I'm on the board at The Writers Place in Kansas City, and I've gone and found myself chair of the marketing and membership committee. And guess what? We're having a spring happy hour on Thursday, May 26 from 6-8 pm. Free beer and writers! You know you want to come. I'll be sitting at the door making meaningful eye contact and silently brainwashing you to become a member so you can get reduced prices for workshops, a tax deduction (TWP is a nonprofit) and the pride of knowing you're a member of such a venerable organization.

Here's some background on The Writers Place:

The mission of The Writers Place is to promote writers and their work, to nurture an interest in writing and literature in a large, diverse audience and to contribute to the quality of cultural life in Kansas City and throughout the Midwest.

In addition to the spring happy hour, I'll be putting on a workshop called Writers Can Be Bloggers, Too on Saturday, June 18 from 1-3. It's $30 for nonmembers and $20 for members, and I'll be looking at blogging from an author's point of view -- pros and cons/how to get started and some more advanced social media techniques for authors who already have a blog and/or social media presence.

Hope to see you there! Here's how to sign up if you're a nonmember or a member.

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Speaking of writing and books, I'm giving away a $50 Barnes & Noble gift card this month on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

I hardly ever check Facebook (I admit it -- I'm just not really a Facebook person). So I probably took a few days to respond to my friend Jenny's mail, but when I opened it, I was touched by her heart and her family's goodwill.

Jenny and her family are collecting books and school supplies for Hackleburg, Alabama, which was recently flattened by a tornado. Here's the logo her son drew.

Jenny's currently got a bin sitting on her front porch in the Kansas City metro area, but since I'm not sure I want to just, oh, post her address here, please email Jenny at jennymeade311@gmail.com if you want access to that bin. I'm sure she'll only have you body scanned once.

Jenny writes:

If you live outside the area, I urge you to start your own collection, or go here and donate in other ways. If you want to know more about Hackleburg, Alabama, visit this Facebook page.

I know there are lots of other little towns with massive destruction like this one. I know there are more people who need help. I know there is much to do. I am one woman, we are one family, we are four states away, and this is what we can do. Do something, whatever you can do.

I remember posting my husband's essay about Parkersburg, Iowa, in 2008 after he received this text from his brother: "f4 tornado hits parkersburg. town gone." At this time of year, I always hear people from other areas of the country ruminating on tornados. They are fascinating and terrifying in their randomness, and when they hit, time after time, it's tempting to succomb to tornado and disaster fatigue and stop doing. I know I feel that way. I am sick of the disasters, sick of the sad stuff, sick of digging deep.

That's why I love what Jenny is doing. It's not hard to weed through your kid's bookshelf (which I am doing this weekend, Jenny) and find some great books to donate. You'd do it anyway. Smart projects take the behavior people are going to do anyway and turn it into good.

Like rebuild. Looks like the Parkersurg city-wide garage sale is this Saturday.

It's always worth it.

I was in the shower last night, getting ready for bed, when Beloved walked in. "You're not going to believe this," he said. "Osama bin Ladin is dead."

I peered through the fogged-up glass, watching the rivulets run down. I could barely see Beloved's face. He doesn't walk upstairs when I'm in going-to-bed mode to tell me just anything.

At first, my mind wanted to close it off like it was no big deal. It's been so fucking long that we've been hunting bin Ladin, through two presidents and a gamut of emotion for me and the rest of the American people.

I didn't know what I felt.

Part of it was anger in thinking with this guy dead, another guy will just pop up. (Or will he? We didn't actually get another Hitler.)

Part of it was relief that at least this particular asshole was out of commission.

Part of it was fear of retaliation, a desire to duck below the windows every time a car drives by.

And part of it was curiousity over what will happen to Osama bin Ladin's soul.

Mostly, I was tired. The news didn't make me jubilant, it made me feel exhausted. I knew the world could be a brutal place prior to September 11, 2001, but I didn't internalize it until then. Since then, so much has happened on U.S. soil, both natural and man-made -- Katrina, the BP oil spill, the recession -- it has often felt like one flight of bad news after another since that day -- really bad news, end-of-days kind of bad news.

I don't think I'm the only American who hung that stinking wreath of excrement around Osama bin Ladin's neck, let him represent all that was wrong with humanity.

Now he's gone, so perhaps I'll have to look harder into all that is wrong with the world -- and that makes me tired.

So I went to bed and I prayed for Osama bin Ladin's soul. I prayed he knew not what he did.

The little angel wanted us to tape the royal wedding. So we did. When I came downstairs this morning, she was already dressed and glued to the set.

"Did you watch Princess Diana's wedding?" she asked.

"No."

"Why not?"

"Well, it was on at like four in the morning. And I really didn't care."

She narrowed her eyes, trying to gauge if I was joking.

Just then, Meredith Viera (wearing a ridiculous hat that appeared to be free-climbing the side of her head), mentioned "Princess Katherine."

So now she's gone from Kate to Katherine?

Just like Katie Holmes went from Katie to Kate when she married Tom Cruise?

As though maybe they weren't good enough the way they were?

It's one thing when you change your own name. It's a completely different thing when someone else changes your name for you.

Good luck, Princess Kate. You're going to need it.

Remember when I wrote about the Santa/Easter Bunny/Tooth Fairy mess?

After the Easter weekend, I went into the little angel's playroom. Ma had drawn a picture of a bunny on the little angel's white board when she left. The next day, Ma's bunny was replaced with a headline, "Things I Believe In," and three pictures: Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.

We've talked about whether or not she should believe in them several times since the kids at school told her they weren't real, and both Beloved and I keep turning the conversation into a question for her -- what do you think? Neither of us wants to lie to her, but neither of us sees the harm in a little magic in childhood.

But this picture -- this picture made me sad, a little. The clinging, the need to write it out, to validate something I know won't last much longer. Often I'm shocked that she's seven. Birth to three seemed to take ten years, but three to seven shot by in an instant. I just taught her about Santa, didn't I? Is it really time to let it go already? We were just getting good at it!

It may seem contradictory that I'm writing about letting it all go as she's drawing pictures of it on her white board, but I see the pictures as evidence of her internal struggle. Are they real? Aren't they real? Should I believe the other kids? Why are my parents being so wishy-washy about this?

And there's a big part of me that just wants to get it over, to tell her it's a lovely fairy tale, that yes, it's us, it's always been us. Who could love you more than us? Who takes more satisfaction in your joy than us?

But that's another message that loses its magic if you shoot it straight. She needs to figure it out on her own.

This morning, I went to take a picture of the white board. Three dirty tissues lay on the floor, and it was all wiped away.

I opened the door to see a slight man standing on my front step. "I was driving by," he said, gesturing to his truck, "and I noticed your trees could use thinning."

I stepped outside, noting the woodchipper hitched to the back, the phone number on the side. "How much?"

He threw out a number, too high. I called Beloved, master negotiator. A few minutes later, my husband sent me to the ATM for the final amount. "Hurry," he said. "It'll go faster than you think."

I laughed. Surely they couldn't trim three trees that fast? But when I looked outside, the man on the doorstep was already 20 feet in the air. Three huge limbs lay on the ground. I thought about how long it would take Beloved and I to cut down such limbs, to drag them away. They must've weighed as much as a man.

I got in the car.

By the time I got back, the little man had moved to the front. "How much off this one?" he asked.

"As much as you can," I said. "I keep worrying that one's going to smash my car."

My sister and the little angel and I went on an errand. We were gone maybe twenty minutes, and when I returned, the man and his truck were gone, the trees transformed -- gone were the tributaries of tiny branches and left were the strongest limbs.

I pulled up to the house and sat there, staring at the tree, thinking how much I longed to trim my life like that, strip it to its skeleton, slash and burn the dead branches that come crashing down every time it rains.

With all the clutter gone, I could finally see my house.

Yesterday, some kids told my daughter that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are all frauds. She asked the lunch lady, and the lunch lady told her that her sons still believed.

The little angel cried a little bit and decided she didn't want to play with those friends just then.

My husband told me this story after our girl went to bed. I asked him what he said. He had told her that people believe all kinds of different things, from religion to politics to bunnies. You can still like other people even if they didn't believe the same as you do. I thought this a brilliant response.

I personally can't stand the Easter Bunny because Easter is the most important Christian holiday -- there is no Passover Chick, and I don't see why we need a bunny. I've never really leaned on the bunny and would be relieved to just tell her it's us, man, it's us. We know you like chocolate.

So she still believes. For now.

When I graduated from high school, my parents took me to Target and bought me things I'd need for college. As the cart filled with the bare essentials -- towels, shampoo, shower caddy, sheets, toothpaste -- I remember being shocked at how much it cost to live alone. It hadn't dawned on me before then that I couldn't just take everything out of my parent's house -- that I would, in fact, have to duplicate these essentials to live on my own.

What happens when there are no parents? Or when the parents can't provide?

A friend of mine recently forwarded me information about Give What You Got, an organization that helps Kansas City kids who are in foster care, residential treatment facilities, transitional/independent living programs and in at-risk households with supplies they need to transition into whatever world they are emptying out into. It's graduation time, and if you want to help, it's very easy.

I get a lot of review items, and I'm sending a bunch of cookbooks over to help a graduate out. Others are donating money to buy a microwave or pots and pans -- things to help ease the transition from childhood to adulthood.

Congratulations, graduates. Safe travels.

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Read my review of The Kitchen Daughter by Jael McHenry at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

She was wearing a white skirt. The bus seemed to take forever. So I handed her a badminton racket and a birdie. She frowned at me.

"What do I do with this?"

"Throw it up in the air and hit it."

She threw it wildly to the right, snapping at it with her right hand.

"You're left-handed. Put the racket in your left hand."

"Why?"

Why indeed.

"Always use your strong side in sports."

We practiced her throwing the birdie in the air until she could hit it. I told her not to worry about aiming right now, just hit the birdie. At first she held the racket and swiped laterally without connecting the flat part to the birdie at all. She is my daughter -- unpossessing of sports common sense.

"Just bounce it on your racket and get used to how that feels."

She smiled as it started to pop up and down without falling off.

"You're a natural, honey."

"Yeah, I'm a natural!"

Now, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I've never played badminton competitively in my entire life. I'm not good at ping pong, I don't know how to play tennis or golf. I never played basketball and don't know the rules to volleyball. I lasted two seasons in softball Little League playing right field when nobody could hit past third base.

There is nobody more unqualified than me to teach a kid any sport at all, whatsoever.

And I taught my little girl to hit the birdie yesterday.

Damn, I did it!