I’ve been meaning to send out an update for some time, but action has relentlessly swallowed every spare minute for months now. I could wax poetic about all the recent changes but I’ve decided to knock it down to 10 words:

Got married, quit job & radio show, moved to India

Many of you know all these things, many of you may be scratching your heads wondering WTF, another portion of you are probably just thrilled to have stopped receiving Charm School emails once a week. But for those of you who actually do care and are interested, I’m including a couple of wedding pictures as proof, an intro to, and a link for the Pam and Phil Travel blog. The first few entries will explain everything. Soon we’ll be posting our wedding pictures.

Pam and Phil’s Travel Blog
http://www.blog.pamandphil.com

Intro:
It’s difficult not to skid into the rehashed territory of late night PBS travel documentaries when writing a travel blog, but to balance that out, there is the fact that this is Pam and Phil’s Travel Blog – a couple who headed across the Mojave Desert without actually knowing it was a desert, and only carrying about half a bottle of water. The same people that broke into a ghost town amusement park in Minnesota to see a 30 foot tall sculpture of Paul Bunyan. We’ve visited the alien museum in Roswell New Mexico and waited for hours for the damn Marfa lights to show up, and burst into tears at the beauty of a Texas sunset. We are the same couple whose perfectly good midnight road trip was interrupted when the road abruptly ended and we were spit out onto a gravel fire trail at 70 mph. Apparently we’d taken a wrong turn. Neither of us had a map. One of us can’t read a map. The other of us usually can’t find his glasses. We are the people who lied our way into Burning Man early and camped in the shade of a tailpipe for three days while holding down territory for the rest of the camp, each thought the other was going to deal with shade and packing the stove — turned out we’d laid claim a large swath of playa earmarked for the handicapped. No one asked us to move.

It really is quite amazing that we haven’t fallen off the edge of the earth yet….so stay tuned. India is a big country and a year is a long time ; )

http://www.blog.pamandphil.com

Please feel free to drop me an email, find me on facebook, ichat, or skype when you have a sec. I’m sure homesickness will kick in any day now.

Namaste,

Pamela
AKA  Pixie

xox

 
Contact info:
ichat: pammydog@mac.com
Skype name: pamelaholm
email: pamela@pamelaholm.com
Phone: undecided 

Download podcasts @ http://www.piratecatradio.com/playlist.php?dj=charm 

“Good for you,” I said.  “Good lord,” I thought. I’ve seen the pictures; I’ve heard the reports of relief chaos, of rotting muck in 100-degree heat, of sharks and corpses. But I know better than to express my fears.  “Good for you Sweetheart,” I said again, because I meant it, and know I can’t stop her.

I can’t claim to be surprised. My daughter has a long history of taking these sorts of hair-raising trips. It started when she was 15 and announced that she was going to spend three weeks of her summer working at an orphanage in Guatemala.  My stomach fell through the floor – I’d only just start letting her ride the city bus on her own.   

“If you find a program,” I said, banking on her dropping the ball, “we’ll see.” Responsible parents don’t talk their teenagers out of acts of kindness. The next day she came home from school with information on a program somewhere near an active volcano – a week of language school followed by two weeks of immunizing children at the local orphanage.

“You arrange it,” I said, praying something age appropriate would distract her, like shoe shopping or a movie. Within a week she’d contacted the school and made arrangements to stay with a Guatemalan family.

“Okay,” I said calmly, “I’ll take you there, and if it seems safe you can stay on your own.” After a few good teenage whines and door slams she agreed to my terms.

For the next two months I panicked and plotted how to wriggle out of the arrangement.  “This is exactly what a child her age should want to do,” I kept trying to reminding myself, while boning up on recent Guatemalan history and checking the state department website for travel advisory information – none of which did anything to quell my fears.

By the time the plane took off I was fairly comfortable with the idea of leaving my only child in the hands of a country who was working it’s way back from a decade of military sponsored genocide. But before we’d even left the airport I’d decided there was no way in hell I was leaving my daughter there for three weeks. It was the metal box at the airport entrance with the words No firearms allowed in airport. Please leave them here, scrawled on the side in felt pen, that clinched it for me.

The next spring Cara starting making noises about spending her summer setting up and running a daycare center in a Mexican village. Once again the anxiety set in, and once again I held my tongue. By the time summer had rolled around she had recruited six friends, written a curriculum and gathered donated materials for her foray. I dropped her off at the airport then sat by the phone for a month awaiting news from her kidnappers. A month later she returned home happy and suntanned, six months after that the village was destroyed by a hurricane.

A couple years later, after she’d flown off to Ohio – where they have tornadoes and republicans – to go to college, I was informed of her plans to spend winter vacation learning to surf in Costa Rica. “Why can’t you just go to Florida and get drunk like other kids?” I wanted to scream into the phone. Instead I took a deep breath and said, “Sounds like a great plan, Honey. Send a postcard.” While Costa Rica is a relatively safe country without much civil unrest or threat of natural disaster, it is the undisputed drowning capital of the world.

Within a week an email arrived saying she was bored of stoned surfers and was going to spend the rest of the trip traveling through Panama, the land of pirates and Manuel Noriega.
This time I could barely muster the energy to panic.

By the time Cara told me she was going to New Orleans to scrape toxic mold off houses that were now located in an alligator swamp, my pulse didn’t even flutter. By now I’m resigned. What better way for an Oberlin environmental studies major to spend her spare time than helping to clean up the largest environmental disaster of our time? I just wish that once she’d take a trip that didn’t require shots and where a haz mat suit wasn’t part of the dress code.

For most of us it’s easy to look at the mud-soaked images of New Orleans and feel instantly overwhelmed.  I admire her willingness to jump in and make a difference. I can’t claim to have set an example. When I was her age I was, well, pregnant.  I did shuttle her off to art school with me when she was still in diapers where she breathed in oil paints, bore witness to ungodly performance art and served as a model for a friend’s photo documentary on slaughterhouse ethics. But for the life of me I can’t figure out how this paved the way for a young lifetime of philanthropy.

My adventurous spirit abandoned me after a childhood of barreling down hills on anything with wheels and leaping off swings at their apex. Now I won’t even cross a bridge without first being shot with a tranquilizer dart. There are times when I want to explain to my daughter that charity begins at home and that her mother’s nervous system is a worthy cause.  It’s not that I’m not proud of her, I’m well aware that while I sit on the porch over looking the beautiful San Francisco landscape, worrying about sharks and tuberculosis, she is making a meaningful contribution to the world.  I can only hope that by raising a child that is doing her duty, that I have done a portion of mine.

Cara will be in New Orleans from Oct 22 – Oct 30.
 If you’re interested in contributing to her trip please contact me at pamela@pamelaholm.com

My new novel The Night Garden, hits the shelves on May 17. Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews have been nice to me, a great relief. My publisher, Mac/Adam Cage, has done a great job of getting the word out and we’ve just been told that The Night Garden was chosen as a BookSense pick for June 05 – nice.

LOVESICK – the cat allergy musicalThis project started as a joke, but over time that joke has taken on a life of it’s own. Lovesick, is a musical comedy I’ve been working on, on and off for the past eight years or so. I keep going back to it between projects, and it keeps on seeming like a good idea – or at least an entertaining bad idea. I’m currently casting the play and working on the music with the most fabulous Jim Fourniadis. All of it makes me smile a lot. The play is going to hit the stage the first three weekends in July 05 at the Darkroom Theater in San Francisco. It’s a delight to share the joke.

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After working on two books back to back and spending the better part of four years alone in a room writing, it’s time to join forces, join humanity, work collaboratively.

It’s going to be a busy summer. I’m thrilled.