck in my throat,” Denis said, blinking madly. Then after a moment, he whispered, “Life is sometimes just so …unfair,” and he sprang from the couch and ran to the bathroom where he remained for some time.

Okay, so despite the breezy blog posts, I’ve actually been in a state of gut-wrenching anxiety about my forthcoming novel and how it will be received by, well, everybody. Sarah Breivogel, my book’s publicist, sent galleys out to reviewers and magazine editors many weeks ago and then she followed up with emails and letters. The response to my book’s announcement was …nothing. I understood this response to be, not an oversight, not an indication of how beleaguered-by-galleys magazine editors are. No, I knew it for what it was - an astounded, appalled silence. I imagined reviewers staring at the bound galleys in horror, thinking, Denis Leary’s wife tried to write what? A novel? You’ve got to be kidding me! I envisioned them trying to slog their way through the first chapters before finally giving up and writing their one-word review: “Unreadable!” and tossing it into the rubbish bin.

Well, this morning, I finally got a review! And it was nice! It was a starred review from Kirkus reviews! I don’t think I can provide a link because I think you have to be a subscriber to open a link (shameful confession: I took out a month-long subscription in order to read my review, rather than wait until work hours when my editor, who subscribes, could email it to me), so you'll just have to take my word for it. Hmmm, maybe I'm onto something here. I could blog about all sorts of glowing reviews from obscure literary journals that can only be read by subscribers, knowing that my blog readers, most of whom are my own blood relatives, are never going to cough up the dough to open a subscription.

When I saw Lulu after her hip surgery last Thursday, my first thought was that she was walking quite well for somebody with a new fake hip.

My second thought was, nice gam!.

Her coat is thick and wavy so I had no idea what beautiful musculature the dog possesses. I find that I keep staring at it, though.

I'm just admiring the conformation of an athletic animal, I keep telling myself. But there's something disturbingly sexy about it. I think the exposed flank combined with the mohawk reminds me of that evil/sexy Last of the Mohicans guy.

This guy:

See what I'm talking about?

I just have to stop thinking about this.

Here she is, poor girl. She has a plush dog bed that she could lie on but has found that lying on the hard floor with her head hanging off the step earns her the most sympathy and pats.

I've been cleaning my barn. I can’t stand housecleaning but I find great satisfaction cleaning my barn for some reason, and also cleaning my horses. Yesterday, I washed my horse Mark, and then when he dried and was still as wretched-looking as he was before his bath, I gave him a full body clip. Clipping a horse is one of those things, like child-bearing, that seems like a great idea when it first occurs to you. Why should I spend hours currying the winter coat off this horse, when I can just clip him, is what I thought yesterday at noon. So, out came the clippers and I set to work. An hour and a half later, I was covered with horse hair, was wading through great drifts of horse hair, my nasal passages were lined with horse hair, and I had only shorn a small clearing on what I now saw as the vast acreage of my horse Mark. Horse clippers are big heavy things and moving them over a horse’s body again and again starts hurting your arm and then it starts hurting your back. Plus, the clippers get hot and make a loud high-pitched whirring sound that, after two hours, doesn’t go away, even when the clippers are turned off. Plus, horses are stupid. They’d like the thing to be over as quickly as you would but believe that dancing in place is the best way to speed things along. But I did manage to finish his body and left the legs for another day (the day hell freezes over, most likely).
Here’s a before shot:

Here's the after shot:

Do you want to see the whole horse? Well you'll have to wait until tomorrow because the photos I took yesterday don't flatter Mark. He's not exactly an oil painting, as horses go, and, like Barbra Streisand (and me for that matter), really needs to be photographed from certain angles. Seriously, I adore this horse and can't show the pictures I took yesterday. But I will show you this guy, whom I found when I lifted a bucket from a corner of my tackroom.

When the amphibians start moving in, it's time to turn on the dehumidifier. I named him Newt, though I suspect he's actually a salamander and then put him in the bucket and released him next to our pond.

Last fall I began work on a new book and I ran into a little snare right at the beginning. I was describing the campus of a boarding school in September, in Connecticut, and I had all the trees aflame with bright russets and golds and somebody was raking leaves. It was still early in September when I was writing this and it dawned on me that the leaves might still be green well into October. I really had no idea. And I wasn’t quite sure when the first frost usually arrives. So I decided to start a journal to document the local flora and fauna as the seasons change. I also determined that since there is no better place to observe anything than astride a horse, I would trailer my horse Mark to Steep Rock Land Preserve every day, weather permitting, and that way I could see the exact same landscape as it changed with the season. I kept what I called my Steep Rock Diaries from September until December. Then I had to stop because the trails were too icy for horses. I've been hiking in Steep Rock this winter and spring, on and off, but am dying to get back there with Mark. My trailer needs a new tire but is being serviced on Tuesday and then I will start up with the diary again.

I don't even know where to begin to describe the beauty of Steep Rock. First, there's the winding Shepaug River that divides the preserve:

That's my daughter Dev on the trail. There's an old railroad bed that runs along the river's edge and it's great for riding.

In places, the roots of great hemlock trees have wrapped themselves, like tentacles, around the rock outcroppings along the river's bank. This one appears to be testing the temperature of the water with its root, although you can't actually see the water in the photo:

So we do this big loop, Mark and I. We go along the railroad bed and cross the river and go up to what they call the "clamshell" and enjoy the views and loop back around and across the river again. We go out in the early mornings and it’s often cold riding along the old railroad bed, but when we cross the river, if the sun is out, it shines down on us and sparkles off the rocks below. Mark always stops in the middle of the river at our crossing place and we stand there for a moment. The damp, dark smell of river always reminds me of my childhood, of a winding creek that ran behind a house in Michigan that we lived in. My brother and I spent our summer days wading around this creek looking for tadpoles and crayfish and watching muskrats glide just under the water (muskrats are cute, if you've never seen one - nothing like regular rats.) Sitting on my horse, at this point in the Shepaug River where the clear water rushes over the rocks, something always comes over me. The coolness, the washing, rushing sound, the smell of water and fish and wet dirt and something else – loam? Silt? It all makes my head light and my muscles - even my bones - seem to go soft. Everything in me seems to dissolve into the horse and the river below and once, when a Great Blue Heron soared above us on that very spot, Mark and I both stared at it, blinking, blinking into the dazzling sun and then the sky was made blurry by my tears and I thought, there is a God. There is a God. Because the bird seemed so hulking and primitive, yet it flew. And the horse, and the river...

But the thing I love most about Steep Rock, because it thrills me, and terrifies me, is this:

The dark abyss, not my sweet daughter about to enter it. But I will blog about that another day. I'm supposed to be working on a book.

In 1871 a tunnel was blasted into a small mountain in Washington, CT, to make way for the proposed Shepaug Valley Railroad line. The engineering of the tunnel was overseen by a local explosives expert known as “Glycerin Jack.” I’m writing this in bed and so cannot start searching my house for the book that told me about Glycerin Jack, but I really should because there is another interesting fact about this important person in our town’s history. Apparently, the man passed a tapeworm that was something like thirty feet long (will fact-check length when I find the book). The local doctor kept the tapeworm in a formaldehyde solution in a jar on his desk and all the townspeople came to observe it.

Anyway, the Shepaug Valley Railroad ran from 1872 until 1948. When the train stopped running, the tracks were pulled up, but the flat, packed stonedust bed remains and there is no better place in this area to gallop a horse. The old railroad bed winds above the Shepaug River, through groves of centuries-old trees, alongside the old carriage road, and eventually, after you come around a bend, you see in the distance, this:

The first time I saw this, I was alone, on foot, and I wasn't sure what exactly I was seeing. When I got a little closer, I saw this:

And then, finally, I was confronted with this:

Every time I approach the tunnel, whether on horseback or on foot, I become a little breathless with fear. First, once you step into the beginning of the blasted out area, before you even enter the cave, the temperature drops about five degrees. And there is sudden silence. The rushing sound of the Shepaug River, which had been a constant white noise, ceases. And the striations of the rock, the way it sweeps up gives the ledge a sense of rapid, upward motion, like a great wave rising up over you. But the most unsettling thing about it - and the reason my horse always balks here - is because there is no light visible at the end of the tunnel. The tunnel curves, so it's not until you are inside that you are able to see that there's a way out. A phrase from one of my favorite poems comes to my mind whenever I see the tunnel and it is this:

At the wood’s mouth,
By the cave’s door,
I listened to something
I had heard before.

The poem is "The Lost Son" by Theodore Roethke. It's a rather long poem about nature and sexual longing and remorse and death and there's a sort of manic flight pattern and then, at the end, a stillness. The words at the end of this poem are taped above my desk now. I'm in a bit of a creative void (writer's block), and it feels like the task before me is daunting and dark and Roethke's words are meant to give me hope:

Was it light?
Was it light within?
Was it light within light?
Stillness becoming alive,
Yet still?
A lively understandable spirit
Once entertained you.
It will come again.
Be still.
Wait.

Meet Mark. I know he looks cuddly, and he is. If you’re not a horseperson, then yes, that is how a horse’s mane is supposed to look. If you are a horseperson, judge not, lest ye be judged. I don’t have time to mess with that mane right now. Mark will be sporting his mullet at least until my book comes out.

Mark has an interesting history. He was born approximately twelve years ago, on the wrong side of a fence. His mother, lacking foresight, chose to lie down next to a fence during her labor. Mark was born and then, when he managed to stand, he was on one side of the fence, and his mom was on the other. Horses are herd animals and the foals “imprint” on their mothers immediately after birth. The mare’s scent, her distinct vocalizations, her gait – the foal absorbs it all, commits it to memory, and then is able to pick her from any number of other mothers in the herd. It has long been a notion among cowboys and others, that human “imprinting” of a foal can help it get over it’s innate fear of humans. When a foal is born, it’s important to touch him, have him smell you and hopefully he will associate humans with the world in which he finds himself. Unfortunately, many foals choose to be born at night and by the time a human has found him, he has imprinted on the mother and is about as receptive to the human touch as a wild deer.

Mark, however, spent his first night wobbling around in a cold, dark field, hungry and alone, listening to his mother’s frantic whinnies. In the morning when the mare’s owner discovered him, she helped him through the gate to the flank of his desperate mother. So Mark’s first touch was a human touch, and it was a human’s hands that guided him to the warm milk that filled his empty belly and that auspicious beginning made Mark a bit of a human lover. Now, if you approach our horse field, Mark will come trotting over to meet you. When somebody forgets to close a gate and the horses get loose, Mark gallops down to our house and peers in our windows. Mark is a clown and a coward which makes him my soulmate. We have foxhunted together, competed in hunter paces (a pace is a cross-country race over hunt-field style jumps) and hunter trials. Here we are at the Golden’s Bridge Hunter Trials:

If you’re not a horse person, then what you are seeing is perfect jumping form by horse and rider. If you are a horseperson, give me a break. We were in a field. He was galloping. You can see it’s a drop jump, I had to brace myself against his neck like that…

I love to take pictures while riding Mark. Here we are watching Devin ride Snoopy:

This one shows Mark's mane at its most ridiculous. It looks like I'm riding a Pomeranian:

Mark is such a versatile horse. You can really take him anywhere. Here we are in Rome above the Spanish Steps:

Viewing the Coliseum:

Okay, I just installed Photoshop Elements and have found a new way to waste time. Now I'm trying to get a shot of Mark on the Red Carpet at last year's Emmy Awards but I can't figure out how to cut around his ears.

I had Oprah on the other day. I just had it on, I wasn't watching it. Anyway, as they cut away to a commercial, Oprah said, "Coming up, the words no mother wants to hear from her child..." This interested me because I had already heard the words no mother wants to hear from her child. These words are: "Mom, there's a bat on your pajamas."

This happened a few summers ago now, but I remember every minute of it like it was yesterday. It was early morning. I was sitting at our dining room table in my pajamas, talking on the phone and writing something down. When Devin came downstairs, I stood up for some reason, still nattering away, and she said, “Mom! Mom! Mom! Mom!”

I snapped my fingers and frowned - the universal mother’s sign-language for “shut your trap, I’m on the phone.”

“MOM,” Devin said again, her voice rising now. I looked at her, and that’s when she said THOSE WORDS. She was staring down at my thigh, backing up and stammering, “Mom, there’s a …bat on … your… pajamas!”

Time stood still then. I was staring at Devin, blinking, the phone held to my ear. Later, we would puzzle over my eventual response, which was, “Is .. it … real?” For some reason I was whispering and looking intensely into Devin’s eyes, when I said this. I couldn’t bring myself to look down at my pajamas.

“YES!” Devin screamed, and I then I had to look down and there it was - clinging to my threadbare, paper-thin pajama bottoms - a furry, hideously ugly, maniacally grinning brown bat. He gripped my pajamas with claws that came out of – get this – his wings!. He was grimacing up at me! That’s right, he was leering at me with his half-human/half-pig face and the next thing I knew I was standing at the opposite end of our house shrieking my head off and clinging to Devin, who was also shrieking her head off. In our flight through the house I had somehow managed to brush my cheerful, pug-nosed passenger from my pajamas (and drop the phone) and Devin and I just stood there, clinging to each other, alternately shrieking, laughing and crying.

I'm telling this story now because it’s bat season again. The bats are coming out of hibernation and will soon be darkening the sky around our house every evening. Don’t get me wrong - I love the idea of bats. When we bought our place in Connecticut, we were well aware of the area’s bat population and were pleased that our property was inhabited by so many of these useful creatures. According to an article in the local paper, a single brown bat can devour between 3,000 and 7,000 mosquitos in one night. At dusk, Denis and I used to watch them fly out from under the eaves of our old barn and dart about the sky, and we would gaze up at our little mosquito-assassins and smile. In our minds, there was a beautiful symbiosis between the bats and the Learys. We owned the property, but were willing to allow the bats to live on it. In return they would kill all the mosquitoes so that we could sometimes eat our supper outside. We lived under the misconception that there was a mutually understood, unwritten treatise clearly defiining the boundaries of our territories. The bats got the whole outside. The only place off-limits to them was the inside of our house. We knew that bats sometimes carry rabies, but what we didn’t know was that up close, the bat’s creepiness quotient is off the charts, and, like a terrorist, he doesn’t set much store by boundaries. He rules through fear and intimidation and travels about with the smug knowledge that he can go anywhere he damn well pleases. And he does.

NEXT: Bats: Part Two, starring Denis Leary

I found tennis relatively late in life. I wanted exercise, that’s all, and one day, watching my son take a tennis lesson, I thought, now that looks like a good workout. I thought that since I was pushing forty I would probably never be good enough to play any real tennis but chasing the ball around the court for an hour or two a week might help me tone up a bit.

Well, it’s five years later and I’ve just come from my regular Saturday doubles game. Tomorrow I’ll play in my regular Sunday group. Mondays I play in a clinic, Tuesdays I have a regular doubles game. Thursday I play singles with a friend at noon. Wednesdays and Fridays I have no scheduled tennis but I’ll sub if I’m asked. I’m known in these parts as a bit of a tennis whore, because I’m an easy get as a sub. It’s just that I have the privilege of working at home and having kids old enough to take care of themselves which makes me a little more flexible than many people. If somebody needs a sub they know that I’ll usually drop whatever I’m doing and test the sound barrier speeding to the court. I’m obsessed.

Recently somebody told me that everything you need to know about life could be learned on the tennis court. His point was that one must always be in the moment; don’t be filled with self-loathing because of that point you just botched. Move on. Be honest, do your best, don’t stand there admiring your last shot, get ready for the next. If the court is so wise, I wanted to tell him, why won't it tell me how to fix my second serve? Anyway, I thought I might use my blog to share any insights that come my way while playing tennis. Today, it occurred to me that what messes up women in tennis, is our biological tendency to want to look at each other’s faces all the time. I love this book called The Female Brain, by Louann Brizandine, MD. In it she talks about how women and men are neurologically wired quite differently. We women need to bond with each other – it’s a primitive drive that was necessary to protect our offspring. Women like to look at each other’s faces and gauge each other’s emotions all the time. On the tennis court, for me anyway, this creates a problem. When I am receiving a serve, for example, I find myself standing with knees bent and racket ready, but when the ball comes rocketing into my court, I have to say to myself, “watch it into the racket” because if I don’t, my tendency is to watch my opponent's face. I have noticed, in mixed doubles, that men don’t do this. Men watch the ball. They have a hunting instinct that makes them want to follow prey and attack it. Women have that too, but the bonding instinct that makes us want to smile at each other all the time can thwart it. Anyway, that’s what I think happens. It sounds much better than the other explanation which is just that I’m a spaz.

Today I received a review of my book, Outtakes From a Marriage from Publisher’s Weekly, which said that I have “an eye for the comedy of manners of the rich and idle.” Well, thank you very much, PW. Now I’ll turn my eye on some of the less idle, like the participants in this past weekend’s Celebration of Young Writers in Washington, Connecticut. It’s an annual event in which famous actors and writers read the works of students ages 5-18. The readers have included Denis, Frank McCourt, Rose Styron, Mia Farrow, Peter Gallagher, Christine Baranski and many others. The event is a fundraiser for the After School Arts Program. Denis hosts the reading every year.

Here he is chatting with the lovely Rose Styron before the event:

We saw Rose again the following evening at the opening night performance of The Country Girl, starring Peter Gallagher, Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand, and directed by Mike Nichols. Such an amazing performance by Peter, and everyone. There was a press line as we entered.

And afterwards, a party at Tavern on The Green. Here's Denis with Peter Gallagher:

Denis is a little partial to that particular jacket, and that particular shirt, as you can see. If you saw us leaving for the play last night you would have thought I was going to the Oscars (I overdressed as usual, rube that I am) and he was going to a hockey game. I could blog all day about all the wrong outfits I've worn to events. Fortunately, I'm usually cut out of the photographs when they appear in print.

“Don’t treat your dog like a person, or he’ll start treating you like a dog,” my grandfather told me once, when I was a child. I can’t remember what I was doing that provoked this warning, probably spoon-feeding one of our dogs, but I do recall hoping, praying, that his words were true. It was my dream to have a dog treat me like another dog. I’m a dog nut. I seem to have been born that way. I carry the fascination around with me the way my retriever-mix, Daphne, carries around an oversized stuffed animal.

She doesn’t know why she does it, she just does. She comes from a long line of dogs that were bred to carry things around. I come from a long line of people who are enchanted by creatures who must carry things or herd things or stalk things for reasons that no longer serve them any purpose.

My great-grandfather bred Welsh Terriers. Here is his favorite, Freshy, surrounded by my mother’s aunts and uncles. My mother is the littlest one, with the boy’s haircut, gazing at Freshy.

Apparently my mother was nipped by Freshy when she was just a toddler. The dog, being a terrier, was feisty and combative. My mother, being a Sullivan, was likewise, so according to family legend, after overcoming her astonishment at having been bitten by a dog, she grabbed her by the leg and bit her right back. After that they were fast friends.

My grandfather – the one who gave me the advice on how to treat dogs - had a champion English Bulldog. My grandmother (his ex), kept Beagles. In this photo I'm petting my grandmother’s Beagle while my grandmother and mother pose on my grandmother’s porch.

Although my grandmother lived for decades after this photo was taken, this was one of the last times I saw her. I don’t remember much about her, but I remember that the dog was called Daisy, and that when she wagged her tail, her whole body wagged. My grandmother was mentally ill and alcoholic and ended up estranged from us. There were no framed photos of her in our house growing up, no calls on Mother's Day, so, like I said, I mostly remember her dog Daisy. The way her body wagged, her hips and tail a jolly serpentine dance, the way she smelled like wet shoes, the way she followed my grandmother’s every move with doting eyes. This photo is fascinating to me. My father only recently sent it to me, so I've been studying it. My grandmother is in a crisp dress and pearls, but her paint-peeling porch is cluttered with mops and brooms. You can see the hasty attempt to make things nice for us, her guests, then the defiant leaving of the mops, as if to say, "it doesn't matter what you think." My mother is smiling in a sort of zoned-out fashion. Me, in heaven, adoring Daisy, whom I had only just met.

Here I am on my seventh birthday, when I received my beloved puppy Beau. Notice my sister Meg (the clone of my mother in the earlier photo) and her clandestine attempt to pat Beau. I'm sure I was feeling a little territorial and she had good reason to have her eyes trained on my face.

Beau lived until after I left home for college, and was only one of a number of family dogs we had while I was growing up. Beau was a poodle. He was smart and learned tricks. He bit. He slept in my bed. He humped our drapes. He had a reeking skin condition that caused the fur on his rump to fall out and oozing scabs to form.
I loved him, I loved him, I loved him, but when my friends came over, I locked him in a room and wished he didn't exist.