Mary Lou Sanelli
I’d like to begin by saying: I love what I do. I am so grateful to be an author and speaker, appreciative of the programmers who invite me, excited to share my work with willing listeners. Ten women in a book club or hundreds in a conference room, it doesn’t matter.
However.
There are times when if I was also the person assigned to hold the door open for the audience members as they left, I’d want to trip a couple of them.
I often use the line, “c’est la vie,” by which I mean “such is life,” all the while wishing it wasn’t.
A few events — and there are always a few — just backfire for one reason or another, so that I have to pray for the stamina to hang in there when all I am feeling is so pissed off that, at any minute, I fear it will show.
As I write this, I’m thinking that Seattle is not the same city as it was before the pandemic, but I expect this because I’m not the same woman. A lot has happened, even more has followed, and it feels like way too much and not nearly enough.
Either way, my ties to Seattle have only intensified.
No matter what draws me downtown, I always take a moment to stop and take in the view of Elliott Bay and give thanks for all Seattle was, is struggling to be again, and for the beautiful nature that surrounds it either way. Here is the city I know so well. Two decades ago, it cast a spell on me that helped build a wonderful — for a writer at least — career. I came looking for footing in a promising new city, never really coming around to the weather, but never happier.
So, I’ve been wondering what it is, exactly, about our present city — our present world — that has brought about in too many of us a neglect of courtesy. Is it the nearly three years of staying at home? The constant, repetitive, low-frequency fear of the 24-hour news cycle? I don’t know. What I know is that rudeness has become a given lately, no matter where I find myself. Add to this an increasingly less-than-patient attitude toward each other as witnessed by a writer who doesn’t look down at her phone when she’s out and about but pays close attention. To everything.
Still, one would think (hope!) that some would be better at decorum, especially those who have had every opportunity to practice it. Take one prestigious downtown club (here’s a clue: Fourth and Marion). After my last author event there, I thought of someone I haven’t thought of in years. She and I were bartenders together, and we could count on the construction workers and cops to tip well. But the white-collar guys? Not so much. Causing her to whisper in my ear, “Those with the most give the least.”
Here’s what happened: Twenty members of said Prestigious Club registered for my talk. Five showed up. The programmer was disappointed. I was disappointed. But that’s not the worst of it. Out of the five, four were eating tacos, three were noticeably intoxicated, two were on time, one bought a book, but only after I embarrassed her into it. And you know a hometown audience is the hardest, so I didn’t sleep well the night before. (It’s been suggested I give up red wine in the evening, and I will … think about it.)
But the yin yang, dark and light, of being a speaker, of being alive, is that the opposite experience is right around the corner.
Sure enough, later in the week, I was a keynote speaker for an international organization in a convention center in Pennsylvania. Yes, I had to travel by air to get there and not just hump up Madison pulling a carton of books behind me. But, no, those hundreds of listeners were not eating tacos and slurping Merlot through my talk. They were … generous, there is no other word for it. Will I try to emulate the generosity I admired in them? Definitely.
And then.
A few days later, my new column came out. And while I’ve never received so many positive emails from readers, a few others didn’t like it one bit. It was one of those columns that literally wrote me, eager to free itself since the reversal of Roe V. Wade. To recap: I call out the evangelists for spending so much money to ensure women cannot have final say over their reproductive healthcare options.
One comment from a reader really got to me: “I marched the streets for CHOICE in the 1960s, after going through a hell experience in my early 20’s when access to abortion meant you had to beg a panel of doctors that you would commit suicide if you remained pregnant. My mother always said, ‘Abortions would be a nickel on every street corner if men could get pregnant.’ ”
Others? They’d like to put an end to me and told me so. The oddest thing, though, is one begins his hateful emails with “Dear Mary Lou” and signs off with his real name. I didn’t want to go to the police. But my husband copied his emails and marched on down to the department. When I wrote for the Northwest Life section of The Seattle Times, I had to get a restraining order. When I began at this paper, I had to get a restraining order. I don’t feel like getting another, but I will if I have to. For now, after his second email, I had a second glass of wine despite earlier advice not to have a second glass of wine. And I let his words go.
Well, I am trying to let them go.
C'est la vie.
Mary Lou Sanelli is the author of Every Little Thing, a collection of essays that was nominated for a Washington State Book Award. Her previous titles include poetry, fiction, non-fiction and a children's title, Bella Likes To Try. For more information about her work, visit www.marylousanelli.com.