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Much Ado About Publishing

A Fling Before Fifty

by Nina L. Diamond

Last week, when I turned 49, I realized that I have far more important things to achieve before I turn fifty.

I realized this just as I flung spaghetti at a wall for the very first time.

I felt the way other people feel the first time they climb Mount Everest or win the Pulitzer. Okay, maybe not as good as the Pulitzer.

It was exhilarating, it was fun, it was also slightly naughty. After all, we grew up being told by our parents not draw on the wall. So, throwing food at the wall would really be out of the question.

I hadn’t planned to fling my pasta. I was having a working dinner at my house with an author whose book I’ve been editing.

“I think the spaghetti is done,” I said as I lifted one strand with a fork. “It looks done. I’ll take a bite and see.”

“Why don’t you just throw it against the wall?” he casually suggested.

I froze and stared at him. “Do people really do that?” I asked. “I mean, you hear about it, and then there’s that old saying, ‘Let’s throw it against the wall and see if it sticks,’ but does anybody really test spaghetti that way?”

“Sure they do,” he replied. “I have. You mean you’ve never thrown spaghetti against a wall?”

“Believe it or not,” I said sheepishly, “I’ve never thrown spaghetti against a wall.”

He looked at me like I might be from another planet. A particularly tidy planet.

“Go ahead, throw it!” he cheered.

You would’ve thought I was a major leaguer winding up for a World Series pitch at the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded. I aimed. I flung. IT STUCK!

I gotta admit, I was surprised. “Look!” I gasped. “It stuck! Spaghetti really does stick to a wall!”

“Well, of course it does,” my partner in crime grinned like a proud coach.

Look what I’d been missing all those years. It felt wonderful, though I had to admit it looked all weird and squiggly. It was a pretty tenacious critter, too. It had become one with the wall. I had to pry it off. I wondered, if I’d left it there, and flung some more, when it dried would I have avant-garde kitchen art worthy of The Museum of Modern Art, a decorating book, or the Home & Garden channel?

I tossed the tossed pasta and drained the rest, feeling a sense of accomplishment far greater than one would think the event deserved.

And that’s when it hit me: It’s the little things, like throwing spaghetti at a wall, that I want to accomplish before I turn fifty.

Like most everyone else, I’ve spent my whole life working toward specific, big goals, usually with timelines in mind. It’s not that I’ve missed the little things. It’s just that in this year leading up to 50, accomplishing the little things seems more important than the big things.

My goal machine has always been churning: At 20, I thought that my first book should be published at forty. While persistence gets you published, and timing is rarely in your control – I was on Oprah two years before the book came out, which does a writer no good at all – coincidence can save the day, and my first book actually was published when I was forty. I thought that my next one should come out within five years, and, coincidentally, it did. I wanted a humor column, and finally got one. I’ve been published in most of the magazines and newspapers on, and interviewed nearly everyone on, my ever-evolving wish list.

I’ve talked about string theory with physicist Michio Kaku; stem cell theory with Christopher Reeve; nonviolence theory with Mahatma’s grandson, The Gandhi Institute’s Arun Gandhi; and even clowning theory with Ringling Brothers’ Master Clown Frosty Little. I’ve been on TV and film sets, onstage and backstage, and even in the private area at Kennedy Space Center where Apollo 11’s first man on the moon capsule was prepared.

But, until last year, I’d never spent an entire night at a truck stop.

It wasn’t planned for or longed for, it was car trouble. It wasn’t as much fun as throwing spaghetti against the wall, but it had its amusing moments.

Twenty years ago, I sat by a tropical lagoon talking about music and manatees with Jimmy Buffett, but until last fall I’d never carved my name into a wooden railing by a lake.

The morning after my pasta fling, while walking a couple of miles downtown to that same lake, I told my neighbor, Beth, about my spaghetti epiphany. She asked we whether I’d done this or that, and I was surprised by how many of those thises and thats I’d actually done, but not by how many of them were achieved (if such a word is appropriate) back when I was in college, including throwing something off a building. It was a carved pumpkin, tossed out the 7th floor window of the dorm. It landed with a satisfying splat! in the parking lot, away from cars and people, of course. I’ve always been a very careful rebel.

I told Beth about a few things I’d still like to do – I’ve always wanted to go to an Amish barn raising, and learn to tap dance – but most of the little things that catch my attention, I’ve discovered, are more like the spaghetti on the wall: a spontaneous realization that I’ve never done this before.

Or, as Beth, old and wise at 30 put it: “It’s very Zen. You don’t know what you haven’t done until you’ve done it.”

A few days after my pasta fling, I went to a recording studio where a singer I’ve been interviewing was working on his latest album. I walked into the control room and there they were on the wall: three real, live, velvet Elvis paintings! I’d heard about those, of course, but had never seen one (much less three) live and in person. They were huge and they were velvet. I touched them just to make sure.

I got a funny tingle: here’s another one of those things I’d never done before, and now I’ve done it before I turn fifty. The strange thing is that most people have probably never been in a recording studio, but have seen plenty of velvet Elvises. Because of my work, I’ve been in plenty of recording sessions. But, until last Wednesday, I’d never seen Elvis in all his velvet glory.

On my lakeside walk with Beth the morning after I flung the spaghetti, we saw two men who were participating in a fishing tournament catch a 40-pound carp that had lips like Mick Jagger. I’d never seen a 40-pound carp before. With or without grotesque Jagger lips. That’s a very big goldfish.

I added that to my running list of things I didn’t know I hadn’t done until I did them.

Thinking that it would be nice for no more than five years to elapse between published books, my next one should’ve been written by now so it can be published sometime during the next 11 months while I’m still forty-nine.

Well, it hasn’t happened. I don’t even know what my next book will be.

But, I do know how I plan to follow up my spaghetti fling. And I can do that right away. I’m thinking a great big lasagna noodle.

I think I need a bigger wall.

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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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Logo image courtesy of George Glazer Gallery, NYC georgeglazer.com