Monthly Archives: August 2009

Random Reading Notes

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Lots happening in the “Shire” and it. is. glorious.  Our community is celebrating weddings, music, friendship and growth.  I had not factored in how fatiguing glory can be, but surely there will be time to rest in the winter. 

One of my dear ones is getting married this Saturday.  Here is a Tolstoy quote that landed in her invitation:

The goal of our life should not be to find joy in marriage
but to bring more love and truth into the world.
We marry to assist each other in this task.
The most selfish and hateful life of all
is that to two beings who unite
in order to enjoy life.
The higher calling is that of the man
who has dedicated his life
to serving God and doing good
and who unites with a woman in order
to further that purpose.
~ Leo Tolstoy

The irony of that quote is that joy is the byproduct of a life of service. 

I have so many good books on my nightstand I can hardly bear going to sleep. 

You know, if you’ve read this blog for more than a week, how much I admire Wendell Berry.  I have two new book of essays and I love to read them wherever they fall open. 

Love is never abstract.
It does not adhere to the universe or the planet
or the nation or the institution or the profession,
but to the singular sparrows of the street,
the lilies of the field,
“the least of these my brethren.”
Love is not, by its own desire, heroic.
It is heroic only when compelled to be.
It exists by its willingness to be anonymous, humble, and unrewarded.
~ from “Word and Flesh”

Another author in my top five favorites is Neil Postman.  The Disappearance of Childhood is teeter-tottering in my pile of books.  Some quotes such as “Reading is, in a phrase, an antisocial act.” need a bit more background to be appreciated.  My antipathy to television needs no bolstering, but you can’t blame me for chortling a bit over this Reginald Damerall quote on how television erodes the dividing point between childhood and adulthood:

“No child or adult becomes better at watching television
by doing more of it.
What skills are required are so elemental
that we have yet to hear of a television viewing disability.”

I’m revisiting a book that had a powerful impact on me thirteen years ago: Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman.  It is curious to re-read the book at a little more emotional distance.  I asked my husband to read the introduction and the first chapter in order to understand me better.  While he believes Wendell Berry is a better grief counselor, Curt appreciated this:

“How do I keep my mother’s death from being a lifelong lesson?
How do I keep it an isolated incident,
something so overarching, so devastating,
so pervasive in my life still?
How do I keep from being crippled by it?”
The answer, I believe–if there is such a thing
as a concise answer to such questions–
is to slowly learn to live with the loss and not under it,
to let it become a companion
rather than a guide.

Helene Hanff is kick-in-the-butt fun to read. 84, Charing Cross Road is high on my list of lifetime favorites.  She uses a strange and intriguing convention in Apple of My Eye, a book about New York City.  The entire book is a diary about a book she *plans* on writing.  Her friend  Patsy is forever commenting, “Put that in the book.”  Her humor is irrepressible, her writing wonderful.  She is one of those friends who is a walking encyclopedia, able to give you a two minute synopsis of the history of anything.  Thanks to Hanff, I’m am SO ready to visit the Big Apple.  The Cloisters, a collection of twelth and thirteenth century buildings, torn down and reconstructed in NYC, is now on my “must see” list.  I had never heard of it before this week.  Anybody been?

Then you look out,
and the splendor of the city
smites you all over again
with “astonishment of the heart,”
as it says in the Bible.

Finally, I am snuggling into Donald Hall’s memoir of his childhood summers with his grandparents in Maine, String Too Short to Be Saved.  I have to finish this so others (who are not yet aware that their earthly happiness depends upon reading this book) can begin.  When our kids were all together last weekend, we spent an evening reading sections of Aunt Doris’ memoirs aloud.  Whenever it sparked a memory, Grandpa filled in his own memories.  Stuff like his Grandpa who died in a field, sitting next to his tractor. My kids heard about the fine art of burning a page of the catalog and throwing it into the outhouse hole before you did your business so the seat was warm.  This book reminded me of that evening.

The idea of their [Donald’s grandparents] mortality
was never far from the surface of my day,
for a flush or a sigh or a hand pressed to the heart
brought death to me,
as if I had heard someone say the word.
It was a pack on my back,
and I would feel the sharp, physical pain
of their approach to dying,
something becoming nothing–or
was it my own approach to bereavement
that made my side ache?

What are you reading this summer?

Motherless Daughters

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By 1996 I was certain sure I had made peace with grief.  Sorrow was a sealed file with the words RESOLVED stamped on the front.  I had been “moving on”, as they say, for decades.

Suddenly, with the stealth of a B-2 bomber, grief pounced and hijacked me.  While I was held hostage, facing my familiar adversary, I had the sense of confusion and disbelief: This cannot be happening to me.  It seemed surreal, disconnected, in short, unbelievable.

It was in that context of confused ongoing mourning that I first read Motherless Daughters.

My mother-in-law wanted to help; she gave me this book with the hesitant hope that it might give me something she herself couldn’t give.  I planted myself in the small bathroom at 10:00 p.m. on a Saturday night and started reading.  By 4:00 a.m. I had finished the book, exhausted, soggy,  numb, and emotionally done-in.

When Hope Edelman wrote about experiences, emotions and situations that I knew firsthand in my soul but had never spoken aloud, it could only be described as cathartic.  Edelman gave me words to articulate the sorrow and, more than anything, helped me to understand the nature of grief.  The first chapter, The Seasons of Grieving, is the best concise summary of grief that I have ever read.

I recently revisited Hope’s narrative.  I was surprised to see statements I’ve been saying so long that I thought they were my very own.  The words of the first chapter are still powerful and continue to resonate in my soul.  Back in 1996, they reassured me that I wasn’t some freak of nature who refused to “get over it.”

Having said that, I found the predominant value of this book much more in its diagnosis than in its therapy.

Quotes to copy:

Like most other families that lose a mother, mine coped as best it could, which meant, essentially, that we avoided all discussion of the loss and pretended to pick up exactly where we’d left off.

“My mother died when I was nineteen,” [Anna] Quindlen wrote. “For a long time, it was all you needed to know about me, a kind of vest-pocket description of my emotional complexion:  ‘Meet you in the lobby in ten minutes–I have long brown hair, am on the short side, have on a red coat, and my mother died when I was nineteen.'”

Ten years ago I was convinced I’d finished mourning my mother.  The truth was, I’d barely begun.

Edelman describes a random incident years after her mother’s death where she is balled up in physical pain, clutching her stomach.  She had thought she had sailed through the five stages of death and moved on.  I had a similar moment when, as if lightening from heaven, I was struck, pierced, skewered, with overwhelming grief.  I thought I was well-adjusted, “normal” and that everything was copacetic.  For no discernable reason (I mean the timing of the episode) I was brought to my knees, in tears, and incapable of articulating anything but deep, deep pain.  I ended up in a seldom-used restroom in our church, gasping for air, howling in anguish.  Someone got my husband and told him to go in and check on me.

Here’s what I’ve learned about grief since then: It’s not linear.  It’s not predictable.  It’s anything but smooth and self-contained.  Someone did us all a grave injustice by first implying that mourning has a distinct beginning, middle, and end.  That’s the stuff of short fiction.  It’s not real life.

Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons, like the moon.  No one is better created to understand this than a woman, whose bodily existence is marked by a monthly rhythm for more than half her life.

Fine Art Friday – Watercolor!

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A Moment Spurred,  Ann Yoder


My goal as an artist is to create paintings
that share a ‘voice’ that your heart hears.
~  Ann Yoder

People!  I have a real treat for you.

My friend, Ann Yoder.

Our kids were in play group together.

Whenever we meet randomly in town,
it is talk, talk, talk…

Please don’t skip this link, she does excellent work.

Portfolio.

The stories behind the paintings are like
the “Vivid” setting on a camera.

Inspiration Behind the Art
Your day *will* be better because of her art.

Found in the Laundry Room

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Our cousin’s laundry room sports this sign.
Did her husband make it?
This looks like something her father might have made.
 It makes me smile.


Emily at “Not so idle hands” blog is giving away a sign she makes.
Crafters, you’d love this blog.
You can enter to win a sign by clicking on Emily’s name.


I love looking at this Degas when I’m scooping
up wet clothes from the washer.
Who knew ironing could look so romantic?
All it takes is watercolor!


Folk art from my sister-in-law.

 
The background picture at Nettie’s blog.
I love pictures of woman hanging the wash.

What’s in your laundry room/nook/space (beside stinky socks)?

A Friendship for Bedtime

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My friend in Zimbabwe is reading Andy Catlett by Wendell Berry.

This morning’s inbox has these lines in response.

I started on Andy Catlett last night.
Oh, what a friendship for bed time.
Is that whole book set  on just one day?
Wendell Berry is truly gifted, to tell a story like that.
I left reading off just where grandma was making a raspberry pie.
I cannot wait for that pie to get out of the oven.

Consume, Produce, Go Out, Stay Home

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TV and other media have learned to suggest with increasing subtlety and callousness–especially, and most wickedly, to children–that it is better to consume than to produce, to buy than to grow or make, to “go out” than to stay home.  If you have a TV, your children will be subjected almost from the cradle to an overwhelming insinuation that all worth experiencing is somewhere else and that all worth having must be bought. 

The purpose is blatantly to supplant the joy and beauty of health with cosmetics, clothes, cars, and ready-made desserts.  There is clearly too narrow a limit on how much money can be made from health, but the profitability of disease–especially disease of spirit or character–has so far, for profiteers, no visible limit.

~ Wendell Berry in the essay “Family Work” (1980), The Gift of Good Land

What do you think of this quote?

The Book That Changed My Life

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George Grant first introduced me to the idea of reading what influenced your favorite author.  What shaped his views, her style…what has contributed to his voice?  So a book like The Book That Changed My Life is right up my alley.  Except I had not even *heard* of about half of the authors.  Wow. 

The interviews with David McCullough and Katherine Paterson are worth the price of the book.  Of course, McCullough understands the topic: he read what John Adams read while preparing to write about him.  And Diane Osen, editor and interviewer, has my admiration by one fact alone: she has read all of Trollope. 

And all those writers with whom I am unfamiliar?  Here’s some of their stuff: 

The very act of storytelling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of narrative is, by definition, holy…I’m very at home in the Biblical tradition that talks about the Word of God as the central manifestation of the way in which God is int he world.  This is what I take to be the essence of biblical faith…In other words, my notion of narrative informs my faith, and my notion of faith informs my idea of what writing is for.      ~ James Carroll

I think technology drains us of convictions.  It is so powerful and so sophisticated that we tend to lose some of our self-confidence in an almost imperceptible way.”    ~ Don DeLillo

Music can prepare one for writing prose that is very metrical and cadenced and musical; as a matter of fact, the terms that we use for prosody in English come from music.  One creative area, I think, cross-fertilizes another.   ~ Charles Johnson

David McCullough is a historian I greatly admire.  His books stick with me years after I’ve read them. 

I’m writing for people like me.  If I can convey how interesting the past really was, how full of life those people really were, what they were up against and how it turned out for them, then, my feeling is others will want to read what I’ve written.  And there’s no need every to trick things up, to sugar this or that, or use dramatic devices to make it interesting.  ~ David McCullough

I was very interested in the books that shaped him.  Here is a partial listing:

A Stillness at Appomattox, Bruce Catton
Reveille in Washington, Margaret Leech
Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner  
My Antonia, Willa Cather
A Night to Remember, Walter Lord

Katherine Paterson is a children’s author whose works move me.  I have sobbed, visibly and vocally, through some chapters of her books.  And I was *thrilled* to discover that some of my most favoritest books ever are also hers. 

I remember one woman just going at me, and she said, What did your father think of such a book [Gilly Hopkins]? knowing that my father was a very conservative Presbyterian.  And I said, Well, of all my books The Great Gilly Hopkins is his favorite, but then he’s read the story of the prodigal son.  Which was a mean thing for me to say, but he did understand what the story was about.  It’s very sad to me that many Christians don’t understand it.  They think that a Christian book is nice.  They don’t understand that Christians deal with life-and-death, hell-and-heaven issues.  And sin is a very important part of what we have to say.  ~ Katherine Paterson

I’m including all the books that have changed Katherine Paterson’s writing life.  You can be assured that the Desai and Endo books are now on my Wish Lists.

Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Kristin Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset
Clear Light of Day, Anita Desai
Silence, Shusaku Endo
Emma, Jane Austen
Poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins

Just Be Cuz

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We’re back from a trip to Omaha for time with extended family.  We participated in two family reunions (Grandpa’s side and Grandma’s side) and visited with all of my husband’s living aunts and uncles, all but two of his cousins. 

I’m curious about cousins.  Some are functional strangers who happen to be related.  Sharing an ancestor doesn’t appear to be enough commonality to carry on a conversation. 

But other cousins, upon meeting for the first time in decades, seem familiar, because they truly are family.  They are kin and kindred. 

It’s fun to discover family traits that travel through parallel generations.  One cousin said her husband calls her relatives “human doings” because of their high energy and focus on activity.  She quizzed Curt on his personality and came up with many matches; for example, she likes to read but only if all the work is done. 

We heard and told many stories.  Ah, the art of storytelling: the opening, timing, animation, interaction, enthusiasm, and the ability to stick the landing.  It’s fun to listen to couples tag-team their history, one jumping in with color commentary, one handing off the narrative, at times both talking in stereo.  And stories flowing downstream accrue more stories.  There were goofy and crazy yarns, funny and unexpected outcomes.  But the ones that found a home in my heart were the stories where the person opened up his/her life, pain and all, and didn’t mask the hurt.

I have a friend who has no cousins.  No aunts or uncles.  Her dad and mom were both the only child.  Her family history goes straight up the branch like a poplar tree.   

We all grow up with the weight of history on us.
Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains
 as they do in the spiral chains of knowledge
 hidden in every cell of our bodies.

    ~ Shirley Abbott

The great gift of family life is
to be intimately acquainted with people
 you might never even introduce yourself to,
had life not done it for you.

    ~ Kendall Hailey, The Day I Became an Autodidact

Call it a clan,
call it a network,
call it a tribe,
call it a family.

Whatever you call it,
whoever you are,
you need one.

~ Jane Howard


How many cousins do you have?  Do you see them often?  Ever?  With what emotions do you anticipate family gatherings?