“Be careful who you spend your time with. You can fall in love with anyone.”

My childhood best friend’s mother, Ms. Cynthia, was the queen of such axioms. She uttered them in an unapologetic Alabama lilt and I believed her every word. During our carpools from ballet class to tennis lessons to Sunfish regattas and back again, I would drape my long, straight 12 year-old body over the center console of her Nissan station wagon and listen intently to her romantic wisdom, imagining the day I could actually put her advice to good use. I never thought I would lose my way. In between picking the perfect gentleman suitor—“not you or you, oh yes, you’ll do just fine” (choosing a boyfriend, I had decided, was just like selecting the chocolate truffle with the preferred praline filling)—was an elegant world of charm bracelets, opera-length kid-leather gloves and tinkling ice cubes. Bliss was in arm’s reach. “All you have to wait for now, Belle,” I mused, “are breasts, a tube of Clinique ‘Almost Lipstick’ and a curfew past 7:30.”

Done.

My first year in the city and the breasts, lipstick and non-parentally controlled SoHo apartment were in place. I was ready for my Yankee prince. I was ready to be courted. I was open. I was soooo open…

And I was lost.

If a trainer at Equinox told me he liked my work-out pants, I would arrange cocktails at the Bowery Bar. If an Argentine busboy smiled and said, “Que haces, mi linda? Quieres tomar una copa?” I would meet him at “Novecento” on West Broadway for a glass of Malbec. Sleep with the men, no—that’s never been my style. Waste my time and my brain space on them? Yes. Between working at the news channel and going on terribly inappropriate dates, I somehow forgot about myself, my writing and dear, wise Cynthia.

Then, one day I stopped. I opened a notebook. I wrote down my thoughts, wisdom passed down, anecdotes. Cynthia, Granddaddy, Mamma and all the rest poured onto the page. It felt good, I felt good. Of course, I still need a little bad… maybe that’s why I went with an old flame to “Scores” Thursday night…

“Be careful who you spend your time with. You can fall in love with anyone.”

Courtesy of my cousin in Birmingham, Alabama…

A girl from the South and a girl from the West coast were seated side by side on an airplane. The girl from the South, being friendly and all, said, “So, where y’all from?”

The West coast girl said, “From a place where they know better than to use a preposition at the end of a sentence.”

The girl from the South replied: “So, where y’all from, bitch?”

There was no one to fasten my pearl necklace. I would be getting ready for some really big dance—to be held in some grand ballroom that my little town didn’t even have possess—and I would be stuck. Hair done up real big, reminiscent of Mamma living in Madrid going to dinner dances at the Ritz, a long, sapphire blue dress, the swish of silk stockings—still, I couldn’t leave the house because I was alone and no man was there to position my pearls, fit the delicate gold hook inside the filigreed clasp.

When I was five years-old, eight, twelve and then sixteen this was a reoccurring nightmare, my greatest fear in life: I would have no man to fasten my necklace. Then, I was seventeen, a junior in high school and onto much more important things. Why are you worrying about a damn necklace—not to mention a boy—when there are SAT’s to study for, college applications to fill out, an important life to plan, I chastised myself.

University. My liberal arts college left a bad taste in my mouth so I created a major that would allow me to travel the world. Every moment of every day was spent concocting a new plan that moved me from Buenos Aires to Aix-en-Provence to Bahia del Salvador and back again. No time to worry about being alone.

Then, New York City happened to me. I worked at a news channel. The environment, the people, my first winter—everything was cold. Thoughts turned back to that pearl necklace. Maybe I hadn’t been such a fool after all. Age five and I knew what was important. It wasn’t about being dependant, it was about being with someone you love to help you along the way.

35 degrees up here in New York today. Chef is next to me and pouring my morning coffee and placing a kiss on my warm cheek. No pearl necklace to speak of yet. We’ll manage that bit later. First things first.

“There’s a certain power to naivete. You don’t know what can be done and can’t be done. You just go for it.”

“WELCOME WRITERS!”

The enthusiastic words were printed on a worn piece of translucent computer paper, one thick crease running through its center, attesting to the thousands of sessions and people before me that had read the greeting. The paper, in turn, was taped to a finger-smudged glass door—the entrance to a fancy Gramercy Park elementary school.

This was my first attempt at any sort of post-collegiate organized writing instruction. I had dressed up for the occasion, deciding to wear a silk pencil skirt, fitted black wool sweater and stilettos. I can still hear the heels clicking on the linoleum floor of the skinny little hallway. I felt too tall, inappropriate—as if my head was going to pierce the corkboard squares of the low-lying ceiling. Cut-outs of 5 year-old hands decorated the walls.

With my usual healthy dose of egoism, I had placed myself in “Advanced II Creative Writing,” classroom cap, 15 people. Shit. There was going to be no blending in with the masses if the masses were a mere handful of people. Why had I chosen the advanced class? Why wasn’t I drinking a nice Cote du Rhone at “Pastis” on that blisteringly cold January night instead of affixing a nuisance of a nametag to my nice sweater? But, somehow, I maintained the broad smile, thanked the woman at the makeshift registration desk and pressed the “Gotham Writers” pass into the palm of my hand. Here we go…

I stepped in the door and it was like all the classrooms before and smelled like Elmer’s glue, worn wooden floors, chalk dust. The people, however, were much different. There were no overly-dressed, self-conscious twenty-somethings like myself. I quickly took in the group before me: a graying seventy year-old woman, a pocket-sized man in Converse sneakers and a bad leather jacket, several frumpy, middle-aged men, a tall, pretty woman with a strong face and broad smile, a strawberry-blonde in her early forties with a classic, unforgettable face (delicate silver jewelry on her ears, wrists and fingers). I felt silly in my SoHo get-up so I slid into some 8 year-old’s desk and began pulling out a multitude of pens, pencils, notebooks—anything to distract myself from the hell that was sure to come. Two minutes until class was to begin. The class grew quiet. Pencils sliding across desks, papers shuffling, one loud clock ticking…the door creaked open.

“I hope you didn’t come for praise,” the man’s voice boomed as he crossed the threshold and strode to the front of the class. He commanded attention and moved to sit at the teacher’s desk, but, certainly he couldn’t be the instructor, I thought. The man was gorgeous with a full head of curly dark hair, a perfectly pronounced Roman nose and chiseled jaw. “I’m not here to tell you what’s good about your writing, I’m here to fix what’s bad. If you have a problem with this, go back down to the registration desk and get your refund. Now.”

With a face like that, he could shred the chapters of my life story and I would still come to back for more, I thought. I settled myself into the miniature desk and began to imagine what our children would look like…

“You. What are you doing? I gave you a timed assignment.”

“Me?” I said, with widened eyes, still thinking of our blonde, curly-headed children.

“Yes, you. Five minutes and then we’re reading our passages out loud. Get to it.”

“Umm, sorry, get to what? What exactly was the assignment?” No one looked up from their furious scribbles except for the dwarf in red Converse.

“Throw the reader into the middle of a dramatic scene. No build-up, no preliminary, just action.” He smiled kindly and then hunched over his notebook with all the intensity of a physicist on the brink of discovering cold fusion.

“Thank you,” I said. And, then, I did it. I was hooked. I wrote a scene about my mother and when I went to read it aloud I almost cried. The intensity of our teacher, Peter, the dedication of my peers, the stories I had to get out, to tell to someone.

This was my day. The day I set out to become a writer.