Latest Book Obsession

 Jane Austen meant nothing to me until Freshmen year of college.  Our Intro to the Novel instructor, an very tall man named Clarence something, led us through Emma.

He pointed out Austen's gift for describing the ridiculous in her time period's fashions and mores, and her ability to lead her main characters to better choices and happier endings. I went on to read more Jane on my own. Thank you, Clarence.

So when I saw a book on my library's Staff Picks display titled Jane and the Last Mystery; a Jane Austen mystery, I gave it a chance.

It was the LAST book in a multi-book series and the first book of my latest book obsession.

Jane makes a great fictional character. The footnotes and end pages show the research that Stephanie Barron, the series' author, has done into Austen's life. Many of the settings were visited by Austen. A lot of the characters did actually live at the same time as Austen. Barron is true to the Austen family, Jane's mother and father, her sister, Cassandra, and the five healthy Austen brothers; James, Edward, Henry, Charles and Frank.

I love the attention to detail in fashions and behaviors. Barron's version of Jane Austen manages to straddle all social strata and gender expectations. 

I know more about Napoleon, and England's efforts to stop the "Monster" from invading the British Isles, than I ever wanted to. Political intrigue allows Jane to do a little spying and meet dashing characters.

So, yes, I thoroughly enjoy this series. I wish that Jane could continue but Barron ended her series in a respectful manner. 

Give Jane Austen mysteries a try.

 

What a YEAR!!

It's been a Year!  I saw beautiful sunrises, watched squirrels beg, followed birds in flight. I walked with my friends around the neighborhood and stopped on the hillside to watch the sun set. I stood on shorelines and watched gulls swoop low.

Friends and family gathered around our table to laugh and eat and reminisce. My worship community is tight and striving to spread peace. I walked in the Peace Walk for the first time in years.

I took a poetry course and wrote some poems! 

I spend a lot of time with my 97 year old Mom, and her struggles to keep her sight. (So far so good!)

And a lot of time with our son and his family and our granddaughter who is as tall as I am, now.

We survived a lot of sad and shocking events in our world this year. Wars in the Middle East, in Africa, in the Ukraine. Forest fires that spread smoke all through North America. Extreme weather. Gun violence. Etc. Etc. yada yada yada.

We DID survive. And where there is Life, there is Hope.

What do you hope for this coming year? Hope means we still have a future.  Here are a few of my hopes:

I hope to use my time more wisely.  I hope to smile more. I hope to write more.

I hope for a cleaner world. I hope to make changes in my lifestyle to bring that cleaner world closer.

I hope for Peace. I hope to spread peace wherever I can.

I hope for Kindness. I hope to be kind in meaningful, measurable ways.

I hope for Truth, Justice and the Global Way*! Almost like Superman! 

I hope you are all happy and healthy and productive in 2024.

Happy New Year!!

*The original quote was "the American Way". But that has different meanings than it did in the 1950's. I have no idea what the Global Way is.  I hope that it will be a truly inclusive, accepting, generous, truthful, hardworking and respectful way of life.

 

Poetry

I am still alive. My absence is a mystery even to me. But I still have things to write about.

For the holidays, my son gave me a gift certificate to take a writing class. I signed up for a poetry course. It ended last week.

Somehow I missed that the last poem was not to be submitted. It has been such a charge to have an audience - even of one, the professor - for every poem I wrote these ten weeks. And he said nice things - mostly.

So, I wrote that last poem. A poem that would encapsulate something that we carried with us from the "rock" stars of our childhood.

Here it is:

Needs

We lock our fingers together

and mime our imprisonment.

As the shaggy boys harmonize, 

we clutch our none-too-impressive chests.

We are in "Chains!" and 

we swirl and dip and sidestep - as one.

 

We trained for years -

singing rounds in the car.

Mom taught us songs 

about "bananas"

and "chasing rainbows" 

and "old mill streams".

 

Now the music is our own.

No Mr. Sandman, No Stranger in Paradise.

All our very own. The words a code

 our mother cannot decipher.

 

And then she does. 

We come home from school

And "Yesterday" plays on the stereo.

 

The shaggy boys are older.

They play alien sounds.

They sing of other needs

beyond love and dancing.

 

We sit in the evening

reading or knitting;

we harmonize to the arrival of the sun

or the "wind that turns me on".

The music knots around us

and in us,

then and into the stars.

Bound by more than blood. Bound

by the need to sing.

 

Thoughts on First Day

 The Quaker Meeting that I attend has ventilation problems. That's never a good thing but when viruses gather where people gather, it can be a bit dodgy. So, we crack the windows to make sure the air moves around, even now, in Winter.

We keep our coats on as we sit in silence. This morning, I remembered my childhood Winter Sundays. The pastor of the Catholic Church my family belonged to poured the parish's money into the school. The nave had ceilings that were as high as heaven. The aging, overburdened furnace churned out heat and it sailed immediately to those heights. We never took our coats off unless we were lucky enough to sit right next to the heating vents.

Those memories made my Winter coat feel like a hug as I sat in Meeting. I imagined people long gone putting their arms around my shoulder - Friends who have moved to other states or other parts of the world. I remembered F(f)riends and family whom I will never see again in this lifetime. This morning, they sat with me, as I huddled in my coat.

I remembered teachers and the other students at that parish school. They sat with me in Meeting, too. Worship shared has no boundaries.

If our ventilation problem isn't solved by summer, we may end up meeting under the trees in our shorts. And that will be fine.

Where two or more are gathered in the name of peace, there also will peace be found - even if it comes in a Winter coat.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The moon over the sunrise. A gift!

 In 2020, I learned that the world is not as safe as I may have thought. The virus, the political arena, the arguments and disagreements, - all added up to make me anxious. I was not alone.

2021 was not a whole lot better, with violence in our capital and the return of mass shootings. (Even shooters stayed home during the pandemic's first year.)

2022 - more of the same. My disillusionment was becoming a world view.

I dropped out of social media. I went to ground. And I told myself that the world was an unsettled, unsettling place.

Over and over again, I warned myself about real and imagined dangers. Over and over again, I congratulated myself on wisely hunkering down, laying low, disengaging.

Now, I am teaching a short "stories-we-tell" workshop to the children of my worship group. What a wake-up call! 

The world is complicated! The world is full of flawed and wonderful people, intriguing living things, beautiful rocks and trees, (awful traffic, annoying noises, too - let's be honest). 

Still, there is light - Light - every morning, even if the skies are gray. If I tell myself that the world is full of danger, I will treat everything and everyone as an enemy. Do I want to live in a world like that? Does that make me happy?  Um, no.

If my conversation is ONLY full of the way people irritate me, or close calls with disaster, or wrongs that I have suffered, YUCK! How can I bear getting up each day?

Somewhere in our suffering, we have to find birdsong, or cloud dances, or funny hats, or smiles.

The Attitude Doctors tell us to find three things to be grateful about each day. Make it easy on yourself. Be grateful for ONE thing! Just one. But be grateful for that one thing several times during the day. Maybe in a day or two, you will notice another thing to be grateful about.

Here are some suggestions:

Hot toast with your favorite spread. Just the smell is a gift.

Birds in puddles - they are seriously silly.

Roofs!

Warm socks.

Air.

The fact that things will change - hopefully for the better.

Can you walk? Be grateful. Can you see? Find interesting things to see.

You can change scary stories to ones of possibilities, tales of comfort, the history of growth.

Time to crawl out of the bunker. You can do it.

(Right now, I am grateful for radiators and tea kettles.)

 

 

Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris - remembering Paul Gallico

 When I saw the title of the new movie version of this book, I knew it had to be a typo. The book was published - in 1958 - under the title, Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris.  I just learned - from Goodreads - that in Britain, the title was Flowers for Mrs. Harris. Notice that the British title did not drop the "H" from Mrs. Harris' name. I wonder if that bowdlerized spelling was considered a slur. Hmmm.

The author was Paul Gallico. I read all of the Mrs. Harris books. For a hardworking charwoman, she got around. She even went to Parliament.

I moved on to Gallico's less humorous works.  His first foray into authorship was as a "smart-alecky" movie reviewer. Then he became a sports writer. After asking if he could spar with Jack Dempsey, (he lasted two minutes), he wrote about the bout and his fortune as a sports writer was made.

Gallico was a storyteller at heart and in the late '30s he sold a piece of fiction to the movies, quit his sports writing job and moved to Europe to write fiction.

He made his mark with the novel The Snow Goose, the story of the friendship between a reclusive artist and the young girl who brings a wounded snow goose to the artist for healing. Every year the snow goose returns to the marsh where the artist lives. 

I read Gallico's books as a teen and all I could remember of this book was the returning goose and the boats rescuing soldiers at Dunkirk. The ending is bittersweet. I LOVED it. (I was young.)

Gallico wrote novels that will be familiar to movie goers - Thomasina, for instance. His Love of Seven Dolls (warning: this is a dated and sometimes troubling story) became the movie Lili  and was the inspiration for the musical Carnival. He wrote The Poseidon Adventure as well.

The 2022 movie version of Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris follows the 1992 movie that starred Angela Lansbury.

Looking into Gallico's work - 41 books, 20 or so movies - I realized I barely scratched the surface with Mrs. Harris, Thomasina and the The Snow Goose. I may have to find a few "sentimental" books by Paul Gallico.

Question of the day! What kid snacks did you eat?

My brothers and sisters and I were "free range" kids. Most kids in the 50s, 60s and 70s were. One of our favorite "ranges" was the corner store where Mom sent us with bottles to hand in for pennies or nickels. That was the recycling program of the time!

We took those nickels and pressed our fingers against the glass case where tri-colored coconut candies, candy necklaces, gumdrops, chocolate drops, wax lips, Necco wafers, chewy fruit slices, lay out on trays. "2 for 1c" or "1 for 1 c", (my keyboard no longer has the slashed "c" symbol that stood for a penny), OR, be still my greedy little soul, "3 for 1c" - at those prices, empty bottles bought us a paper bag of treasure!

Then we moved, much too far to walk to a corner store, too far from any store. So, we foraged for our snacks. Mulberries, wild raspberries, honeysuckle, - spring and summer was a veritable smorgasbord of stuff. Once, we even savored "onion" grass - wild onions with baby bulbs at the end. Once was enough for that snack.

In the Fall we ate the wild pears. So grainy! But still sweet enough for us to enjoy. In the winter, we ate crackers spread with jelly. On Bridge Club nights and the days after, we had pretzels, chips and candy! Popcorn! Oh, we loved popping corn on the stove. And Dad made us a treat he called a Black Cow - root beer and milk - yum! And Mom made an eggless, milkless chocolate cake that we adored. I still make it. Some people call it Wacky cake or Depression cake. I call it delicious.

I loved the fruit slices -Chuckles! - that came 4 or 5 to a pack - gummy candies liberally covered in sugar. I even liked the licorice slice that was always included. Next to that I loved the wild raspberries that will ripen soon.

 So the question of the day is this: What was your favorite kid snack? 

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