Karen Sandler

Category: Family

  • My Father’s Daughter

    Years ago, my mom told me a story about my dad that was both funny and telling. Early in their marriage, my dad decided to paint the picket fence surrounding the house they lived in. The thing is, he didn’t just get out a can of paint and start painting. He had to figure out a better way. As my mother told it, he spent more time rigging up a contraption to hang the paint can around his neck for handy access than he did actually painting the fence.

    I am so my father’s daughter, luckily with some modifications. While I have that same compulsion to find that “better way” to do a task, I resist that urge when the straightforward way will do. But I can come up with thingamajigs with the best of them.

    For instance, I’ve been spending more hours than usual at my computer working on the developmental edit for Awakening, the sequel to Tankborn. I was ending up in a fair amount of pain by the end of the day. Not only was there some carpel tunnel type inflammation, the pressure on my wrist bone from my mouse pad and laptop led to quite a bit of soreness.

    So I put on my thinking cap (the one I inherited from my dad) and considered options for protecting my hands. I went digging through my fabric supply in the garage and came up with some black fake fur I’d used to create some stuffed animal or another. I started out by just cutting a couple rectangles, then folding them in half for extra padding. Resting my hands on those made a world of difference to my comfort.

    But I still had a few issues. How did I keep the rectangles from unfolding? How did I keep the pads on my wrists? Once they were on my wrists, how did I keep them from slipping too far down my arm?

    What you see here is what I came up with. I stitched the rectangles into squares. I added a piece of black elastic to hold the guards to my wrists. Then, to keep them from slipping down, I tied on a couple of hair bands. Hmm, I suppose I should have looked for hair bands in black to keep the same color scheme.

    This is how they look in action. They are dorky looking in the extreme, but since I had all the material on hand, they were free to make (and not too time consuming). Plus, they work just fine, at least to pad my wrist bone. As a protector against carpal tunnel syndrome, they suck, but that wasn’t their purpose.

    For that, I had to rearrange my work space. I use a laptop, and I could never get a very good wrist angle while typing on the keyboard. Not to mention with the screen being down at desk height, my neck was having issues with my head constantly tipping down to see the screen. So I did two things. One, I got an external keyboard with its keys laid out in a slightly more ergonomic way. It allowed me to a) have my forearms level with my wrist (essentially parallel to the floor) and b) have a comfortable angle between elbow to fingers as I type rather than straight on.

    The second thing I did is elevate my laptop. This allows me to look at the screen straight on rather than tipping my head down. I feel rather smug that I didn’t have to buy the rack it’s sitting on. It was tucked away in the garage (because we never throw anything away), just waiting for a brilliant idea to put it into use.

    What you can’t see in the pictures is that I have a drawer open on the mouse side, and a board on top of it to give my arm support when I’m mousing. All of these changes have made a big difference in my comfort as I make my way through my manuscript.

    Unfortunately, my cats tend to thwart my ergonomics when they lie in my lap and drape themselves across my arm. Casper here isn’t as much a problem as Tenka, who suspends half her 14-pound body across my left arm. Ouch.

     

    But I think my solutions are pretty cool. And I think my dad would be proud.

  • In My Father’s Footsteps

    There was a book I read when I was maybe 7 or 8 in which the boy character is taking a walk with his father. The boy tries to match his father’s stride, to place his feet right alongside his dad’s. I have a very clear image of taking a walk with my own dad after I read the book and trying to keep pace like the boy did. Of course my shorter legs couldn’t quite keep up.

    As an adult, I turned into a hyper-speed walker. I can’t seem to help myself–I go on a walk with someone and without even meaning to, I’m blasting along at mach-10, leaving most other people in the dust. I think I got it from my late dad, because when he was younger and still robust, we’d take walks together and neither one of us had trouble keeping up with the other. My two sons walk like I do. None of us seem to know how to meander.

    This came to mind the other night as my husband and I were leaving the “dance barn” where we do international folk dance on Friday nights. The “dance barn” is an outbuilding on the 20+ acres of property owned by some friends of ours. The space we dance in is a converted goat barn (no joke), hence the name “dance barn.” And although it’s not exactly out in the middle of nowhere (the freeway is only a couple of miles away), when we turn out the lights, it’s pitch black outside.

    So there I was Friday night with the flashlight, leading my husband through the darkness. Except my legs didn’t know how to keep pace with him. They just kept striding along at my usual mach-10, not only leaving him in the dust, but in the dark as well. I had to keep reminding myself to sl-o-o-o-w down so he could see where he was walking.

    I felt kind of bad about that. But it was a nice memory of my dad, and those long ago walks we used to take.

  • Taking a Risk

    My husband and I spent the week before last helping my son and daughter-in-law move into their new house. New to them, that is. The house is close to 90 years old, and has many of the “glitches” you’d expect an old house to have. Maybe more than glitches in some cases.

    I knew there was another house they’d looked at in the area and from what I recall from the Realtor’s photos, it was a newer, less glitchy home. I really liked the looks of that house and the fact that it was right next to a park. But when I asked my son about their choice between the top two, he said, “Well, there was the safe house, and there was the interesting house. We chose the interesting house.”

    I bring this up because it made me think of the whole issue of taking risks, not only in life, but in writing. If I’d been the one choosing the house, I’m pretty darn sure I would have picked the “safe” house. Yes, it was more of a suburban tract home. It didn’t have much in the way of intriguing features (unlike the “interesting” house, which has wonderful windows, a stately entry and living room, and a dining room with a cool little built in china cabinet). The safe house looked comfortable, but it was a bit blah.

    To connect this to my writing, what if I always chose the comfortable, but blah? Would I have ever sold a book, let alone the 20 that I’ve sold in my career? Would readers have eagerly looked for my books, read them with enjoyment, sighed with the satisfaction of experiencing a good story if I’d stayed “safe?” I’m thinking not. I’m thinking I’ve been better off taking the interesting road rather than the safe one.

    How about you? Do you take risks in your writing? Do you create characters, scenes, stories that are safe, or are they interesting? It might end up being more work, a more difficult endeavor. But in the end, when you take the interesting path, you have a much better chance that the book you’ve written, the literary house you’ve built, will be wow and anything but blah.

  • Temptation: 1, Me: 0

    Generally speaking, I should not stop for yard sales. If I do, there’s a .999 probability that I will spend money. Usually it will be some small knickknack that only costs a couple dollars. But sometimes (like today), it requires pulling out my mad money to lay down some semi-serious cash.

    I could blame it on my husband. I certainly blamed him that time I was admiring a kitten at an adoption clinic and begged him to let me take her home. We already had three cats, and I counted on him to tell me, in a reasonable tone of voice, “No, Karen, we already have enough cats.” He did not. Instead, he said, “Sure, let’s adopt her.”

    Cosette turned out to be a wonderful cat who spent most of her waking hours snuggled up to me. Sadly, a heart condition cut short her life at a young age.

    In any case, you can see that my husband is supposed to be the safety brake to my acquisitive nature. So when we stopped at a yard sale to check out a dining room set (we actually do need a dining room set), I counted on him to temper my temptations. But I’d already seen the school desk/chair when we were scanning the offerings from our car. Close up, I liked it even more. It turned out the price was kind of reasonable and when I made an offer, the counter was exactly what I’d expected and was willing to pay.

    So, I said, “I want this.” Hubby’s response…crickets. Other than opining that he had no idea where in the house we would put it (I said I’d jam it into my office if I had to), he just let me go on my merry way.

    I did pay for it with my aforementioned “mad money,” cash I receive from book sales that I happened to have tucked away. So the purchase didn’t impact our household finances at all. But hubby didn’t exactly live up to his side of the bargain by saving me from myself.

    But why did I want it, from the moment I spotted it at the yard sale? Because (A) I love old furniture. I love that it’s made from solid wood, that it’s well put together. It’s something I inherited from my dad, I guess. He loved to work with his hands and was an amazing woodworker. (B) I’ve always thought purpose-built furniture is particularly cool. The fact that this is a combo desk-chair is so neat. (C) I love its connection with the past. As I was carrying it into the house, it occurred to me that my mom likely sat at a desk just like it when she was in school in the 30s and 40s.

    There’s a divot carved out of the desktop and I can imagine a restless boy like my father carefully drilling out that hole with his pen knife to while away the slow moving hours in the classroom. There’s a big X scrawled across the desk top too, maybe made by some frustrated student who just had enough of the times tables when a beautiful spring day awaited him or her just outside the schoolhouse windows.

    What am I going to do with this desk-chair? No idea. For now, I piled a few of my granddaughter’s books in the storage area under the seat. She’s a toddler and a little too small to use the chair, but I bet she’ll be intrigued by it next time she comes over.

    And maybe I’ll just sit in the chair myself, write out a few times tables and think about the students who once used it. Girls like my mom, who won a contest in high school with the slogan “Don’t be square, the cafeteria’s not the place to brush your hair.” And boys like my dad, who would sit in old stuffy classrooms dreaming about how he would have much rather be running in an open field with a kite, or riding his bike to the ocean.

  • Happy Birthday, Dad

    Today is my dad’s birthday. He would have been 86 today. He died of Alzheimer’s nearly 5 months ago on January 9th. I’d like to share his eulogy today as a way to remember him.

    Great men don’t always become president, or build tall buildings, or run corporations. Sometimes greatness comes from a man’s kindness, his generosity, his good heart. Sam Stier was that kind of man.

    Sam was a loving husband of Barbara, father to four daughters and stepfather to one son, grandfather to nine grandchildren, great-grandfather to five great-grandchildren. He was also a friend to everyone he met. That last is no exaggeration—everyone who met him came to love him.

    Sam was born in Los Angeles, California, June 4th, 1926, the oldest of Harry and Rose Stier’s three sons. Sam was just 10 years old when his mother died of tuberculosis. Before she left for the hospital that last time, she took her oldest son aside and told him, “Sam, be a good boy.” He took those words to heart after she died, watching over his two younger brothers, Irwin and Arnold, while their dad worked as a long-haul trucker.

    When World War II broke out in 1941, Sam was too young to enlist, but felt a sense of duty to fight for his country. When he turned 16, he tried to persuade his father to sign the papers allowing him to enlist in the Navy. His father refused. Sam asked again when he was 17. This time his father relented. Sam served in the Navy from 1943 through 1946, mostly in the South Pacific.

    One of his first jobs out of the Navy was as a TV repairman. He loved working with his hands and he loved electronics and figuring out how things worked. He was always thinking of better ways to do something, even when the “better way” took longer than the other way. In the case of his job repairing TVs, Sam just wanted to fix the TV right there at the customer’s house. Sam’s boss wanted those TVs brought into the shop so he could charge a higher price for repairing it. Sam was far too honest a man to go along with his boss’s scheme, so he quit.

    Not long after, Sam started working at Space Technology Laboratories, which later became TRW. As a spacecraft technician, Sam helped build many a communications satellite. He traveled to Cocoa Beach, Florida numerous times to help with the launches. He enjoyed those trips to the East Coast, but at the same time hated leaving his family.

    Over the years, he enjoyed a wide variety of activities. He was an avid skier and loved tinkering with cars. In the ‘70s he bought an Alfa Romeo, fixed it up, and raced it at the track in Gardena, California. He was a voracious reader, but also enjoyed outdoor sports like hiking and whitewater rafting. In later life, he took up woodworking, and did much of the work remodeling his home in Pollock Pines.

    And throughout his life, Sam was an amazing father. He supported his four daughters in everything they did. He always let them know he loved them and how proud he was of them. He taught his daughters by example. They learned to be kind from his kindness. They grew to be generous through witnessing so many acts of Sam’s generosity. They became responsible adults because he took responsibility for his actions. Everything Sam gave his daughters, they passed down to their own children, raising another generation of loving, generous people who live by their grandfather’s example.

    For many people afflicted with Alzheimer’s as Sam was, their personalities change. They become unhappy, sad, or angry. But Sam’s spirit was so strong that despite the theft of his memories by the disease, his basic nature never changed. He was just as kind, just as generous and upbeat throughout his illness as he’d always been. He charmed the staff at his care home, and they grew to love him as their own “Papa Sam.” And although it was difficult for his family to see Sam fade, to have him move farther and farther away from them with time, it was a great blessing that he never lost his loving nature.

    I love you, Dad. Still missing you.