Poetry Thursday: Overflow

Overflow

I didn’t mean to do it.
Somehow
my elbow brushed against
that top heavy bottle
of cream and
Over it went,
spreading a silent pool of
reproach in french vanilla
across my countertop
running in languid pools
over the edge
dripping casually onto
my clean floor.

So early in the morning
for this to happen,
my eyes still gummy with sleep
I’m frozen in shock
incapable of moving.

“You’re always in such a hurry,”
my husband says
when
“You’re so clumsy”
is
what he means.

He turns his back
and pads away
while my eyes stare
transfixed
on this fountain before me
until they too fill up and
spill.

~Becca Rowan
September 2008

The Sunday Salon: The Sense of an Ending

On Thursday I stopped into the library to return some books and came out with a veritable treasure trove of books, which, combined with some review books that arrived earlier in the week, gave me plenty of reasons to curl up on the sofa with a pot of tea by my side.

Because I was craving something compact, I chose  The Sense of an Ending to read yesterday afternoon. What a marvelous combination of intensity and understatement Julian Barnes achieves in this slim little novel. It’s really a novel about an ordinary man, Tony Webster, who is at that stage of life where he seems surrounded by endings. He’s retired, divorced, his only child has grown up and away from him, and a day’s activity might consist of “restringing a blind and patching a pair of trousers.” He is a self-proclaimed man who “finds comfort in his own doggedness.” When a rather mysterious bequest comes his way, Tony finds himself in contact with an old flame from his youth. Through their rather enigmatic encounters, he comes to the realization that his past experience was really nothing like he remembered it, and that his actions have had far graver consequences on people’s lives than he ever imagined.

Barnes himself has said that he “wanted to write a book about what time does to memory, how it changes it, and what memory does to time”; about “discovering at a certain point in your life that things you’ve always believed were wrong.” It’s also a book about discovering and accepting who you are and the way you’ve chosen to live. “If Tony had seen more clearly, acted more decisively, held to truer moral values, settled less easily for a passive peaceableness which he first called happiness and later contentment. If Tony hadn’t been fearful, hadn’t counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval…and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn’t been Tony.”

Most of us, at least when we reach a certain age, are wont to examine our lives, are prone to counting what-if’s and shoulda-coulda-woulda’s. In trying to make peace with those memories, you have to determine how many times acting counter to your original course would have meant acting counter to who you are as a person.

And you have to make some kind of peace with the answer.

One reviewer calls The Sense of An Ending, an “average book about an average English guy.”  Well, aren’t most of us just “average” people, trying to do the best we can with life as it happens? Tony is given the opportunity, if you will, to reexamine his past in light of new, rather alarming information, an opportunity most of us never have.

But in the end, we each can only do the best we can with what we have.

 

Poetry Thursday: Ithaka

Everyday is a journey, isn’t it? Not necessarily of mythic proportions, like Odysessus’ journey home to Ithaca, but when we set our feet on the floor each morning, we don’t know what the day will bring.

I love the way this poet encourages us our on journey – be it large or small – to keep our “thoughts raised high,” to “not hurry the journey at all,” because it’s “better if it lasts for years.”

 

At the end, whatever we’ve found along the way has made us “wise” and “full of experience.”

Ithaka ~Constantine P. Cavafy When you set out for Ithaka ask that your way be long, full of adventure, full of instruction. The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops, angry Poseidon – do not fear them: such as these you will never find as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare emotion touch your spirit and your body. The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops, angry Poseidon – you will not meet them unless you carry them in your soul, unless your soul raise them up before you. Ask that your way be long. At many a Summer dawn to enter with what gratitude, what joy - ports seen for the first time; to stop at Phoenician trading centres, and to buy good merchandise, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, and sensuous perfumes of every kind, sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can; to visit many Egyptian cities, to gather stores of knowledge from the learned. Have Ithaka always in your mind. Your arrival there is what you are destined for. But don’t in the least hurry the journey. Better it last for years, so that when you reach the island you are old, rich with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth. Ithaka gave you a splendid journey. Without her you would not have set out. She hasn’t anything else to give you. And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn’t deceived you. So wise you have become, of such experience, that already you’ll have understood what these Ithakas mean.

Black and White and Read All Over

31 Ways to Get Smarter-Faster

Who could resist a headline like that? Certainly not I, the ravenous reader forever in search of ways to improve her mental ability. I purchased the copy of Newsweek magazine bearing this claim (despite the sticker shock -$5.99 for a single copy of a magazine!) and proceeded to devour it from cover to cover.

I hadn’t read a news magazine in a very long time. News coverage frustrates me. There seems so little of substance, so much hyperbole and posturing and just plain ridiculousness. So I was primed to be disappointed.

I was not disappointed. The stories were interesting, informative, thoughtful, and I felt as if I had added some value to my daily reading. Sort of like taking a vitamin or doing your exercise in the morning – all the things my morning newspaper once did for me back in the day.

Here’s the other thing about reading the news – I like my news in black and white on a page. Not surprising since I prefer my books to come the same way. But reading hard news on a screen seems especially distasteful. News should come printed on crinkly sheets of newsprint, with smelly ink that rubs off on your fingertips. Or, at the very least, on slick printed pages bound together, which can be folded in half and tucked into your purse. The Newsweek didn’t disappoint on that score, either.

Oh, and as for the story about getting smarter? Fascinating. It seems you can actually increase your IQ throughout your life by doing things such as eating dark chocolate and yogurt or drinking red wine and coffee, by dancing, going to a literary festival, knitting, playing an instrument, writing in longhand, sleeping, daydreaming…all kinds of things it sounds perfectly delightful to do. For once, something that is good for you doesn’t have to be an onerous task.

That information alone was worth the price of the ink.

How about you? Do you read newsmagazines or newspapers? Do you like to read them online or in print?

 

The Sunday Salon

I love Marisa de los Santos.

I love the characters she creates, because they’re so lovable in their humanity, so knowable in their occasional quirkiness, so identifiable in the ways they manage to knot up their lives.

I love the way she uses everyday language but allows her poets voice to creep in just enough so we want to stop and savor each sentence a little more than we might ordinarily do in a contemporary novel.

I love the way her stories connect us to our deepest emotions and make us think about some of our relationships in new ways.

This week I finished her latest novel, Falling Together, the story of three people who became best friends in college, go their separate ways, and then unexpectedly fall back together after six years apart. And while this novel was just as successful in all the ways I described above, somehow I didn’t love it quite as much as I had hoped I would.

It’s hard when you have really high expectations for a book and an author, and perhaps I invested too much excitement in this novel, having just re-read Belong To Me and loving it more the second time round than the first and being so eager to delve into another book that I would love just as much. I think what didn’t work for me so well was simply the story line. It was harder for me to connect with these characters from a different generation and the way they were reacting to one another. The premise of the story didn’t ring true –  two of the friends embark on a journey across the world to search for the third, accompanied by the hostile husband of the friend who has gone missing – so I couldn’t invest myself in the outcome either way.

But there were still luminous and wonderful spots, pages I dog-eared, and sentences that struck at the core of my heart. The writing was everything I love about Marisa de los Santos, and so I could forgive a storyline that seemed somewhat contrived.

It was Pen’s (for Penelope) relationship with her parents that was most interesting to me. Pen’s father had died suddenly two years prior to the events of the book, and we don’t discover how he died until very near the end of the novel. Pen’s mother has been mourning the loss deeply, but has recently announced that she “found someone.” Not sure how she feels about this development, Pen catches sight of her mother reading late one night, and realizes something important about her parent and herself.

She looked in and saw Margaret tucked into one corner of the big sofa reading a book, and the sight of her made Pen catch her breath. She looked purely alone, but content, as complex and self-contained as a Russian doll, inward and inward and inward. As Pen watched, her mother smiled a private smile at something in her book, and Pen thought she had never seen anything so incandescently lovely as her mother alone, until her mother glanced up and saw her and shut her book and became lovelier still, open-faced and alive.

Pen thought, You are like me. You like your little pockets of solitude, but you’re not made for being alone for long. There were people who could live on their own and be happy, and then there were people like Pen and Margaret who needed the falling together, the daily work of giving and taking and talk and touch.

While not my favorite of de los Santos’ novels (that honor goes to Belong To Me) Falling Together still has a place in my heart and on my shelf next to her other books.

Mom at Home

Contribution by Prince Raymond I never imagined myself as one of those moms who sits the kids down in front of the TV and goes about her business. No one ever told me about how hard it is to get any housework done when you’ve got kids in the house at the same time… All they want is all my attention all the time. I went and got us Bakersfield direct tv from website I found and it’s been really helpful because there are a lot of educational children’s shows that I don’t mind having the kids watch. It actually seems to be teaching them a few things and they’re even starting to pick up a few words of Spanish from the Dora the Explorer show which I think is just the coolest thing in the world. Maybe if I had some free timeI would sit down and watch it to because it certainly couldn’t hurt for me to brush up on my Spanish skills! Wouldn’t that be hilarious when my husband got home.

Poetry Thursday: The Language of the Human Heart

Poetry has been called “the language of the human heart,” and we turn to it when our hearts are breaking. The shock of loss and the pain of grief are physical as well as emotional, and sometimes hard to put into words. Poetry reminds us that these feelings are not unique to us, and by sharing them we can be comforted by our common humanity. Poets face life’s most difficult questions head-on and unafraid, and through their work, we find solace and wisdom.” ~Caroline Kennedy, from She Walks in Beauty

My dear neighbor and friend is dying. We have lived side by side for the past 30 years, and though sometimes days have gone by when we haven’t seen one another, her constant, quiet presence has always been a comfort to me. She looked out for me when I was a young mother, and, in the past few years, I have looked out for her in her old age. She wanted nothing more than to be able to stay at home until she died – and she almost made it. She went into the hospital last Thursday, but she won’t be coming home again.

“Why should I gripe?” she said last night when I talked to her on the phone. “I’ve lived a long time. I’m 88 years old!”

My friend loved to read, and most any evening I could see the glow of her reading lamp – on her sunporch in summer, and in her little front bedroom/sitting room in winter. She loved historical novels and romance novels, but didn’t care for mysteries. “Oh no,” she said once with a shiver, when I asked her if she had read a certain mystery writer I liked. “I don’t like all the killing.”

My friend loved to write and receive letters. She once wrote dozens of letters in a month – to brothers and sister in laws and cousins. Last summer, she told me that her last living cousin had passed away. “And now I only have two people left to write to,” she said.

I think one of the saddest, hardest parts of aging is losing all one’s family and friends, watching them disappear from your life like stars going out, one by one. Being left behind must be so painful, suffering through that grief time and again, and wondering when it will be your turn.

Caroline Kennedy, who edited this lovely book of poems She Walks in Beauty, is certainly no stranger to loss. In her lifetime, she has lost her father, her mother, and her brother. “There have been periods when I have wanted to withdraw from the world,” she writes. “Knowing that my mother turned to poetry at difficult times in her life, and reading the same poems that brought her solace, helped me feel her presence and gave me strength.”

Here then, is a poem from this anthology, that speaks to me today as I face the loss of a friend…

Never More Will the Wind

Never more will the wind

Cherish you again.

Never more will the rain.

Never more

Shall we find you bright

In the snow and wind.

The snow is melted,

The snow is gone,

And you are flown:

Like a bird out of our hand,

Like a light out of our heart,

You are gone.

~H.D.

Simply Reading: The Murder Stone

…the burned and desolate spot Gamache sought wasn’t exclusive to the murderer. The reason Armand Gamache could go there was because it wasn’t totally foreign to him. He knew it because he’d seen his own burned terrain, he’d walked off the familiar and comfortable path inside his own head and heart and seen what festered in the dark. ~from The Murder Stone, by Louise Penny

I could easily fall in love with  Armand Gamache. Louise Penny’s inveterate Chief Inspector of the Surete du Quebec is intelligent, romantic, sincere, sensitive, and deep thinking. He is completely devoted to his wife and children, yet able to run down the most vile of murderers, as he must do once again in The Murder Stone.

This is only my second Louise Penny book, but I enjoyed this one even more the first one I read (The Brutal Telling). The setting is the Manoir Bellechasse, a lakeside bed and breakfast, the place Gamache and his wife Reine-Marie always spend their wedding anniversary. They return each year because it is the place where they first made love – see, isn’t that romantic? They are celebrating their 35th anniversary at the Manoir, and are joined by a large family of other guests who have chosen this spot to place a commemorative statue of their father. Of course, as things happen, someone in the family turns up dead, and Inspector Gamache must take charge of the case.

Penny’s mysteries are intelligent and complex, and she delves deeply into each characters psyche. I imagine her as one of these authors who completes long character analyses of each person in their book, because they are each so unique and fully fleshed out.

But it is the relationship between Gamache and Reine-Marie that I love.

“I enjoyed this evening,” said Reine-Marie, slipping into the cool crisp sheets beside her husband.

“So did I.” He took off his half-moon reading glasses and folded his book onto the bed. It was a warm evening. Their tiny back room had only one window, onto the kitchen garden, so there wasn’t much of a through draught, but the window was thrown open and the light cotton curtains were billowing slightly. The lamps on their bedside tables provided ponds of light and the rest was in darkness. It smelled of wood from the log walls and pine from the forest, and a hint of sweetness from the herb garden below.

“Two days time and it’s our anniversary,” said Reine-Marie. “July first. Imagine, thirty-five years together. Were we so young?”

“I was. And innocent.”

“Poor boy. Did I scare you?”

“Maybe a little. But I’m over it now.”

Their marriage is so rock solid and strong, and though she doesn’t play an actual role in helping him solve the case, her insight usually plays a meaningful part in the investigation. Penny’s books are delightful –  well written, well researched, and thoughtful through and through. And if you visit her website, she seems the kind of person who is just as you would expect from reading her books. Smart, kind, thoughtful, sincere, and a dog lover after my own heart.

Penny’s books are mysteries, but so much more. As she writes on her website: “The Chief Inspector Gamache books, while clearly crime fiction, are not in fact about murder or even death. They’re really about life. And friendship. About belonging and choices. And how very difficult it can be, how much courage it can take, to be kind.”

I highly recommend them, and I’m excited to read the other five books in this series.

 

 

 

The Sunday Salon: Tipping Points

Early in the week I finished 11/22/63, but I found myself still thinking about it as the week progressed.

That’s the mark of a powerful book, isn’t it? When you can’t get it out of your head, even after you finish the last page?

One of the most interesting aspects of Stephen King’s novel, 11/22/63, was the portion that explored King’s assessment of what might have happened had Kennedy lived to finish out his term. In King’s view, it wasn’t a pretty picture, filled with hatred, violence, and poverty. It set me thinking about tipping points in history, historical events that set a nation and its people on a certain course for good or evil. Certainly all of history is one long series of tipping points after another, but each generation can name its own particular apex, the moment when a previously stable environment gets rocked on its axis.

Of course, most of us don’t get an opportunity to change history, or even to effect much change at all. It’s one of the things that can cause much frustration in modern society, especially in consumer affairs. It’s almost as if there should be a consumer court or consumer forum where people could go file complaints about products and services nationwide.

I was seven years old when Kennedy was killed, and so the world as I know it  evolved based on that moment in American history. Had Kennedy lived, would the Vietnam war have escalated into the major conflict it became, spurring a social revolution that ultimately led to huge changes in women’s rights? What would have happened to race relations and integration? How would the Cold War have played out? in nuclear disaster or detente? Who would have followed Kennedy into the White House and what course would they have set?

Of course, we’ll never know, other than to speculate as King has done in 11/22/63.

I’ve been thinking about the most recent tipping point, the 21st century version. Had you asked me before I read 11/22/63, I would have identified the September 11, 2001 attacks as the point at which our world changed and we embarked on the course that led us to our current, somewhat rocky state of affairs. But I wonder if the true tipping point wasn’t the Presidential election that preceeded it, that unprecendented state of affairs where the winner was debateable, the outcome unclear for so long. Because after reading King’s book, I realize the Man (or Woman) in the White House sets the course in more ways than the ordinary citizen imagines.

Now tell me, what do you think the tipping point of the 21st century will be? 

Time Warp: Stephen King’s 11/22/63

In one of those interesting confluences of events, recently I found myself enmeshed in all things Kennedy (as in John Fitzgerald). It started with a Christmas gift  - a  copy of 11/22/63, the new novel by Stephen King that focuses on one man’s time travels and his attempt to prevent JFK’s assassination. As it happens, I was visiting my son who lives in Dallas when I received and began reading the book. So we thought it appropriate to take a ride out to Dealy Plaza and wander around the famous Book Depository Building.

It was strange, being there in that spot while I was reading King’s eerie description of that time and place. There it was, the Book Depository building that King described as having an “evil, blank face.” The sixth floor corner where Lee Harvey Oswald hunkered down to fire those fatal shots is now a museum, but the same window stares down with empty eyes onto the street. And how chilling it was seeing an “x” marked on the roadway in the spot where each of the shots made impact with the President’s head.

The whole scene seemed smaller, more claustrophobic than I would have expected. Having only seen ancient black and white film footage, the road seemed large and expansive, where in reality it’s a small two lane section of city street, flanked closely by buildings. But being there in the actual city where history occurred and where so much of King’s book is set, certainly added an extra dimension of realism to an already fantastic read.

The novel was, without a doubt, one of the most compelling stories I’ve read in a long time. I’ve not read much of King’s work, but when I have, I’m always struck by way he can write so sparingly (which may seem an odd way to describe an 870 page book) and yet convey such strong feelings. There are no wasted words despite the size of this tome. It’s all rip-roaring story, and reading it felt like being in a race car slamming around a track at top speed.

King looks not just at what happened in Dallas, but also at what the world was like in the years between 1958 and 1963, and how the seeds of 11/22/63 have come to fruition in the world of 2012. For Jake Epping (aka George Amberson), the past calls to him with a siren song. When he slips through the worm hole that allows him passage into that time period, he finds a lot to love, including a woman who steals his heart. So in the midst of a time-travel thriller, King inserts an authentic love story with lasting ramifications for our intrepid hero.

I finished the novel in less than a week, hauling it around the house with me, unable to put it down. And in one last bit of Kennedy confabulation, I was searching my TiVo for something to watch one night just after finishing the book, when I found a special program my husband had recorded back in September – Conversations With Jacqueline Kennedy, a recently released set of audio tapes which Jackie recorded just months after the President’s death. So for two hours, I listened to her inimitable, breathy voice, layered over photo montages of their early days together all the way up to that fateful day which had been in my mind so much over the past week.

11/22/63.

*Note: If you read and review this book, or any other Stephen King book, why not add join the Stephen King Project, a year long challenge hosted by Natalie (Coffee and A  Book Chick) and Kathleen (Boarding in My Forties).