Author: gr4c5

I write. I read. I cook. I run. That's me, in a nutshell.

Tomato Girl

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Pupek, Jayne. Tomato Girl. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2008.

What a beautifully written, tragic first book! The characters are so true to life and so compelling I was picturing them in a movie. It’s told in first person from the point of view of 11 year old Ellie. With the help of a series of seamless recollections Ellie recounts her life with a mentally ill mother and a cheating father. Ellie’s father is taken with, and soon overcome by, a teenage girl who delivers tomatoes to the store he manages. From the moment the “tomato girl” comes into Ellie’s life every day is stacked with another unbelievable tragedy, a level of sadness leading to horror much deeper than the one before. It is hard to imagine the amount of pain this child has to endure at such a tender age. Pupek writes with sentences full of foreshadowing. They hang heavy like dark clouds, bloated with the storm that will erupt any minute.
My only complaint is absence of addressing molestation. Ellie is “grabbed” by boy hard enough to leave a bruise. At the same time her period has started (her first). When Sherrif Rhodes discovers the blood, and Ellie tells him of the rough boy, the Sheriff doesn’t take Ellie to a hospital to be examined by a real doctor. She is brought to a black woman who practices witchcraft. Because the story is set in the late 60’s and racism is hinted at I was surprised Sherriff Rhodes would bring a child to her rather than the local hospital. This is the only part I wish was explained better.

ps~ there are a ton of those “gotcha” sentences that I love so much. Too many to mention.

 

Things We Hide

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Kisa’s in the bathroom murdering ladybugs without remorse; sucking them down with a vacuum. I think there are two survivors but I can’t be sure. They’re in hiding. Indy’s under the bed, watchful eyes in the dark waiting for the killing spree to be over. She hates the vacuum. She’s hiding, too. I’m learning to be a lady, which means keeping things like band aids, bra straps and blemishes…oh, and bad dreams…out of sight. Best foot forward or fall flat on your face.
What other things can we hide? I’m killing a friendship because I can’t deal with the consequences. Not my problem~all my fault. Walk away slowly and no one will get hurt. Or something like that. I spent a long time talking to a friend about it. Weird to talk to one friend about another friend and realize there’s only one friend in the picture – the person you are talking to. It bites to be so blase about the whole thing. What was once care is now so callous. Lies do not make loyalty.
All I have ever wanted is out and out honesty. Step up. Be an adult and tell the fukcing truth. Don’t make yourself or your life out to be something that it isn’t. Stand tall, be proud and show the world who you really are. We love you as you are.

Yet. And, yet. We hide. Hide behind bragging and bravado.

I stand in the mirror’s way and wonder what it really sees in me. If my bra strap slips off my shoulder would you sue me? If stress gets the better of my face would you avoid looking me in the eye? My bad dreams circle like black smoke I can’t blow away. I won’t hide. For better or worse I’m here. Be here, too. Please. I love you the way you are.

So, I’m in the bathroom. A ladybug comes out of hiding. My bra strap falls. I’m almost about to pull it back up and think again. Coming out of hiding I smile and leave it where it is. Fukc it.

An Academic Question

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Pym, Barbara. An Academic Question. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1986.

When this book landed on my desk I nearly laughed. It’s only 182 pages long with a decidedly easy-to-read large font. Needless to say I read it in a day!
Here are some things that intrigued me about the book before I read it: Barbara Pym died of breast cancer when she was only 66 years old. Her last book, An Academic Question was published six years after her passing and is actually a blend of two different manuscripts.
Here’s what I put on LibraryThing: An Academic Question at first read appears to be about a lonely, bored, mother of one, who is feels neglected her professor husband. Her friends are bland, her hobbies even moreso. It’s only after she agrees to help her husband find information to support an article he is drafting do things really start to get interesting. As with any academic, there is competition to get published and for Caro’s husband the pressure is on. Human emotion is played out in subtle detail as Caro deals with jealousy, betrayal, and the need for approval from everyone around her.

One of my favorite scenes is when Caro is in the audience, listening to a young professor give a lecture. Bored with the beautiful lecturer’s topic, Caro starts to focus in on how the striking woman is dressed. Upon noticing a pale pink rose pinned between her breasts Caro decides the color matches the roses she has in her own garden. Soon she is imagining her own husband placing the rose…and speculation and imagination create jealousy which becomes an accusation later on…It truly is a classic way jealousy manifests itself.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter, “Barbara Pym: Too Good To Miss” (p 196).

 

92 in the Shade

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McGuane, Thomas. Ninety-Two in the Shade. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1972.

June is fishing month. Go figure. Ninety-Two in the Shade is about a man (Thomas Skelton) who has always wanted to run a guided fishing tour off the Florida Keys. Not the fishing I had pictured for the month of June, but a form of it, I guess. Thomas is new to the business and even newer to competition. He is not without his share of problems. The opening “scene” is Thomas waking up in a hotel and finding four people standing naked in a tub. Right away you know this isn’t your typical River Runs Through It fishing story! Other quirks: violence that does (or doesn’t) happen, relationships that are (or aren’t) good, and the entire book is absent of chapters. I may have come across other books like this but never noticed this chapterlessness before. The only reason why this seems odd is because not having chapters makes it difficult to know where to stop!

I did a little extra research and found out that Ninety-Two in the Shade was made into a movie not long after it was written and while it’s Thomas McGuane’s third work of fiction many critics consider it his best.

I never did get used to McGuane’s “gritty” style of writing, but here are some quotes (and scenes) that caught me: “He walked to Homestead, then right on through town, tripping his brains out in the emptiness of 5 a.m.” (p 4).
A conversation between Skelton and “his girl.” May it confuse you as much as it did me:
Miranda~ “Tom, I had this incredible orgasm.”
Tom~ “Do I have to hear about your organism too?”
M ~ “Just this one. It was like a whole dream of sweet things to eat…Spun sugar, meringue, whipped egg whites…”
T ~ “How about when your chum shot off? Was it a blintz or an omelet?”
M~ “Ask him.”

To say that Ninety-Two in the Shade isn’t without humor would be a lie: “You should never kill somebody if it isn’t funny” ( 34).

BookLust Twist: In both Book Lust and More Book Lust. Book Lust: in the chapter “Montana: In Big Sky Country” (p 156) because Thomas McGuane is from Montana. This, by the way, takes care of a November read because that’s when Montana became a state and Ninety-Two in the Shade was on the November list. More Book Lust: in the chapter “Gone Fishin'” (p 101).

Pass the Party Perfect

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My aunt is Mother of the Bride for the first time. As I talked to her I could hear her nerves rattling along the wire. Nerves were bordering on wired nervous. A little over two weeks to go before her little girl becomes Mrs. Someone Else. She wants everything to be perfect. I tell her it’s not going to be. I’m not being mean, just meaningful. My mother wrote a list of everything that went “wrong” at my sister’s wedding. Live and learn I thought. When my day came two years later I tried to remedy all previously made “mistakes.” While I didn’t make my sister’s faux pas, I created my own. It was inevitable. My dress didn’t fit properly. The food line was too long. Father-in-law had the first dance…with his son-in-law. Someone stole a golf cart and a groomsman ended up sleeping the night off in a ditch. Yup. Classy. But the real question is did we have a blast? Yup.

No one has the perfect party. There will always be something wrong with something or somebody. Even if you don’t notice, someone else will. Kisa and I wanted to use stolen champagne flutes for our end-of-night toast. We opted for my great-grandmother’s glasses. Unbeknown to either of us one glass disappeared forever. That has become my deepest regret even though I didn’t know it at the time. So, pass the party perfect. It aint gonna happen. What it will be is a great time!

Things They Carried

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O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway Books, 1998.

I admit it. I have picked this book up three different times now. Technically, I should have read it in March to celebrate the day U.S. troops pulled out of Vietnam (March 1975), but as you can tell, there were plenty of other things to reach for in March…
Nope, I cracked this book open for no other reason than sheer boredom. I finished Peter Pan and The Ground Beneath Her Feet and decided I wasn’t up for The Joy Luck Club…at least not right now. The Things They Carried has been hanging around my office for months now. It just seemed to say “read me” and the time was right. I am so very glad.

This was an amazingly moving book. I had a hard time getting into it the first two times I picked it up, but the third time was a charm because after that I couldn’t put it down. Tim O’Brien writes with such ferocious honesty. He calls it a fiction but it easily could have been the truth. The shocking violence, the depths of sadness, the urgency to survive, the humble efforts to maintain sanity and the humor that survives it all…each chapter is a short story of all of these things. Each story stands alone, complete as it is, yet connects beautifully to the story before it as well as the one after it. Peter S. Prescott from Newsweek said the stories “bounce off each other…” and I would agree.
I could quote nearly each story, but here are my favorites:
“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terible power of the things they carried” (p 7). The reason why this quote stuck with me is because O’Brien spends the opening chapter listing everything a soldier carried in the Vietnam war. Both the physical and mental, the essential and the sentimental. This quote sums up how they never forgot why they were carrying everything else.
“The problem, though, was that a draft board did not let you choose your war” (p 44). I found this to be one of the most humanitarian statements of the book. O’Brien had just finished explaining that some wars were justified, like stopping Hitler, but in this case he was drafted to fight a war he didn’t understand.

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Vietnam” (p 239).
ps~ one of the reasons for starting the Book Lust challenge was to find writers I could fall in love with. I wanted one book that would spark an obsession. Much like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale or Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams or Katherine Weber’s Objects in the Mirror are Closer than They Appear. All of these books created a rabid need to read anything else written by the authors. I found such an obsession with The Things they Carried. I will go on to get my hands on any and everything Tim O’Brien has written before and since.

June is…

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June is:

  • Fishing Month (92 in the Shade by Thomas Mcguane)
  • Barbara Pym’s birth month (An Academic Question)
  • National Family Month (Act of the Damned by Antonio Lobo Antunes)
  • The most common month to get married in (Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler)

If there is time I’ll also reread Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

June is also another LibraryThing Early Review:

  • Tomato Girl by Jayne Pupek

Personally, I ended May on a crappy note so June is ME month. It’s also vacation month! Hello Vegas! Hello San Diego! I’m hoping to see some very special people. June is also house-hunting month (like we haven’t been doing that already!). The farm starts up this month and I started a new blog about the fantastic four which I am really, really excited about, too! Like I said, ME month! 8)

With Regret

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It finally dawned on me that I should post a formal announcement that Rebecca’s show in Simsbury has been canceled. I had forgotten that I had promised free drinks to anyone who showed up. Sorry ’bout that. Next time she has a gig anywhere close to here I will renew the invitation. In the meantime, visit her myspace page for other gigs, new photos and music!

Thanks.

May Was…

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A month of allergies. Lilacs. The end of the school year (yay). Dreams coming true. The final Chuck Lelas walk. A new haircut. The serious house hunt. Family time. Natalie Merchant performing with the Boston Pops and ten good books (Nine and a half…).

  • Educating Esme: Diary of a Teacher’s First Year by Esme Raji Codell (National Education Month)
  • Plain Speaking by Merle Miller (Harry Truman’s birthday, Merle Miller’s birthday, on the heels of a book about Roosevelt…it just made sense).
  • True Confessions: a Novel by Mary Bringle (Mothers & Daughters)
  • Dreamland by Kevin Baker (History. I have to admit, tail between my legs, that I didn’t finish this one. Once I found out what the reader doesn’t find out I didn’t want to continue. BooHiss).
  • Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie (Music month)
  • Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin.

Books added to the list because I gave up on Dreamland:

  • Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie (celebrating Barrie’s birthday)
  • The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien for no ther reason than it was a great book!

For LibraryThing & the Early Review Program~two books!:

  • Best Girlfriends Getaways Worldwide by Marybeth Bond (really, really fun travel guide)
  • Home Girl: Building a Dream House on a Lawless Block by Judith Matloff. Interesting, considering I’m dreaming of houses these days…

 

 

Peter Pan

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Barrie, J.M. Peter Pan. Toronto: Bantam books, 1980.

Barrie was born in May. I needed a quickie read for the end of the month. Choosing Peter Pan was a no-brainer. The version I chose to read was an illustrated deluxe addition. Full of both color and black and white illustrations: “Special edition illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.” Really.

Because Peter Pan is such a well loved, well (over?) produced story, everyone knows the basic plot: three kids unhappy with the way their father has treated the family dog run away with an orphan boy to his Neverland (not to be confused with Michael’s Never Land Ranch). Peter and his Lost Boys are looking for a mother and they think they have such a figure in Wendy, one of the Darling children. It’s a magical adventure full of danger in the form of pirates, “redskins” and a ticking crocodile. Even the fairies and mermaids are not to be trusted.

Upon rereading Peter Pan I was surprised by how slow the story moved in certain sections. Because of the glossed-over, dumbed-down, glitzed-up theater/movie/storybook versions that have popped up over the years I had forgotten Barrie’s original 1911 language and long since deleted details. It was hard to picture reading this aloud to a young child. Peter Pan seemed slightly evil (being described as cunning and sly), Tink seemed downright dirty as she responded to her own jealousy over Wendy (gleefully leading Wendy to her death). True to fairy tale form, it does have a happy ending. Sort of.

One of my favorite images from the book that I’ve never forgotten is how Peter describes fairies as being the shattered pieces of a baby’s first laugh, “You see, Wendy, when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces. and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of the fairies” (p 29).

BookLust Twist: From More Book Lust in the chapter “Fantasy for Young and Old (p 83). 

Where I Go

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Of course I will have to write something a bit more about this (how could I not?), but for now here’s this:

  1. Autumn Lullabye
  2. Man in the Wilderness
  3. The Letter
  4. Sonnet #73
  5. Life is Sweet
  6. Verdi Cries
  7. Butterfly
  8. Spring and Fall: To a young Child
  9. She-Devil
  10. Henry Darger
  11. This House is on Fire
  12. The End

For now, I am stunned into silence. More later.

xoxox

Remember Me Day

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Last year at this time I watched my uncle march in the Bangor Memorial Day parade. Normally a shy man, normally a reserved man, a keep to himself man, my uncle waved to the crowd and smiled and received wishes of ‘welcome home’ with dignity. This was his moment to be proud.

This year kisa and I watched the same parade in a different town. Men marching proudly. Men smiling and receiving wishes of ‘welcome home’ with dignity. Vets handed out poppies of plastic. Kids scrambled for shattered sweets on the sidewalk. Puffed up men drove shiny old cars with pride. Betsy Ross wannabe women threw wilting red carnations to the crowds. No clowns (unless you count an odd fellow with a pipe on a bicycle), no unnecessary fanfare of floats. Only one marching band from kisa’s high school. Flags of stars and stripes waving. It’s the kind of thing that always chokes me up. After rereading stories like Red Badge of Courage and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee I know that war will always exist somewhere. Hate lives day to day and forgiveness comes around every Memorial Day.

Ground Beneath Her Feet

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Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999.

May was deemed National Music Month by someone out there so, in honor of that tidbit I chose The Ground Beneath Her Feet as my “music book.” This was my first time reading Salman Rushdie & I have to confess, if all his other books are so lengthy and detail driven, I am going to have a hard time getting through them. This one was a whopping 575 pages long and and and! I knew the ending in the first chapter!

The Ground Beneath Her Feet is an epic rock and roll love story. Spanning several lifetimes Rushdie tells the love story of Ormus and Vina, two musicians from Bombay. Their story is like a gigantic flood, catching up and describing in detail: cultures, mythologies, histories, industries (agriculture (goats!), music and beyond), the landscapes of India, England and America, their societies, religions, ancestries of families, personalities, births, deaths, emotions, tragedies, triumphs, anything and everything from  the mid 1950s until the early 1990s.  This is a sweeping story that cannot be pigeon-holed into a romance, mystery, or comedy. It is all these things and thensome. Suicides and secrets, miscarriages and murders, wealth and poverty, sane and strange, greedy and generous, brothers and sisters, twins and torture, and of course, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

My favorite quotes circled and scrutinized love:
“In love one advances by retreating” (p 15).
“when it comes to love there’s no telling what people will convince themselves of” (p 30).
“But as the years passed we became each other’s bad habit” (215).

And one quote about my fave, the drums: “It is as if the drums have been yearning to speak to him, and he to them. Finally, he thinks: at long last, here are friends” (p 287).

BookLust Twist: From Book Lust in the chapter “Music and Musicians” (p 164).

 

Divorce

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How does one go about planning to leave? She knows she wants out while he has no clue. He mentally packs a bag on a nightly basis, dreaming of the last time he closes the door while she closes her eyes to sleep. How often is it a mutual decision where one looks at the other and they both know what disaster lies ahead? How often is it a firm handshake, nice try, and see you later? The quiet dismantle of a mistake.

To think of my task is chilling
to know  I was carefully building a mask I was wearing for two years, swearing
I’d tear it off?

If you are the one planning to leave – do you have a mental count down clock, ticking the minutes to freedom? Is your end date so final you know the weeks, days and hours ’til freedom? Do you have an escape route a la Sleeping with the Enemy; something so well thought out no one (including yourself) sees it coming? Will you leave your spouse reeling with IHadNoClue and your friends shocked (They-Were-The-Perfect-Couple. No, I never suspected a thing!).

I know your feelings are tender. Inside you the embers still glow
but I’m a shadow, only a bed of blackened coal
call myself jezebel for wanting to leave.

If you are the one left behind – do you sense the abandonment before it happens? Did he turn away from you a little too quickly to read a text message? Did you feel the distance before you noticed how untouched you have become? Are you secretly counting down the days until leaving, wanting to play the broken, left behind, but secretly rejoicing the respite from unlove? Do you grasp at what once was knowing you never had it in the first place?

Seven months, three weeks, two days and six hours is what he said to me. Why? I thought you were good at this marital thing.
I may be good at it. I’m just not happy doing it.

How I wish that we never had tried
to be man and his wife
to weave our lives into a blindfold
over both our eyes.

~Jezebel, Natalie Merchant 1992 

 

Guilty of Anything

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Forgiven

There are some people in my life who think that my rants are about them. They take my words and somehow see themselves. Yet, while they see words that might work, they dismiss full sentences because they don’t add up. It’s almost like they want the whole thing to be their private Carly Simon moment… but it doesn’t quite fit. Take Dear Mr. Liar, just for hahas. I gender bendered on that one. It’s about a GIRL. Well, sorta. There’s a guy component and he knows his part. Don’t worry. That deletion will happen a n y day. Nothing more to tell. End of that story. So, back to the chick component. I hate fake. When I was finally clued in just how fake this fake really was I decided to lash out a la language style. Words and words upon words. I don’t know. It made me feel better. Now, if I could just delete her from my blogroll…

Then, there’s The Bottle has Been. People have questioned the consumption before. If you knew what bottles I tilt in the air you wouldn’t worry so much. And no, I didn’t write it about You either- not your past, your present nor your future. Not You. I know someone who knows someone who knows someone who drinks too much. We (this different someone and I) got into a discussion about “too much” and, more importantly, who are we to say what much is too?
I have a favorite scene in The Fly. Geena Davis is trying to deal with an exboyfriend who simply won’t go away. Or, more importantly, she decides she hasn’t dealt with the ex in the most proper of ways. In the middle of an epiphany she storms off to do what she should have a long time ago.
That’s me. I’m dealing with things I should have addressed eons ago.

So, here’s what I want to say to you. You are not guilty of anything if not everything. Don’t let it (or me) go to your head.