I just read Alan Brennert's Moloka'i, about the 19th-century leper colony. It was a better book than I expected, focusing less on the horrors of the disease and the isolation policies, and more on how Hawaiian people, some of them based on historical characters, might have lived and died in Kaluapapa. His protagonist, Rachel Aouli Kalama Utagawa, lives long enough to receive the sulfa drugs that keep Hanson's disease from progressing or being contagious, so at the end of her life she is able to leave Kaluapapa and go home to Honolulu.
The description of Honolulu particularly interested me. Rachel lived there as a 7-year-old in 1891 and finally came back in 1948: "The difference between Old Honolulu and New, she would come to decide, was the difference between a beautiful woman who was simply being herself and a beautiful woman calling attention to herself: a little vain perhaps, but you couldn't say she wasn't attractive." I lived in Honolulu for one summer, in 1971, and finally came back during the summer of 2007. The beautiful woman calling attention to herself is still beautiful, and calling more attention to herself than ever, but some of the attention does detract from the beauty now. While I wouldn't want to say that there should be fewer hotels ringing Waikiki beach, I would say that fewer of them should be high-rises. The shadow of the high rise hotels blots out the morning sun on the beach and the trade winds that should be blowing around all the beach-side businesses. I also wouldn't say that there should be fewer restaurants opening onto the beach, but it would be nice if fewer of them were chains, turning some of the rarest real estate in the world into the same sort of homogenized mall offerings you can find anywhere. Next door to the hotel we stayed in last summer was a thriving Cheesecake Factory restaurant. I looked in every time we passed, to see if it was a novelty for Japanese tourists, or something, but the clientele looked overwhelmingly European-American.
Each Hawaiian island is a little bit of paradise, and even Brennert's characters, exiled and imprisoned on Molokai, appreciated that, despite their hardships. It's hard to find a face on any Hawaiian island that doesn't reflect some consciousness of how lucky that person is to be right where they are at that moment. Today's tourists are more conscious of the impact their stay has on the fragile environment, and today's tourist industry has more safeguards in place to ensure that paradise will not be lost through overuse and carelessness. But someone who goes to Hawaii for a brief vacation, a getaway, might not venture outside the resort areas to hear any of the Hawaiian folktales about Maui the trickster or the Menehune, or realize what it means that there was once Hawaiian royalty. Folks like that are haoles, as guilty as the early missionaries of discounting what the people who live there know about enjoying and preserving the islands. They'll drive around Oahu listening to "...paved paradise, put up a parking lot...." on the radio and won't realize how old the song is, or that they could be contributing.
Like anything of value, paradise requires you to take some time to appreciate it. Anyone who writes about the charms of Hawaii, me included, uses Hawaiian words to convey this--that Aloha "means both hello and goodbye." Almost anyone who has ever been there yearns to return. Before I read Molokai, I didn't realize that the Hawaiian burial service concludes with this farewell to the departed "go, but if you have a mind to return, come back." But that seems of a piece with the rest of the Hawaiian attitude. What haole wouldn't want to return to paradise, knowing its pleasures, and knowing that you'll still be graciously welcomed?
Friday, June 13, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Everything that Rises Must Converge...
...at least you'd think so, eventually. I thought I had moved away from regions where people are still fighting the War between the States by shouting things like "the South will rise again" out of their confederate-flag-draped pickups. Imagine my surprise when I read the following letter to the editor in the local big-city newspaper this morning:
Confederate soldiers fought against U.S.
I respond to the June 2 Dispatch article "But not forgotten." I strongly disagree with Richard Hoffman, a board member of the Hilltop Historical Society, who said "These are fallen Americans who fought for this country," in his description of the Confederate graves along Sullivant Avenue.
They didn't fight for this country, and it is offensive to anyone who lost a relative who died defending this country. These are the people who took arms against this country; that's a fact.
To ignore that fact is as ridiculous as anyone who would defend Germany on D-day and then tell you they were good people whom we should also honor.
Michael Yopko, Westerville
The letter sure woke me up, and made me start laughing. I pushed it across the table to Eleanor, who skimmed it and said "Dang, guys, that was about 150 years ago!"
Are people getting wackier and more entrenched in their strange beliefs, or is it just my imagination? A teacher at the local middle school just told me that her three children were harassed for the family's religious beliefs throughout their school careers, including an incident with a teacher who thought one of them needed to be "saved." "What is your family's religious belief?" I asked. I thought maybe her kids were going around telling people they were atheists, which would be a bit confrontational in this intensely religious community. But no. "We're Roman Catholic," she told me. I looked it up briefly (on google) and found that there are strange "Christians" out there preaching that Catholics are not saved and will go to hell. Huh. It's like the bible belt is encompassing more area than it used to. How American.
Maybe the whole country is getting as grotesque and gothic as the South, and we just haven't fully realized it yet. Maybe I'm thinking that partly because I just breezed through Stephanie Gayle's My Summer of Southern Discomfort, a strawberry daiquiri of a novel, easily consumed and with little effect. The main character is a northerner (Boston and NYC) who moves to the south (Macon, GA) and does predictable things, saying, at one point "in Georgia it's all about 'your people.' I draw out the phrase in my best mock Southern accent, which isn't very good. My throat clips the long vowels short." Isn't that just always the way when a northerner tries to mock a southern accent? As she gets to know her neighbors and allow her colleagues to know her, she begins to feel at home in the south. Her northern friends and relatives finally begin to accept that her new home is a place she enjoys, not simply a place where she is missing the pleasures of the north.
Well, geez. Or, in Eleanor's words, "Dang, guys!"
Confederate soldiers fought against U.S.
I respond to the June 2 Dispatch article "But not forgotten." I strongly disagree with Richard Hoffman, a board member of the Hilltop Historical Society, who said "These are fallen Americans who fought for this country," in his description of the Confederate graves along Sullivant Avenue.
They didn't fight for this country, and it is offensive to anyone who lost a relative who died defending this country. These are the people who took arms against this country; that's a fact.
To ignore that fact is as ridiculous as anyone who would defend Germany on D-day and then tell you they were good people whom we should also honor.
Michael Yopko, Westerville
The letter sure woke me up, and made me start laughing. I pushed it across the table to Eleanor, who skimmed it and said "Dang, guys, that was about 150 years ago!"
Are people getting wackier and more entrenched in their strange beliefs, or is it just my imagination? A teacher at the local middle school just told me that her three children were harassed for the family's religious beliefs throughout their school careers, including an incident with a teacher who thought one of them needed to be "saved." "What is your family's religious belief?" I asked. I thought maybe her kids were going around telling people they were atheists, which would be a bit confrontational in this intensely religious community. But no. "We're Roman Catholic," she told me. I looked it up briefly (on google) and found that there are strange "Christians" out there preaching that Catholics are not saved and will go to hell. Huh. It's like the bible belt is encompassing more area than it used to. How American.
Maybe the whole country is getting as grotesque and gothic as the South, and we just haven't fully realized it yet. Maybe I'm thinking that partly because I just breezed through Stephanie Gayle's My Summer of Southern Discomfort, a strawberry daiquiri of a novel, easily consumed and with little effect. The main character is a northerner (Boston and NYC) who moves to the south (Macon, GA) and does predictable things, saying, at one point "in Georgia it's all about 'your people.' I draw out the phrase in my best mock Southern accent, which isn't very good. My throat clips the long vowels short." Isn't that just always the way when a northerner tries to mock a southern accent? As she gets to know her neighbors and allow her colleagues to know her, she begins to feel at home in the south. Her northern friends and relatives finally begin to accept that her new home is a place she enjoys, not simply a place where she is missing the pleasures of the north.
Well, geez. Or, in Eleanor's words, "Dang, guys!"
Monday, June 9, 2008
Summer in Ohio
It's been wonderful weather here--in the 90's, with a breeze. My northern children are not used to it. I'm not used to it anymore, having just gotten accustomed to having to wear three-quarter sleeves and jeans on Memorial Day weekend every year. I've lived in Ohio now for 18 years, and it took me an entire decade to start finding things to like. Stanley Plumly, who was born in another part of the state, told me when I first moved here that I would find lots to like. Well, Stan, you were right. Finally.
In fact, Stan was right about pretty much everything he ever told me because most of it was about poetry. He's a poet worth rereading. I thought that at this point in the summer, with all its potential still unsullied, I should look again at the title poem of his volume Summer Celestial:
At dusk I row out to what looks like light or anonymity,
too far from land to be called to, too close to be lost,
and drag oar until I can drift in and out of a circle,
the center of a circle, nothing named, nothing now to see,
the wind up a little and down, building against the air,
and listen to anything at all, bird or wind, or nothing
but the first sounds on the surface, clarifying, clear.
Once, in Canada, I saw a man stand up in his boat and pass
out dollar bills. It was summer dark. They blew down
on the lake like moonlight. Coming out of his hands
they looked like dollar bills. When I look up at the Dippers,
the whole star chart, leaves on a tree, sometimes all night,
I think about his balance over cold water, under stars,
standing in a shoe, the nets all down and gathering.
My mother still wakes crying do I think she's made of money.
--And what makes money make money make money?
I wish I could tell her how to talk herself to sleep.
I wish. She says she's afraid she won't make it back.
As in a prayer, she is more afraid of loneliness than death.
Two pennies for the eyes, two cents: I wish I could tell her
that each day the stars reorganize, each night they come back
new.
Outside tonight the waters run to color with the sky.
In the old water dream you wake up in a boat, drifting out.
Everything is cold and smells of rain. Somewhere back there,
in sleep, you remember weeping. And at this moment you
think
you are about to speak. But someone is holding on, hand
over hand, and someone with your voice opening and closing.
In water you think it will always be your face that floats
to the surface. Flesh is on fire under water. The nets go back
to gather and regather, and bring up stones, viridian and silver,
what falls. In the story, the three Dutch fishermen sail out
for stars, into the daylight hours, so loaded with their catch
it spills. They sleep, believe it, where they can, and dry
their nets on a full moon. For my mother, who is afraid to
sleep,
for anyone afraid of heights or water, all of this is intolerable.
Look, said the wish, into your lover's face. Mine over yours.
In that other life, which I now commend to you, I have spent
the days by a house along the shore, building a boat, tying
the nets together, watching the lights go on and off on the
water.
But nothing gets done, none of it ever gets finished. So I lie
down
in a dream of money being passed from hand to hand in a long
line.
It looks like money--or hands taking hands, being led out
to deeper water. I wake up weeping, and it is almost joy.
I go outside and the sky is sea-blue, the way the earth is looked
at
from the moon. And out on the great surfaces, water is paying
back water. I know, I know this is a day and the stars reiterate,
return each loss, each witness. And that always in the room
next door
someone is coughing all night or a man and a woman make love,
each body buoyed, even blessed, by what the other cannot
have.
Isn't that remarkable--to look at a place like this, with its rusted barrels of impatience (oh, I mean impatiens) in the front yards, and see how the loveliness and the optimism--I mean, these are annuals in a place with barely a 3-month season--grow right out of the rust? On a sunny summer morning, when people in Indiana and Iowa are cleaning up after tornadoes and floods and everyone in the country is having at least an occasional sleepless night thinking about money and other things they can't have, reading this poem is like coming up from sleep into the kind of dream that buoys you into waking and leaves you in that state of potential from which you can accept any direction you end up heading.
In fact, Stan was right about pretty much everything he ever told me because most of it was about poetry. He's a poet worth rereading. I thought that at this point in the summer, with all its potential still unsullied, I should look again at the title poem of his volume Summer Celestial:
At dusk I row out to what looks like light or anonymity,
too far from land to be called to, too close to be lost,
and drag oar until I can drift in and out of a circle,
the center of a circle, nothing named, nothing now to see,
the wind up a little and down, building against the air,
and listen to anything at all, bird or wind, or nothing
but the first sounds on the surface, clarifying, clear.
Once, in Canada, I saw a man stand up in his boat and pass
out dollar bills. It was summer dark. They blew down
on the lake like moonlight. Coming out of his hands
they looked like dollar bills. When I look up at the Dippers,
the whole star chart, leaves on a tree, sometimes all night,
I think about his balance over cold water, under stars,
standing in a shoe, the nets all down and gathering.
My mother still wakes crying do I think she's made of money.
--And what makes money make money make money?
I wish I could tell her how to talk herself to sleep.
I wish. She says she's afraid she won't make it back.
As in a prayer, she is more afraid of loneliness than death.
Two pennies for the eyes, two cents: I wish I could tell her
that each day the stars reorganize, each night they come back
new.
Outside tonight the waters run to color with the sky.
In the old water dream you wake up in a boat, drifting out.
Everything is cold and smells of rain. Somewhere back there,
in sleep, you remember weeping. And at this moment you
think
you are about to speak. But someone is holding on, hand
over hand, and someone with your voice opening and closing.
In water you think it will always be your face that floats
to the surface. Flesh is on fire under water. The nets go back
to gather and regather, and bring up stones, viridian and silver,
what falls. In the story, the three Dutch fishermen sail out
for stars, into the daylight hours, so loaded with their catch
it spills. They sleep, believe it, where they can, and dry
their nets on a full moon. For my mother, who is afraid to
sleep,
for anyone afraid of heights or water, all of this is intolerable.
Look, said the wish, into your lover's face. Mine over yours.
In that other life, which I now commend to you, I have spent
the days by a house along the shore, building a boat, tying
the nets together, watching the lights go on and off on the
water.
But nothing gets done, none of it ever gets finished. So I lie
down
in a dream of money being passed from hand to hand in a long
line.
It looks like money--or hands taking hands, being led out
to deeper water. I wake up weeping, and it is almost joy.
I go outside and the sky is sea-blue, the way the earth is looked
at
from the moon. And out on the great surfaces, water is paying
back water. I know, I know this is a day and the stars reiterate,
return each loss, each witness. And that always in the room
next door
someone is coughing all night or a man and a woman make love,
each body buoyed, even blessed, by what the other cannot
have.
Isn't that remarkable--to look at a place like this, with its rusted barrels of impatience (oh, I mean impatiens) in the front yards, and see how the loveliness and the optimism--I mean, these are annuals in a place with barely a 3-month season--grow right out of the rust? On a sunny summer morning, when people in Indiana and Iowa are cleaning up after tornadoes and floods and everyone in the country is having at least an occasional sleepless night thinking about money and other things they can't have, reading this poem is like coming up from sleep into the kind of dream that buoys you into waking and leaves you in that state of potential from which you can accept any direction you end up heading.
Friday, June 6, 2008
That's A Morte
We never did find a substitute caterpillar for our visiting six-year-old. My response to his heartbreak over leaving it on our deck in the former peanut butter jar with holes punched (by ice pick) in the plastic lid was to observe that even if we did find him a replacement, caterpillars are not long-lived creatures and the relationship was doomed to disappointment. Since then, I've been informed that the key to keeping a captive caterpillar is to feed them every hour or so, like newborns. If you know a six-year-old who is capable of that, I'd like to know about it!
We've been preparing Walker for the imminent demise of his replacement guinea pig. See, when he was 9, he wanted a guinea pig, and we got two so they could keep each other company. He picked out a cute little short-haired pig and named him Legolas, which led to many merry confusions in our household (the most memorable was when Walker commented "Legolas is ambidextrous" and the rest of us looked at him and said "how on earth can you tell?" only to see that Walker was looking at a LOTR movie book and reading about the Tolkien elf's knives). When Legolas was three, we found him dead in his cage one morning. The other pig, Lady Night Heart, was not visibly distraught, but the kids thought she needed another friend. She missed having someone to pick on and outsmart, they said. So we got the loan of a companion guinea pig who was left over when the main guinea pig had died. This one's name was Sandy, and Sandy was already a middle-aged pig. Well, now Sandy is getting old and having some physical troubles. We hauled her off to the vet last week and found out that she's not in terrible pain, but probably is not long for the world.
In a typical case of life dovetailing with art, I came across this passage while reading John Scalzi's The Android's Dream this week:
"Why do you only sell unmodified animals?" Creek asked. "I'm just curious."
"I've got a PetSmart one shopping center over," Robin said. "All their animals are genmod. I couldn't compete. But they hardly sell unmodified pets anymore because unmodified pets die too easy. Genmod pets are designed with six-year-old boys in mind, you know."
"I didn't know," Creek said.
"It's true," Robin said. "I think that's kind of like defining deviancy down. You should be teaching a six-year-old that you need to respect living things, rather than making pets so they can survive a mallet attack. So, economics and morals. That's why. People who come in here respect animals and teach their kids manners...."
Part of respecting living things is understanding that death is part of the deal, eventually. Walker has been dealing with the issue in his own way, making up verses to a continuing song:
When a dart hits your heart
and it then fails to start...
that's a morte...
When a bear starts to tear
and there's blood everywhere...
that's a morte...
We've been preparing Walker for the imminent demise of his replacement guinea pig. See, when he was 9, he wanted a guinea pig, and we got two so they could keep each other company. He picked out a cute little short-haired pig and named him Legolas, which led to many merry confusions in our household (the most memorable was when Walker commented "Legolas is ambidextrous" and the rest of us looked at him and said "how on earth can you tell?" only to see that Walker was looking at a LOTR movie book and reading about the Tolkien elf's knives). When Legolas was three, we found him dead in his cage one morning. The other pig, Lady Night Heart, was not visibly distraught, but the kids thought she needed another friend. She missed having someone to pick on and outsmart, they said. So we got the loan of a companion guinea pig who was left over when the main guinea pig had died. This one's name was Sandy, and Sandy was already a middle-aged pig. Well, now Sandy is getting old and having some physical troubles. We hauled her off to the vet last week and found out that she's not in terrible pain, but probably is not long for the world.
In a typical case of life dovetailing with art, I came across this passage while reading John Scalzi's The Android's Dream this week:
"Why do you only sell unmodified animals?" Creek asked. "I'm just curious."
"I've got a PetSmart one shopping center over," Robin said. "All their animals are genmod. I couldn't compete. But they hardly sell unmodified pets anymore because unmodified pets die too easy. Genmod pets are designed with six-year-old boys in mind, you know."
"I didn't know," Creek said.
"It's true," Robin said. "I think that's kind of like defining deviancy down. You should be teaching a six-year-old that you need to respect living things, rather than making pets so they can survive a mallet attack. So, economics and morals. That's why. People who come in here respect animals and teach their kids manners...."
Part of respecting living things is understanding that death is part of the deal, eventually. Walker has been dealing with the issue in his own way, making up verses to a continuing song:
When a dart hits your heart
and it then fails to start...
that's a morte...
When a bear starts to tear
and there's blood everywhere...
that's a morte...
Thursday, June 5, 2008
When You Are Engulfed in Flames
Not that I would have tried anyway, but I absolutely couldn't resist buying David Sedaris' new book in hardback because of the title. It turns out to be one of those Japanese translations into English. I was hoping it was going to be one of his stories from real life (although in a way it is, because it appears in the longest essay, a piece on how he quit smoking and why). As usual with a Sedaris book of essays, I laughed out loud while reading each one. When we had to wait in a doctor's office yesterday, I said to my daughter "so, you'd rather I didn't take this book?" waving the Sedaris book, and she said "it might be better not to." She's still emotionally scarred from the time I was reading Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim in the YMCA waiting room during Walker's swimming lesson and I got to what you tell your children in Holland on Christmas Eve in "Six to Eight Black Men" and I couldn't muffle my laughter, and then I couldn't stop laughing, and then I couldn't get my breath and tears were running down my face...and I have a really loud laugh....
I have such a loud laugh, and laugh so often, that one time after a movie an old lady came up to me, touched my arm with a quavering hand, and said "you really enjoyed that, didn't you?" I said "yes, I did."
Anyway, according to a woman we once met in a parking lot on a barrier island in South Carolina, if your hair is on fire, it's okay to park in the handicapped parking space. This is what she told us when my family, feeling protective of my limited ability to walk any distance during our last trip to the beach when my knee was completely shot but I wasn't admitting it yet, confronted her about why she'd parked in the only handicapped space in the lot when she didn't have a handicapped tag. "But my hair was on fire" she said. "I was driving, and I smelled something, and I had to pull over." We didn't see her actually being engulfed in flames, but her "handicap" generated great hilarity for the rest of the trip. Anyone who was there would tell this story with more details and make it funnier. I do remember that later during the same trip, during a "pirate tour" of downtown Charleston, the tour guide described the way Blackbeard would tie firecrackers into his beard and light them. From the other side of a pineapple fountain, I heard my daughter murmur "guess he wanted to park at the handicapped pier."
Other than my friend Miriam, there's no one better at taking a story like that and making it into something that shows you what people are like than David Sedaris. In "Of Mice and Men," he even tells about how he read an unusual newspaper story and evidently embroidered it for his own purposes, coming back to it only to prove a point and finding that he couldn't, in fact, prove it:
"Then there was the story mailed to me by a stranger in New England, who'd clipped it from his local paper. It concerned an eighty-year-old Vermont man whose home was overrun by mice. The actual house was not described, but in my mind it was two stories tall and isolated on a country road. I also decided that it was painted white--not that it mattered so much, I just thought it was a nice touch. So the retired guy's house was overrun, and when he could no longer bear it, he fumigated. The mice fled into the yard and settled into a pile of dead leaves, which no doubt crackled beneath their weight. Thinking that he had them trapped, the man set the pile on fire, then watched as a single flaming mouse ran back into the basement and burned the house to the ground."
Later he finds that he has embroidered the story:
"I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. 'Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,' the headline read, and then I noticed the letters 'AP,' and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a kind of shack with cow skulls tacked to the outer walls. It then turned out that the homeowner had not fumigated, and that there was only one mouse, which he somehow caught alive, and threw onto a pile of leaves he'd started burning some time earlier. This would certainly qualify as thoughtless, but there was no moment when he looked at the coughing mice, running for their lives from the poisonous fumes. He did not hear the leaves crackling beneath their feet, or reach for his matches, thinking Aha!"
But, of course, it's this story-telling ability that makes his well-crafted essays so eminently readable. It's like having a friend with good timing who can tell a story and make it hilarious. One time Ron found a mouse in the live trap we keep under our sink. Usually we take these mice to campus and put them right outside the building that houses the English department, but this night we were tired and didn't want to drive the mouse anywhere, so Ron walked it across the street and let it go. "You didn't take it far enough away," I whined. "It'll come back." The next morning, Ron opened the front curtains and stood there for a minute. "Look at that!" he said. We all came over and looked out. "Did you see that mouse limping slowly up the driveway?" he said.
Neither Ron nor Miriam, who have lived with me in houses near the woods with wolf spiders in the basement, have ever told a story like this about them:
"Big shaggy things the size of a baby's hand, they roamed the basement of my parents' house and evoked from my sisters the prolonged, spine-tingling screams called for in movies when the mummy invades the delicate lady's dressing room. 'Kill it!' they'd yell, and then I'd hear a half-dozen shoes hitting the linoleum, followed by a world atlas or maybe a piano stool--whatever was heavy and close at hand.
I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn't seem that organized. Then too, I figured they had their own lives to lead. This was an attitude I picked up from my father, who squashed nothing that was not directly related to him. 'You girls are afraid of your own shadows,' he'd say, and no matter how big the thing was, he'd scoot it onto a newspaper and release it outside. Come bedtime I'd knock on my sisters' door and predict that the spider was now crawling to the top of the house, where he'd take a short breather before heading down the chimney. 'I read in the encyclopedia that this particular breed is known for its tracking ability, and that once it's pegged its victims, almost nothing will stop it. Anyway, good night.'"
On a similar note, I've had the opportunity to eat a Japanese breakfast, and despite a well-deserved reputation for being adventurous about food, I passed it up. But not as entertainingly as Sedaris, who not only passes it up, but says:
"while shuddering I imagined a mother scolding her son. 'Oh, no you don't,' she might say. 'This is the most important meal of the day, and you're not going anywhere until you finish your pickles. That's right, and your seaweed too. Then I want you to eat your cold poached egg submerged in broth and at least half of that cross-eyed fish.'"
Although none of the essays are as side-splitting as "Six to Eight Black Men," I very much enjoyed "What I Learned," a Princeton commencement address, and, as always, I love the way the cumulative laughter builds as I read the book.
I have such a loud laugh, and laugh so often, that one time after a movie an old lady came up to me, touched my arm with a quavering hand, and said "you really enjoyed that, didn't you?" I said "yes, I did."
Anyway, according to a woman we once met in a parking lot on a barrier island in South Carolina, if your hair is on fire, it's okay to park in the handicapped parking space. This is what she told us when my family, feeling protective of my limited ability to walk any distance during our last trip to the beach when my knee was completely shot but I wasn't admitting it yet, confronted her about why she'd parked in the only handicapped space in the lot when she didn't have a handicapped tag. "But my hair was on fire" she said. "I was driving, and I smelled something, and I had to pull over." We didn't see her actually being engulfed in flames, but her "handicap" generated great hilarity for the rest of the trip. Anyone who was there would tell this story with more details and make it funnier. I do remember that later during the same trip, during a "pirate tour" of downtown Charleston, the tour guide described the way Blackbeard would tie firecrackers into his beard and light them. From the other side of a pineapple fountain, I heard my daughter murmur "guess he wanted to park at the handicapped pier."
Other than my friend Miriam, there's no one better at taking a story like that and making it into something that shows you what people are like than David Sedaris. In "Of Mice and Men," he even tells about how he read an unusual newspaper story and evidently embroidered it for his own purposes, coming back to it only to prove a point and finding that he couldn't, in fact, prove it:
"Then there was the story mailed to me by a stranger in New England, who'd clipped it from his local paper. It concerned an eighty-year-old Vermont man whose home was overrun by mice. The actual house was not described, but in my mind it was two stories tall and isolated on a country road. I also decided that it was painted white--not that it mattered so much, I just thought it was a nice touch. So the retired guy's house was overrun, and when he could no longer bear it, he fumigated. The mice fled into the yard and settled into a pile of dead leaves, which no doubt crackled beneath their weight. Thinking that he had them trapped, the man set the pile on fire, then watched as a single flaming mouse ran back into the basement and burned the house to the ground."
Later he finds that he has embroidered the story:
"I thought I would send him the news clipping as well, and it was here that my triumph lost its luster. 'Mouse gets revenge: sets home ablaze,' the headline read, and then I noticed the letters 'AP,' and saw that while the story had been published in Vermont, it had actually taken place in New Mexico, which sort of ruined everything. Now, instead of a white, wood-frame house, I saw a kind of shack with cow skulls tacked to the outer walls. It then turned out that the homeowner had not fumigated, and that there was only one mouse, which he somehow caught alive, and threw onto a pile of leaves he'd started burning some time earlier. This would certainly qualify as thoughtless, but there was no moment when he looked at the coughing mice, running for their lives from the poisonous fumes. He did not hear the leaves crackling beneath their feet, or reach for his matches, thinking Aha!"
But, of course, it's this story-telling ability that makes his well-crafted essays so eminently readable. It's like having a friend with good timing who can tell a story and make it hilarious. One time Ron found a mouse in the live trap we keep under our sink. Usually we take these mice to campus and put them right outside the building that houses the English department, but this night we were tired and didn't want to drive the mouse anywhere, so Ron walked it across the street and let it go. "You didn't take it far enough away," I whined. "It'll come back." The next morning, Ron opened the front curtains and stood there for a minute. "Look at that!" he said. We all came over and looked out. "Did you see that mouse limping slowly up the driveway?" he said.
Neither Ron nor Miriam, who have lived with me in houses near the woods with wolf spiders in the basement, have ever told a story like this about them:
"Big shaggy things the size of a baby's hand, they roamed the basement of my parents' house and evoked from my sisters the prolonged, spine-tingling screams called for in movies when the mummy invades the delicate lady's dressing room. 'Kill it!' they'd yell, and then I'd hear a half-dozen shoes hitting the linoleum, followed by a world atlas or maybe a piano stool--whatever was heavy and close at hand.
I was put off by the wolf spiders as well but never thought that they were purposefully out to get me. For starters, they didn't seem that organized. Then too, I figured they had their own lives to lead. This was an attitude I picked up from my father, who squashed nothing that was not directly related to him. 'You girls are afraid of your own shadows,' he'd say, and no matter how big the thing was, he'd scoot it onto a newspaper and release it outside. Come bedtime I'd knock on my sisters' door and predict that the spider was now crawling to the top of the house, where he'd take a short breather before heading down the chimney. 'I read in the encyclopedia that this particular breed is known for its tracking ability, and that once it's pegged its victims, almost nothing will stop it. Anyway, good night.'"
On a similar note, I've had the opportunity to eat a Japanese breakfast, and despite a well-deserved reputation for being adventurous about food, I passed it up. But not as entertainingly as Sedaris, who not only passes it up, but says:
"while shuddering I imagined a mother scolding her son. 'Oh, no you don't,' she might say. 'This is the most important meal of the day, and you're not going anywhere until you finish your pickles. That's right, and your seaweed too. Then I want you to eat your cold poached egg submerged in broth and at least half of that cross-eyed fish.'"
Although none of the essays are as side-splitting as "Six to Eight Black Men," I very much enjoyed "What I Learned," a Princeton commencement address, and, as always, I love the way the cumulative laughter builds as I read the book.
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Summer afternoon rereading
Ron and I believe in rereading books. There are books we like to immerse ourselves in seasonally, or every few years, or just once more. Why else would we own books? One of the books I like to reread is John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. We own a hardback copy of it, an old cassette version of the book on tape, which is what I just listened to in the car, and a DVD of the movie. When his newer book came out, The City of Falling Angels, I read it, and it was okay. But it doesn't have what draws me back to Midnight. I like the title, and the idea that whether something is good or evil can be decided by when it happens. This seems quintessentially southern to me. Southerners have fun alternating being mean and being nice, and blurring the line so you're less able to tell the difference.
Some of the kindest southerners I know have the sharpest tongues. One time I was listening to Ron's grandmother as she fixed lunch and went on and on about who was related to who else, and she unexpectedly finished up with "but, you know, he has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel." Then she turned around, put something on the table, and gave me a big smile. If you grow up in a southern family, the people around you can skew your sense of what is normal, and maybe what you can get away with. Think of William Faulker's A Rose for Emily or Flannery O'Connor's Why I Live at the P.O. Think of my parents, who enjoy my family and vacation with us at least every other year, but who have never come to a concert or a play my children are in, while they attended my seven-year-old niece's first piano recital this May and immediately offered her their grand piano.
When I was a teenager, I invented a game called "dead body." My friends would take me to a dark corner somewhere and dump me out of the car. I would lie there perfectly still, listening for any comments. Although we usually picked a place where someone could see the "body," few people evidenced much concern about what they'd just seen. My adolescent sense of the absurd was satisfied by the apparent lack of reaction from bystanders. Well, my adult sense of the absurd is always satisfied by reading about the Lady Chablis, the black drag queen who delights in shaking people up and seeing what happens. One of my favorites of her antics is when she convinces her white boyfriend's parents that she's pregnant, and they give her some money to pay for an abortion:
Chablis clapped her hands. "I took the money them white folks gave us to murder their unborn grandchild, and I bought that color TV sittin' over there and that videocassette player too. And with what was left over, I went out and got me the raunchiest little sequined dress I could find, so in case they ever do find out who I am, I can shake my ass in their face and tell them 'thanks from the bottom of our interracial baby's dead little heart!'"
I like all the characters, from Luther Driggers, who takes flies out on pieces of string, tries to make glow-in-the-dark goldfish, and makes people nervous by talking about putting poison in the water supply, to Joe Odom, who gives "historical" tours of every house he finds to squat in, whether it's historical or not. And, of course, I like the story of how the police came in and had a party in Jim Williams' fancy house on the way to arresting him for murder, and then they all got on the stand and swore they'd followed police procedure. Plus his story has a bang-up ending, what with the voodoo queen who reveals his apparent lack of feeling for the boy who died and the way he dies himself, at the end of the book.
The preface to my book on tape adds to all the absurdity by revealing that John Berendt first went to Savannah because he noticed that the price of an airline ticket to that city was the same as the price of a fancy dinner in downtown Manhattan.
Rereading the stories in this book is as fun as sitting around on the cushioned glider swing on my great-aunt's shady screened-in porch in Jonesboro, Arkansas, listening to the older folks tell about the doings of their friends and relatives. It doesn't matter if you've heard the stories before. Everybody's still gonna laugh and slap their knees for a while, and then they'll gather themselves up slowly and a few of them will turn on lights and notice where the kids have gone and a few will make their way back to the kitchen to bring out some supper.
Some of the kindest southerners I know have the sharpest tongues. One time I was listening to Ron's grandmother as she fixed lunch and went on and on about who was related to who else, and she unexpectedly finished up with "but, you know, he has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel." Then she turned around, put something on the table, and gave me a big smile. If you grow up in a southern family, the people around you can skew your sense of what is normal, and maybe what you can get away with. Think of William Faulker's A Rose for Emily or Flannery O'Connor's Why I Live at the P.O. Think of my parents, who enjoy my family and vacation with us at least every other year, but who have never come to a concert or a play my children are in, while they attended my seven-year-old niece's first piano recital this May and immediately offered her their grand piano.
When I was a teenager, I invented a game called "dead body." My friends would take me to a dark corner somewhere and dump me out of the car. I would lie there perfectly still, listening for any comments. Although we usually picked a place where someone could see the "body," few people evidenced much concern about what they'd just seen. My adolescent sense of the absurd was satisfied by the apparent lack of reaction from bystanders. Well, my adult sense of the absurd is always satisfied by reading about the Lady Chablis, the black drag queen who delights in shaking people up and seeing what happens. One of my favorites of her antics is when she convinces her white boyfriend's parents that she's pregnant, and they give her some money to pay for an abortion:
Chablis clapped her hands. "I took the money them white folks gave us to murder their unborn grandchild, and I bought that color TV sittin' over there and that videocassette player too. And with what was left over, I went out and got me the raunchiest little sequined dress I could find, so in case they ever do find out who I am, I can shake my ass in their face and tell them 'thanks from the bottom of our interracial baby's dead little heart!'"
I like all the characters, from Luther Driggers, who takes flies out on pieces of string, tries to make glow-in-the-dark goldfish, and makes people nervous by talking about putting poison in the water supply, to Joe Odom, who gives "historical" tours of every house he finds to squat in, whether it's historical or not. And, of course, I like the story of how the police came in and had a party in Jim Williams' fancy house on the way to arresting him for murder, and then they all got on the stand and swore they'd followed police procedure. Plus his story has a bang-up ending, what with the voodoo queen who reveals his apparent lack of feeling for the boy who died and the way he dies himself, at the end of the book.
The preface to my book on tape adds to all the absurdity by revealing that John Berendt first went to Savannah because he noticed that the price of an airline ticket to that city was the same as the price of a fancy dinner in downtown Manhattan.
Rereading the stories in this book is as fun as sitting around on the cushioned glider swing on my great-aunt's shady screened-in porch in Jonesboro, Arkansas, listening to the older folks tell about the doings of their friends and relatives. It doesn't matter if you've heard the stories before. Everybody's still gonna laugh and slap their knees for a while, and then they'll gather themselves up slowly and a few of them will turn on lights and notice where the kids have gone and a few will make their way back to the kitchen to bring out some supper.
Monday, June 2, 2008
and the livin' is easy (well, easier)
We had a whirlwind weekend, with a soccer tournament, a cookout at our house, and then an end-of-the-season soccer picnic at the coach's house. The weather was extraordinarily cooperative--it was sunny and in the high 70's. Now that I've acclimated to life in the north, high 70's actually feels like summer to me... well, as long as the sun is out, anyway. This morning Walker and I were combing our hands through the garden looking for a caterpillar. Our six-year-old cookout guest captured one yesterday and put it in a bug jar and left it, so I released it last night. We have not yet found a substitute caterpillar, although the word is that the six-year-old is prostrate with grief. I called off my part of the search when I had my hand under the leaves of a plant and then realized that they looked familiar--I called Walker over-- "doesn't this look like poison ivy?" "Yeah, mom, it looks just like the picture." So I had to come in and wash my hands with Dawn and then a urushiol remover. Hope it works.
The kids and I have two days to clean up and rest up from the weekend, before scheduled summer activities begin in earnest, so maybe I'll have some time for sustained reading. For the last few days, I've only gotten in a few pages at a time. One of our party guests said that she had trouble sitting down and reading, without thinking she needed to jump up and do something else. We talked about the way we all multi-task, and whether twittering is a good habit to get into. Well, as you can probably tell, I'm in favor of sustained activities. I think that, for me at least, trying to stretch my attention too many different ways is kind of like making horcruxes--I'd lose a little more of my soul with every new activity I tried to add.
At any rate, here's my review of the book I read in small increments, amid the weekend whirlwind. It's Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, by Gabrielle Zevin. Now, Zevin wrote Elsewhere, which Eleanor and I found absolutely fascinating. So when I found a new book by her at the library, I put it right in my bag. As you might expect from the title, though, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is nowhere near as fascinating as Elsewhere was. It's an entirely serviceable book; I didn't mind reading it, but it doesn't stand out in the vast realm of YA realistic fiction.
The main character, Naomi, falls down the school steps, knocks herself out, and loses four years of her most recent memories. She can remember middle school, but not high school. She doesn't remember her parents' divorce, and she's lost in French class, which she evidently began in ninth grade. The most interesting part of the book is her relationship with her yearbook co-editor, a "best friend" of the opposite sex. It took me--and Naomi--halfway through the book to put together that he calls her "chief" and she used to call him "coach" in one of their many private joke references. Most of the book is Naomi trying to figure out what kind of person she used to be, and then working on what kind of person she wants to be, in relation to her friends and family. She lives with her dad, and when they leave the hospital after her head injury, she looks for the red truck that she remembers. When he says he got rid of it she says
"You're joking. You loved that truck!"
Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. "It's covered in the memoir," he added.
It was, though I wouldn't find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn't mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Of course it's sad/funny to a person's closest friends or family members to find out that context is all; since we often have rushed conversations on the way to the next thing, we don't always get the entire context for how someone is feeling, especially in terms of how those feelings have developed over the years. That's what writing a journal is for. Or blogging. Or writing a book, whether it's confessional literature or a novel. To go back to an earlier post, lies can be a way of telling the truth, and giving someone a soapbox can be a way of seeing more of the person, without your own whirlwinds intruding on their space.
The kids and I have two days to clean up and rest up from the weekend, before scheduled summer activities begin in earnest, so maybe I'll have some time for sustained reading. For the last few days, I've only gotten in a few pages at a time. One of our party guests said that she had trouble sitting down and reading, without thinking she needed to jump up and do something else. We talked about the way we all multi-task, and whether twittering is a good habit to get into. Well, as you can probably tell, I'm in favor of sustained activities. I think that, for me at least, trying to stretch my attention too many different ways is kind of like making horcruxes--I'd lose a little more of my soul with every new activity I tried to add.
At any rate, here's my review of the book I read in small increments, amid the weekend whirlwind. It's Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac, by Gabrielle Zevin. Now, Zevin wrote Elsewhere, which Eleanor and I found absolutely fascinating. So when I found a new book by her at the library, I put it right in my bag. As you might expect from the title, though, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac is nowhere near as fascinating as Elsewhere was. It's an entirely serviceable book; I didn't mind reading it, but it doesn't stand out in the vast realm of YA realistic fiction.
The main character, Naomi, falls down the school steps, knocks herself out, and loses four years of her most recent memories. She can remember middle school, but not high school. She doesn't remember her parents' divorce, and she's lost in French class, which she evidently began in ninth grade. The most interesting part of the book is her relationship with her yearbook co-editor, a "best friend" of the opposite sex. It took me--and Naomi--halfway through the book to put together that he calls her "chief" and she used to call him "coach" in one of their many private joke references. Most of the book is Naomi trying to figure out what kind of person she used to be, and then working on what kind of person she wants to be, in relation to her friends and family. She lives with her dad, and when they leave the hospital after her head injury, she looks for the red truck that she remembers. When he says he got rid of it she says
"You're joking. You loved that truck!"
Dad muttered something about the new one being more fuel-efficient. "It's covered in the memoir," he added.
It was, though I wouldn't find this out for many months. He wrote about the truck on page ninety-eight of his book. He claimed to have sold it because it reminded him of Mom. He didn't mention a thing about fuel efficiency. It was funny how Dad was more honest in a book that anyone in the world could pick up and read than he could be talking to me. Or maybe it was sad. One or the other. Sometimes it's hard to tell.
Of course it's sad/funny to a person's closest friends or family members to find out that context is all; since we often have rushed conversations on the way to the next thing, we don't always get the entire context for how someone is feeling, especially in terms of how those feelings have developed over the years. That's what writing a journal is for. Or blogging. Or writing a book, whether it's confessional literature or a novel. To go back to an earlier post, lies can be a way of telling the truth, and giving someone a soapbox can be a way of seeing more of the person, without your own whirlwinds intruding on their space.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
