Expectations

And Gratitude

Although Riley has a water fountain and a water bowl, he’s always grateful to take advantage of any unexpected hydration opportunity.

Cartoon and Quote by Ray Wylie Hubbard, from his song “Mother Blues”

“The days I keep my expectations lower than my gratitude; I have very good days.”

I got permission from Texas singer/songwriter Ray Wylie Hubbard’s publishing company, BMG Cicada and Snake Farm Publishing, to use this quote for the epigraph to my first novel The Lockhart Women which will celebrate its fifth birthday on June 1st.

I’m a long-time a fan of Mr. Hubbard and thought the three characters in The Lockhart Women could use his advice. They all have more expectations than gratitude when the novel begins.

Brenda Lockhart is sure she’s settled for less of a husband than she deserves. Peggy Lockhart sees herself as better than the community college her father talks her into attending. Allison Lockhart expects a life of romance by the sea because the coolest surfer at HB High School says he’s in love with her.

Unsurprisingly, life doesn’t work out quite the way they planned.

Does it ever?

“Coming Events” back in June of 2021

Hubbard’s advice turned out to be wise words for me as well. When I first signed the contract to publish The Lockhart Women, I had big dreams of a huge book launch party celebrating in a local brewery with food, friends and family.

But then the pandemic.

My novel debuted just before California lifted the Stay at Home COVID-19 mandates, which meant planning an in-person book launch was problematic. I enlisted a few friends for a Zoom launch, an Instagram Live interview, another Zoom interview, and finally an in-person event at my favorite bookstore.

It makes me laugh now to think that I only invited newsletter subscribers to my first event. What was I thinking? Why didn’t I invite everyone I knew?

By June of 2021, most folks were completely sick of Zoom and Instagram Live and neither of my first two events were well attended. I was very grateful for those faces that did show up on the screen, but I had higher expectations.

My “Live in Person” event on June 26, 2021, had to be moved at the very last minute from LibroMobile’s downtown Santa Ana location to the Bookman in Orange. I don’t remember why now. It was stressful, but I am ever grateful to Sarah Rafael Garcia from LibroMobile and David Hess from the Bookman for pivoting and being so accommodating.

And I was thrilled that friends and family filled all the seats that afternoon.

There have been many thrills, surprises, disappointments, awards, events, educational moments, and so much to be grateful for on The Lockhart Women journey.

As some wise wordsmith told me years ago, books are not like cartons of milk. They don’t have expiration dates.

The Lockhart Women are still on the road. And if you haven’t read it yet and enjoy eBooks, I have a few free links to giveaway in celebration of the birthday. Write back and let me know you’d like one and I’ll send a link your way.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from the first ever Surf City Author Fest. The idea was for 26 authors to set up easy ups in front of the entrance to the Central Library in Huntington Beach and sell books all day. The librarians put this together, at the nudging of local author Rose Molina, and they all did a terrific job.

The weather was perfect and there was steady stream of library patrons heading in and out of the library all day. Most of them weren’t necessarily there for the Author Fest. The HB library always has a ton of human traffic.

The event didn’t get a great deal of publicity, but those who stumbled into it seemed delighted to find themselves among authors and books.

Chris Epting, Mark Zambrano, Toni Haas, and Lisa Alvarez. Not pictured, Christine Amoroso and me.

I also didn’t know what to expect from the author panel I moderated that afternoon in the Library Theatre. It was a wide spectrum of genres, novels (me), short stories (Lisa Alvarez), adult memoir (Christine Amoroso), children’s books (Toni Haas), surfing (Mark Zambrano), and history and pop culture (Chris Epting.)

The idea was to discuss how the place where we live influences our writing. It was challenging to think up questions that applied to everyone. We were also all over the political spectrum, but we managed to have a civil conversation.

We all agreed that there are so many more stories that need to be told about the place of Orange County and the city of Huntington Beach. Ninety-seven people showed up to listen to our conversation on a beautiful Saturday afternoon.

I was grateful we were all there.

Me, reading and holding up the anthology with Jeff Rogers, Thea Puschel, Gina Duran, Mark Hein, and Jo Scott-Coe

I also had a lot of fun with these characters who read from the White Picket Fence Anthology, from Flower Song Press, in the lovely quad at the Riverside City College as part of their “Lit-Chella” literary festival. Big thank you to Jo Scott-Coe for inviting us and to Gina Rae Duran for editing the anthology.

You never know what to expect from a festival or a reading but these two were terrific.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

I know what to expect from Surf City’s City Council. They’ve been suing the state of California for years over housing mandates, arguing that Huntington Beach can do whatever it wants because it’s a charter city. The state countersued in March 2023, stating that Surf City violated state law by refusing to zone for its mandated 13,368 housing units. The city appealed.

San Diego Superior Court Judge Katherine Bacal ruled against Huntington Beach in May 2024. Last December, the state Supreme Court declined to review an appellate court ruling in the state’s favor. A related 2023 federal lawsuit filed by the city against the state, arguing that housing mandates violated the city’s 1st and 14th Amendment protections as a charter city, died in February when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Now, Judge Bacal has retroactively charged Huntington Beach penalties of $10,000 a month from January 2025 through the end of this month (as in $170,000) plus $50,000 a month starting in June until the city adopts a housing plan.

As expected, Mayor Casey McKeon, pictured above said, “The city strongly opposes these penalties, and will continue fighting for the rights of our residents and for the principle of local control against ongoing efforts by the Attorney General to centralize land use authority in Sacramento.”

Apparently, Surf City’s City Council has yet to realize the connection between rote repetition and insanity.

From Those People Behind Us

Also as expected, the realtor in our neighborhood just planted American flags in every front yard in our neighborhood. She’s been doing this every Memorial Day since we moved in more than 30 years ago.

I’ve always found real estate agents intriguing, especially the ones who live in their “territory” which is the case in my neighborhood. Realtors are fully invested in keeping property values high, they know their clients’ family structures, finances, and what home improvements residents have and have not made. They also give away sometimes useful swag. Magnets, calendars, note pads, and newsletters.

A realtor who writes newsletters acts a throughline character in my second novel Those People Behind Us. Her newsletters at the beginning of the story are pretty mild. They promote her skills and services, sing the praises of Southern California surf, sand, and sun, and offer helpful household hints like how to get smudges off stainless-steel appliances.

But when she hears about an affordable housing project replacing a nearby apartment building, the newsletters become increasingly unhinged. Her household hints are about preventing roaches and suggesting that women carry mace when they walk the neighborhood.

Unhinged or not, the newsletters were fun to write.

In other unhinged news that is not fun to write about, we are currently waiting for either an explosion or a toxic chemical dump from a malfunctioning chemical storage tank at a Garden Grove aerospace company. We are NOT in the evacuation zone, but since this tank sits 6.1 miles away from our house it’s still unnerving.

As my friend Lisa Alvarez posted, “Somehow the two official outcomes offered: the tank fails or the tank explodes, seem like an apt metaphor for where we are at this moment as a country.”

Happy Memorial Day.