Missing you - Story Cabaret

I read two very different books in the last two days with the same theme - that of missing people.  The first book, The Sky Is Everywhere by Jandy Nelson, is a poetic treatment of grief, confusion and first love.  Lennie's older sister died suddenly just weeks before the book starts and Lennie is cut adrift.  All of us second children know how hypnotic and stellar our oldest siblings are to us, and how we cannot envision the world without them.  The Walker girls were inseparable and now, Lennie finds herself all alone.   Lennie's libido awakens as she grapples with grief, and in the way that people grasp at anything to give them a break from pain and fear and sorrow, Lennie finds herself drawn to the only other person who seems to understand her suffering, her sister's boyfriend/fiance.  Enter the New Boy and everything shifts.

This book was like a kaleidoscope with recognizable patterns recombining in first predictable and then very unexpected ways.  Lennie's notes to her sister, scraps of poetry, begin each chapter and they come around at the end to save her.   Great romance, great story, great book.

 I just finished the second book and although no one is known to have died in the book it moved me to tears. In The Romeo and Juliet Code by Phoebe Stone, Felicity Bathburn Baghead is deposited on the porch of her American family in the summer of 1941.  Her beautiful mother and father, her Winnie and her Danny, drive away and disappear from her life - back to Europe.  She does not want to be in this big rambling house of secrets on the coast of Maine.  Her Uncle Gideon is angry with her Danny and Felicity decides to angry with him.  And no one will answer her questions.

Back then, adults kept a LOT of secrets from children.  The Bathburn house absolutely rings  with secrets, most rather benign, one or two universe-shaking.  One secret is the boy behind the closed door, a polio victim and soon, Felicity's best friend.  Derek's story is not fully explained in this book and I think Stone might want to do him justice later on.  The story is told through 11-year-old Felicity's eyes and with her very British sensibilities and turns of phrase.

And through it all, she misses her Winnie and her Danny and we gradually get a picture of her life with them in the London of the Blitz.  The strange letters filled with numbers that Uncle Gideon spirits away become an obsession to the two children and their friendship is cemented in their efforts to solve the mystery of what they all mean.  They do solve it but it is not the most important secret in this book.

Stone does a wonderful job of picturing those months before America joined the war and the waiting, the secrets, the longing for people far away.  The Bathburn house is full of good people with broken or frightened hearts.  Flissy, as they call her, ends up being a balm to their sorrows, even as she tries to bear up under her own confusion.  I LOVE this book.  Just thinking about it brings a lump to my throat.  How brave they all were back then! 

Of course, what I SHOULD have been doing all this time is preparing for the Story Cabaret on Friday evening.  I am telling TRUE "Stories of the 'Hood"!  My life is not so tragic as Lennie's or so worrisome as Flissy's but I do have some fun stories to tell.  Just which ones?  And how should I piece them together?   Stop by the Touchstone Theater on 4th in Bethlehem on Friday, April 29th (8 pm), to find out!  $10 gets you an evening of stories AND a glass of wine.  Tom Egan will tell his superb stories of growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, and if my stories don't excite you, let me tell you, you will be blown away by Tom's tales.  I hope he tells the one about riding on boxcars!