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Much Ado About Publishing

Every Day is Garbage Day

by Nina L. Diamond

So you think that getting published is the only way that people will remember your writing? Think again.

It’s been more than 30 years since I first read a “Mother X” letter, and probably 25 years since I read my last one, and I still think about them. And Mother X isn’t even my mother.

She’s my friend, Kathryn’s mother.

Back in the ‘70s, when Kat and I were roommates in college, her mother, Jessine Winter (who looks like Katharine Hepburn), wrote these fabulously long and detailed letters about everything from her daily routine and family news, to her wild escapades riding her bicycle around town; from motherly advice to philosophical musings that would’ve rivaled anything we’d picked up from Firesign Theater or Monty Python.

She signed the letters, “Mother,” followed by a big “X” underneath, which, of course, meant kisses. We nicknamed her “Mother X” and still call her that to this day.

She wrote at least one letter a week, and nearly every single one of them began with the words, “Today is garbage day.”

After a couple of years of this, one day when Kat was reading her mother’s letter out loud (we always took turns reading them out loud, and eventually they were addressed not only to Kat, but to me and a bunch of our other friends, too), and she uttered those immortal words, “Today is garbage day,” I wistfully and slowly, with a lilt in my voice, replied, as if in some dreamy 1940s silver screen romantic melodrama, “Every day is garbage day when you’re in love.”

It just seemed like the thing to say, and I’d said it almost as a sigh, yet with the utmost in romantic realism. On paper, the words look like a complaint, but what made the line become a permanent catch phrase, useful in all sorts of situations, was that I’d said it in such a hopeful, dreamy way that was at complete odds with what the words really mean.

Okay, I admit a bit of truth leaked into this. What 20-year-old college girl, or guy, for that matter, then or now, doesn’t have at least a few complaints about love, romance, or the lack thereof? Hell, what man or woman of any age, in any era, doesn’t? The bookstore shelves overflowing with self-help books certainly proves the commercial viability and universal appeal of my comment.

I was reminded of this phrase recently when a friend happened to say on the phone, “Today is garbage day.”

Right on cue, on automatic pilot, I sighed, “Every day is garbage day when you’re in love.”

She thought I was nuts. But, then I explained.

I always thought that it would make a nifty title for a relationship self-help book, or even a witty novel or movie. In Moonstruck, when Olympia Dukakis asks Cher, “Do you love him?” and Cher says yes, Dukakis, who plays her mother, replies, and I’m quoting almost verbatim, “That’s too bad. When you love them, they drive you crazy because they know they can.”

Yup, that mother certainly knew that Every Day is Garbage Day When You’re in Love.

And when we let Mother X in on my little joke, she agreed, especially since she often gave rather inventive romance advice to all of us in her letters.

In her September 9, 1976 letter, a classic, she wrote about her recommended strategies for winning over a guy, “If you insist on being dumb like the rest of the world since Adam and Eve, don’t despair … he will get used to having you around … Old shoes are comfortable, you know. A new girl may give him bunions … Just happen to be in the shower when he is, smash into him and drop your books on his toes … go over and borrow a bowl of milk for your cat.”

When I read that last line out loud to Kathryn that day in my college apartment, I lifted my eyes from the letter and said, “I don’t have a cat.”

I looked back down at the letter to continue reading it aloud, and saw that Mother X, ever the mind-reader, had written, “GET ONE, THEN!”

I did, about two years later, but because I’ve been a cat mommy for most of my life, not as romance strategy. Sorry, Mother X. That shower advice was good, though.

Her letter continued, “Engage him in fascinating conversation about himself or leechee nuts … If nothing else, after a long campaign to win him over, you may be so thoroughly sick of him that you will dump him and say, ‘Good riddance.’”

A bunch of us ended up doing some dumping, but Kathryn ended up marrying her college boyfriend, Rob, who’s always been like a big brother to me, and they have three terrific, talented, amusing kids, and just celebrated their 25th anniversary.

I don’t think she followed any of Mother X’s well-meaning advice that was passionately detailed in that letter, though we all still laugh ourselves dizzy over the bunions, the shower, the leechee nuts, and that unforgettable GET ONE, THEN!

If Kathryn did end up enchanting Rob with leechee nuts, nobody ever told me about it.

In one of Mother X’s letters, she declared, “I intend to become an old character myself, as long as I have to become old.”

She made good on that promise. Mother X is 79 now, and though she is still a character, she is hardly old. She can still give that bicycle a good workout and she still has the posture of an 18-year-old prima ballerina.

The Garbage Day philosophy lives on, too, and applies across the board to anything that has its ups and downs.

Every day is garbage day when you’re looking for an agent. Or a publisher.

And certainly after you’ve found them.

And when you’re trying to market your book and get media attention.

“Father X” certainly knows a lot about that.

He’s Mother X’s husband, Kat’s father, Galen Winter (who looks like Sean Connery but wanted to be Ernest Hemingway), and in addition to his career as a lawyer, now retired, he’s been a published writer for decades.

His bi-monthly humor column, “The Major,” has run for 20 years in the national magazine Shooting Sportsman. He’s had nonfiction books and novels published by independent publishers, and had an unsatisfactory experience publishing with P.O.D. companies. You can find his books online at Amazon.com. Check him out. He’s just as funny as his wife.

More than a decade ago, many of the Mother X letters were destroyed by water in Kathryn and Rob’s basement, but Kathryn managed to save quite a number of them. Mother X stopped writing them a while ago, but I spoke to her tonight, and asked her to resume her letter writing career. She said she never realized just how much we loved and were entertained by what she thought were just ramblings.

She agreed to write them again.

I can’t wait to open my mailbox and read those long, wacky, honest, heartfelt gems that always begin, “Today is garbage day.”

That’s the best way I can think of to begin a brand new year.

* * * * *

Nina L. Diamond is a journalist, essayist, and the author of Voices of Truth: Conversations with Scientists, Thinkers & Healers. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Omni, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, The Chicago Tribune, and The Miami Herald.

Ms. Diamond was a writer and performer on Pandemonium, the National Public Radio (NPR) satirical humor program, for its entire run in Miami and select markets nationwide from 1984-1998. As an editor, she works frequently with other authors and journalists on both fiction and non-fiction.

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