Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I had a lunch and took a walk with a friend yesterday, and naturally we wandered into a bookstore.  We are both avid readers.  I picked up David Sedaris' new book of essays - "Calypso".  I had begun a mystery, but one sentence into "Calypso" and I was hooked.  Several sentences later I was laughing, and soon tears were rolling down my face.  What a gift he has of being the butt of his own jokes, and seeing himself clearly yet compassionately.  And then I got to the part about the suicide of his sister Tiffany, and I felt like a dear friend was expressing my own mixture of shock, disbelief, confusion, and gory details that no sister or brother wants to know.  Hard to process?  Impossible, actually.  He spoke for me during the crazy time I flew to Texas, saw the splash zone in the hallway of my brother's house where he shot himself in the head.  Sedaris discovers from a sister that Tiffany was found with a plastic bag over her head, so not only had she taken pills, but suffocated herself for good measure.  This is haunting stuff, but I'm grateful he had a brother, three sisters and his dad there.  I lost my only sibling, so speculation and apartness is all I'm left with.  No, that's not quite right.  Now I've got Sedaris' book. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My friend lent me her copy of "Hillbilly Elegy" and at first I wasn't that engaged, but then it dawned on my how relevant it was to some conversations we'd had in the past about our poor background and how difficult it was for us to negotiate going to college, since our parents hadn't had the opportunity and had no guidance to give us.  Both of us, luckily, had two parents and stable households, but we saw our parents struggle with what being middle class might mean and how one could become so.  I'd love to have gone to a small private college, a girl's school, but didn't dare ask.  The state schools were a bargain and in fact the one I went to was excellent.  But I had no sense of choice.  My friend struggled with finances then raising a son alone, and she had little choice in where she got her B.A.
The poor white trash element was present in both our families, and the right wing politics, but we both carved out our lives away from that bent and forged our own paths.  Luckily, we are not mired in a culture of laziness and hopelessness and blame.  But we've seen it close up and personal.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

We just spent three days at our cabin, doing spring cleaning, discovering the toliet needs fixing, adjusting to the eight trees now gone due to the drought, and walking along the lake and sitting on our deck reading or playing Scrabble.  I finished the two books I was reading simultaneously:  Overstory, by Richard Powers and The Bright Light at the End of the World by Eowin Ivey.  Both are engrossing and powerful.  I think I prefer Ivey's first novel, The Snow Child to Bright Light, but the history of this book is gripping and the major character an interesting woman for her time and place.  She discovers an affinity for photography, and has her barrenness become the embracing of an art of looking still and deeply.  The Overstory also has scientific details that are factual, and the main characters in this book are trees and the people who try to save them.  I was blown away by Annie Proux's Barkskins, about the history of the decimation of the forests in North America, but this book is about now, and what is happening and going to happen when we lose our forests.  It is a passionate book, as are the human characters who come alive in relationship to trees.  Their own histories are intertwined with trees.  Reading this novel in a forest had me listening for the trees and observing them.  I also allowed myself some grieving for the loss of the firs around our cabin because of  the drought, and I stared at the stumps which  recorded the years of their lives.  The woods are my spiritual home, from the time I was a child in Virginia.  I understand better why now.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband and I watched "Out of Africa" last night.  We hadn't seen it in many years.  It's ultra romantic and appears to promote colonialism as a way to see exotic places.  Though that was not what Dinesen intended, I'm sure, and it does show the trap women were in who were not married.  Society is closed to them.  The coffee plantation aspect is the most interesting now.  Her hard work, struggle and perseverance  while the men around her were playing at being hunters, despoiling the wildlife for profit.  The reviews say Robert Redford is wrong for the part.  He doesn't even affect an English accent.  But since he is a schoolgirl's romantic dream, not real in any sense, I doubt it matters.  He is Redford.  Enough said.  It is Meryl Streep's performance that enchants.  The range of her emotions is extraordinary.  And now we can see that she's as trapped by colonialism as the Africans.  She has no power, even over the money from her own family, and men treat her like she was designed for their entertainment.  The film is more feminist now than ever. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

My husband and I went to a matinee yesterday to see "RBG".  It has all the elements of a great film:  heroic lead character, terrific love story, tension and politics.  Justice Ginsberg is tiny but mighty.  And her success is a team effort with her adoring husband.  How refreshing to see the man behind the woman instead of the woman behind the man.  And she had her tragedies:  her mother's death when she was 17, her husband's early cancer, and then his final bout.  She clung to the law like a life preserver, and her faith in the constitution guided her conscience.  She was beautiful, as well.  Her love of opera, shared with Scalia, is legendary, and I see how her life mirrored opera in so many ways.  She's "notorious" now, admired by young women everywhere, and enjoying the fuss.  Her granddaughter shows us how inspiring it is to be witnessing this remarkable woman age, but not decline. 

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

Our younger grandson is having nightmares about bugs.  He wakes up screaming and sees bugs on the walls where there are none.  But it began with a real bug on the ceiling of his room as he was being rocked to sleep.  Our younger son had the same fear of bugs, well, to be exact, spiders and bees.  He's over forty and still doesn't like them.  Our grandson's imagination is working overtime trying to make sense of the overwhelming world he's discovering.  He likes cows, but their heads are gigantic and their tongues intimidating.  Super big and super little.  What a strange place!  When my daughter asked about a night light I encouraged her.  All four of my kids needed night lights, pretty much throughout childhood.  The dark is an ancient fear, and in the dark we imagine things.  I hope the little guy gets some relief from his sensitivity and relaxes, but all parents have been through that powerless feeling that we cannot allay all fears, no matter how careful we are.  We cannot protect our children from the experience of living in a complex, convoluted environment.  It's a big, sometimes scary world out there, and you can't fool even a toddler.

Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

A neighbor of mine has Parkinson's.  She has an attendant with her now, and must use a walker, and I often see them walking down our street.  I always speak to her, and this morning, as I was complaining about our dreary weather she informed me she just got back from much better weather.  Where, I asked, thinking Hawaii or New Mexico.  England and Scotland, she replied, and we had a good laugh over that.  What is the world coming to if the warm sunny weather is in damp old England?  We discussed what she'd seen:  Edinburough, Bath, Stratford on Avon, and northern England.  She saw Romeo and Juliet at Stratford.  I countered it wasn't fair, I'd seen Cymbaline when I was there.  When we parted, and felt a rush of joy that she was still able to travel and enjoy new scenes.  Probably her daughter and granddaughter went with her, but hopefully there are tours and ways for people with handicaps like Parkinson's to keep active and stimulated.  She's a wonderful woman, and brave, and an ordinary hero right here four houses up from me.  Hurrah for not giving in or giving up.