House:
Garden
Stuff to look for
Errands
Kinwork and Lisaism
Reading:
Exercise
This had been a noticeable hole in my Newbery Medal reading. I loved the characters and their family ties and the setting, but I don't quite think its various plot threads came together as Virginia Hamilton intended.
One of the selling points of this gym is that you would never have to wait for a machine. Yeah, not even at 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. I used a recumbent bike and then a stairmill for several minutes until an elliptical came up.
Precor elliptical, 45' + 3' cooldown until my pulse was under 120; 20/20 incline; 5' at 11/20, 25 at 12/20, and 15 at 13/20 resistance; and 5660 strides or 125.8 spm. The machine reported a figure, generous I'm sure, of calories burned at 618, but maybe that number is not impossible: it doesn't count arms, and I pump mine continuously. It's been a while since I've used handweights, though.
Sometime in November I finished listening to Edward P. Jones's The Known World, about what happens to a plantation after the death of its owner--its black owner, who owned not just land but people as well. I see now, wanting to link to it because of something in I Am Charlotte Simmons, that I never wrote its own entry.
Really good. It read as if carefully founded on Census data and 19th-century newspapers and pamphlets, which impressed me all the more after I listened to the interview with the author following the performance because while his fiction read like creative nonfiction, it wasn't. Not quite like my next listen, True History of the Kelly Gang it was nearly historic invention, and only nearly because Jones's characters never existed as individuals, only as statistics.
Our plane arrived in Logan about half an hour late, so even though we hadn't checked bags and didn't have to wait for the shuttle and the shuttle dropped us right at our car, we landed on the Mass Pike at 5:00 on a Friday. Traffic was treacly all the way to Sturbridge, and then we hadn't thought to ask if there was a basketball game so we got snarled again on the way into Storrs and didn't arrive at Charenton until after 7:30.
Of course, the destination was well worth the frustrating journey. After a brief hello, RDC continued on to his own new godson, leaving me at Charenton for a blissful interlude.
Emlet learned how to blow bubbles over the weekend; also she sat with her legs crossed for the first time. I stacked firewood and helped to wire Pépé's cabin. ZBD and I collected eggs. A six-year-old cousin read a story to Emlet and her nine-year-old brother sailed us around the seven seas by way of the rowboat in the pasture. I read Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes and Go Dog, Go! and Frog and Toad Are Friends to the two-year-olds and listened with the seven-year-old to a chapter from the latest Redwall book. I herded hens, calling "chook chook chook," to which two did not respond when granddog Zelo was on the property; we debated whether "chook chook" might mean "I have the axe now git to the block." The two youngest babies stared at each other, Siblet at four months having just figured out how to sit up and the eleven-month-old cousin how to wave. There were ginger-chocolate cookies that I made in Denver (flat and extra crispy) and the other batch that I made there (domed and chewy); I figure the second batch came out better because ZBD helped me sift the flour (through a mill, because that is what we found) and Emlet helped to roll dough through sugar. I did a lot of dishes; we never had fewer than six at a meal and once twelve--throughout the weekend were Nisou, her parents, both siblings, one sibling-in-law, all five grandbabies, another family friend, HEBD and ZBD, and TJZD and RED. And me.
Someone's illness led us to discuss (not à table) how "stool" got its medical meaning (the "close-stool") and reading aloud selections from the OED led to much laughter: one of the sources mentioned "the stool of repentance" and another is a verse about "sitting between two stools." Merriam-Webster offers "the stool of election promises to balance the budget and reduce taxes, and the stool of the hideous cost of new weapons." Also Pépé didn't want us to forget about apostools and epistools either, and he and Mémé had just listened to an NPR bit about junk English and asked us to define what "capstone experience" might mean academically, and so I asked about the capstool experience. Later a stool pigeon came up and that was just too much.
We played in--well, near--the brook except for RED who slipped, dousing his feet in chill water. He took it like a champ, of course. We played poohsticks, some of us not quite grasping the up- to downstream element but having terrific fun throwing anyway. We played in the hottub, Emlet jumping to Nisou or me but thinking that ZBD was not big enough to catch her. She thought she was a fine size for pony riding, though, and I was even better because then both could ride me. This was I was game for until my hoove-knees gave out; they lasted longer on NBM's more thickly carpeted floors--visiting her and another part of SEM's family is the only time we left the property for three days.
Emlet and I constructed wheeled towers of Duplo blocks, which ran me over ("Not on me! On you!" in the sweetest French-accented, fluent English you ever have heard); ZBD and I constructed Minas Tirith in Lincoln Logs. We chased me around and around, and when I turned to chase Emlet instead, she corrected me: "No, you chase me!" We colored in coloring books, meticulously recapping a pen after each use, and generally coloring only in or near a small detail of the bigger picture. We admired Siblet in her elfin hat, seven-year-old ZBD's first sewing-machine project. I french-braided waist-length, very thick, but very fine, and glistening with spun gold, hair, so I told the stories of Rumpelstiltskin and Rapunzel. In addition to populating Minas Tirith, the animals I brought from the zoo (a tapir, sloth, mandrill, okapi, and jaguar; in plastic) served most excellently as chew-toys, especially the tapir. Nanabush sometimes had companionship in the stuffed wolf, who was either Jonathan the Husky (some Charenton folk are manic UConn basketball fans) or the Big Bad Wolf (under Emlet's care), and Emlet chastised me for hugging Nanabush hello because he is her "own personal animal."
Emlet's every expression is charming, but her clownface is something else, especially paired with my sister's and ZBD's. A couple of weeks ago I asked my mother if her Monday was free and, if it was, when my sister told her to get in the car, to get in and be driven like a good passenger. I had considered whether to tell my mother I was going home at all, and when I first told CLH only, she suggested my spending Sunday night in Old Lyme--which pressure to be from Charenton untimely ripped is why I debated. I put my hoof-knee down and kept to my suggestion of their coming to me and mine instead. And so we surprised our mother. Who was quite good and didn't say anything about my hair or my lack of grandchildren or curry in the chicken (although she was surprised by the baby épinards in the salad) or otherwise overly critical. However, she could not keep the vowels right in the children's names. CLH said she finally has got Kitty's sex straight, so that's something at least. Emlet's other godgrandmother also i'd the e in her third syllable but needed only one repetition to get it right; my own mother's mauling of Siblet's name into something you might name a sow and continuing to do so after more than six corrections made my teeth itch. When she did this, CLH and I would catch one another's eye and roll them--a difficult simultaneous manuever--and my mother, noticing this, would remark to Nisou each time that we thought it was "funny" when she mispronounced the name. Finally I told her it's not that we find the mispronounciation funny but that we need to sympathize with each other about her inability or refusal to learn Siblet's actual name.
But mostly my mother did fine. Although I am not always uncomfortable with strangers, I know which parent I favor when I tend that way. I wonder if she noticed how comfortable I am in the one house, inviting my guests to sit or drink, making salad, reminding Emlet to go pee, compared to her house where I always feel on eggshells and fear to make myself a sandwich lest I ruin her menu planning.
RDC returned from his aunt & uncle and other uncle and an early Thanksgiving with our other family (SFR is the prettiest baby ever) and baptism and meeting DWJ's betrothed. We had one last dinner together; RDC sympathized with and shared my inability to leave; he came up to kiss Emlet goodnight ("Goodnight, Tonton Richard!") while I was reading my last revolting rhyme to her; and then we did leave.
I had the most wonderful time.
Monday my throat had a few razors in it; by Tuesday morning it hurt. Smooching little kids will do that, except that quickly? So I might have passed it to them, especially since RDC had the same thing. Spreading Dr. Seuss and pestilence wherever we go, that's us.
In Logan I bought some books from Borders because I knew I would continue ignoring Iris Murdoch and James Baldwin, as I had all weekend, this time because my brain was falling out rather than being otherwise occupied. I bought pop history.
On the third-empty plane, I hoped I might be spared rowmates. Nope. They cruelly prolonged my hope by being the last passengers to board (which I noticed for certain because of how long I stood in the aisle while they filed in, watching the attendants arm the doors). I did offer to swap my aisle for their window seat, but they declined.
In a four-hour flight, the two of them got up a total of five goddamn times, two for her and three for him, which--hey!--I wouldn't have noticed or minded at all if they had just sat aisleward from me to start with. And neither would speak to me or touch my arm (I wore headphones) while they wanted out or in. They would just stare, each of the ten times I moved for them. I hated them.
A substitute for my own dog in the fifth picture. One day I hope to find myself such a beautiful dog as in the third picture. A normal gray hen for Kerry.
I spent Wednesday watching "The Lord of the Rings" and organizing photographs. I didn't read a drop but all my photographs are now sorted out. It was just the kind of activity I could do breathing through my mouth, and since my sinuses plugged both nose and brain that suited me fine.
Pop history indeed. I didn't quite throw it across the room, as I did with William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire--a stupid title for a book about the medieval Europe, since the entire world, not just Europe, was lit only by fire, up until Edison--except, you know, also by sunlight. I only skimmed the last few chapters. Unfortunately I bought two books by Norman Kantor. The other is a survey of antiquity, a period I'm not quite as attached to, so its unsupported conclusions, red herrings, and convenient glosses (meaing both elisions and definitions) might not piss me off as badly.
I had never read any Nancy Farmer before and picked her up only because she's won Newbery honors. I started with this because the other I borrowed, A Girl Named Disaster, looked more appealing (it starts out better than House starts, continues, or ends). House wasn't awful, but in the way of The Giver, I am too old. It might be a fine jumping-off point for kids to debate certain ideas, but it lacks cohesiveness for the adult reader.
I went along with opium and coca being grown in unsuitable climates; but it lost me when drug lords ruling a thin strip of country between post-Mexico and the U.S., farming narcotics and blocking illegal emigration, were granted their sovereignty in return for promising not to sell their crops to either country but only abroad.
Miles better than my previous Nancy Farmer. A blurb says that Nhamo is peer to Miyax Julie Edward Kapugen and Karana of the Island of the Blue Dolpins, and she absolutely is. (There was a little Life of Pi in there too, for me, because of the island.) A great story, of freedom and independence and self-reliance (except the bit about the brassiere and shoes).
I expected not to like it; and while I liked the writing, nope I didn't like the story. Quelle surprise.
The way Buck turned into a better wolf than the wolves were reminded me of how, in the beginning of "How the West Was Won" (the beginning of it was all I could stomach), Jimmy Stewart is described as being "more Indians than the Indians." Because, of course, as a white man he could better any red man's accomplishment. Blargh.
I first tried this some years ago and closed it after the first several pages. Or paragraphs. This time I persevered and it appealed to me more. Being me, I had to assume similarities between John Kennedy Toole and his mother and Ignatius J. Reilly and his mother.
Because of the Swift quote and for Ignatius's refusal to respond to any reality other than his own imagining, I expected a Don Quijote, but Toole's protagonist (and all the characters) are more original than that. I also tried to find some great Symbolism in the Scenicruiser and his inability to leave New Orleans until I recalled that he had gone to college.
For ten years. With graduate work in Medieval Studies. Ah-ha-ha.
And finally, a protagonist more thoroughly repellent than McTeague.
My previous Peter Carey was Oscar and Lucinda, which I read on the Poudre. I'll have photographic evidence of what I did while listening to this, eventually and maybe soon. I don't know how anyone can do anything craftie (distinct from crafty) without a book to listen to.
A Recorded Books interview with the author followed the book. The interviewer said that the New York Times reviewer called this fiction "historical invention." I do like this sort of fiction. Girl with a Pearl Earring is one sort, utter invention from the wispy known facts about Vermeer--his city, his religion, his painting. In Cold Blood is another, adopting the basics of an actual case but independent of it, written with the tone of a newspaper article though with a novel's perspective. The Confessions of Nat Turner is a pure novel, in tone and perspective, though it is anchored to historical incident. And The Known World is, surprisingly, entirely fictional; from explicit hints in the narrative I was sure its author had based his characters on actual people polled in the Census, and on archival pamphlets culled from the Library of Congress.
True History of the Kelly Gang shows yet another way to imagine historical fiction. Before I read it, I thought, from whatever I'd heard about the novel, that the Kelly Gang were historically factual. Reading it (listening to it), with the narrative distributed into parcels, written on bank stationery or brown wrapping paper, in pencil or black ink or whatever came to hand, I was sure it was entirely made up, like The Known World, and that Carey used the parcelling for verisimilitude. The Kelly Gang were real, like the Usan Jesse James gang, and Ned Kelly did write a letter, though not the several parcels; and I don't know how much of what he actually wrote found its way into Carey's novel. I do know (because Carey said so in the interview) that one Australian reviewer slammed the book for not being inventive enough, which means that the reviewer must have found that the characters, plot, and Kelly's voice in the novel accorded so well to the Kelly legend in popular culture that he didn't realize it was all pure invention.
A wonderful book.
Swim, 1K.
Sometime along Sunday my left shoulder and neck seized up because of hours of unaccustomed posture. Turning my head to even ten o'clock hurt, and turning it to eight o'clock was impossible. A swim is just what I wanted to stretch myself out, and it was the first exercise (although it really doesn't count, any more than bike-commuting does) since before I went to Connecticut.
We had a very small and very lovely Thanksgiving chez our friends, four adults and one baby boy and one Little Stranger and two actual cats and the one phantom. One of the two actual cats is actually a dog, because he is so friendly, unless he is a shawl, because he wears himself around your neck.
Charley is also the head of the family, because he sat on a chair peering over the end of the table while the humans sat on either side.
We had an amazing meal: poached pears with prosciutto, crab-stuffed tomatoes, butternut squash soup, pork loin with oven-roasted potatoes, green beans, apple pie with cheese (because we forgot cinnamon ice cream) and ginger chocolate cake.
Yeah, I've got this ginger-chocolate thing going on, haven't I? Before she knew what desserts I'd brought, JJM remembered that a cookie I served at Clove's shower was very popular, and very tasty, but she didn't remember what it was. I was glad she remembered it favorably because RDC had confessed while I baked that he is not as wild about this cookie as I (and everyone I bake it for) is. But I only cook desserts, and the other day I pulled Moosewood Desserts off the shelf and it fell open, I swear, like Dr. Dolittle going to Spidermonkey Island because that's how the atlas opened to Tommy's pin, to ginger chocolate cake. With mango sauce.
Also I made an apple pie, because it is Thanksgiving. Actually RDC made the crust, because while peeling and slicing and flavoring apples is not precision work, making pastry is. It was fun, cooking all day with each of us listening to our books.
Both were good, and RDC admitted that he liked the cake, so mleah.
I was sitting in the living room surrounded by my project with Blake on his windowsill. He began shrieking and freaking, which alerted me to the noise of a murder of crows outside. I went to the window and looked out: In a tree across the street I saw three crows and a dangling...pigeon, which resolved into not only a pigeon but also its fate. RDC is not sure if the pigeon is dead yet in the left shot. I think it is, because at least a minute but probably more time has elapsed since impact, enough for the crows to crowd in, and raptors kill with their feet. Possibly it would have fed in the tree if it could have mantled enough, and not just by overbalancing with one wing, to protect its meal from greedy crows; possibly the entire pigeon was too heavy conveniently to carry away. It flew off with the remainder of its prize after tearing out and gulping down what looked like most of the breast meat and gizzards.
I wish I had seen the stoop and the kill, because raptors are the amazing animals, but through binoculars from my porch I got to watch the sharp-shinned hawk feed on pigeon sashimi. I think it was female, because it was on the larger side of the 12"-14" range for its species. (About the species, at least, I am certain.) And RDC used his birthday present, not from the porch but with lots of zoom.
The photographic evidence. These took a great chunk of True History of the Kelly Gang (not all its 14 hours), all of "I, Claudius" (13 episodes) and all of a six-episode "Mansfield Park" that had to recommend it only that it wasn't the "updated" 1999 version (Edmund Bertram is not hot, let alone in a 1983 bodice-ripper way), and seven hours of I Am Charlotte Simmons. I'm a little slow.
Emlet's was a bought stocking. Sewing her name into place took eleventy-nine years because I had to reach further and further into the toe for each letter. I beaded her name in red seed beads, sewed on the letters, covered the joins of beaded loops with pompoms where necessary, added the red velvet cuff atop the made one, and strung and sewed the bead and jingle trim to the cuff.
Siblet's stocking went a little easier. Emlet's was the last of the made stockings in the store, so I had to cut and stitch Siblet's from fabric, but I could do that after I sewed the name down. My embroidery hoop to hold the fabric taut and its not yet being a tube made that much easier. I figured out, possibly by the final E in Emlet, how to close loops of wire, hence no pompoms in the latter two stockings, but I was still clumsy shaping the letters, hence the squarish O in Siblet.
When I bought the red stocking fabric, a day or two after the first supply run, I didn't find green velvet so I used red furry stuff instead. I had already sewn it, completely butchering the join of leg to cuff necessitating the four-pompom camouflage (seen between cuff and leg), when yet a third supply run netted me SFR's green velvet.
I could find only red and silver jingle bells, not the green jingles I had envisioned. I might have used green or red seed beads instead of silver for the trim of the silver-jingled ones, but after completing each name I hated those beads. The straight, unshaped trim didn't drive me nearly as much to distraction.
SFR's stocking is a little bigger than the other two because I felt really bad about Siblet's, which I sewed from fabric, being accidentally smaller than sister Emlet's prefab one--I patterned Siblet's on Emlet's but then took too much hem. But SFR's being significantly wider and longer shouldn't register on the unfairness scale, since she is in a different family. It's the (slighter) difference between Emlet's and Siblet's that worries me. RDC says that it's okay because Siblet is smaller than Emlet: but that is older-sibling rationale right there, OMFB. She won't always be smaller, only younger.
My favorite is Emlet's, even though it's the messiest. I like the red bead on green better than the green on red, and I like the contrast of leg and cuff. I am not sure I'm done with Siblet's, though the rule of this sort of thing is To Know When To Leave It the Hell Alone Already: it wants, or I want, more green. Hmm. Maybe I could redo the trim with green seed beads instead of silver? SFR's cuff is too long, maybe to the point of out of proportion, and still needs a loop to hang it by.
Overall, though, I'm quite pleased.
Another illustration of how my mother is ready to think the worse and not the better of me.
With some backstory: one summer in the early '90s my mother accepted my suggestion to go to the White Elephant Sale. Wishing to avoid the clusterfuck of little bluehaired old ladies much more skilled at rummaging through others' castoffs than parallel parking, I parked farther from the Congregational Church than my mother would have wished. She complained of the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, despite my having offered to drop her closer, and she complained that I walked too fast. "It’s not a race," she chided me. I wasn't racing but walking, and told her she could opt to keep pace with me as well as I slow for her. She tried to make me guilty for not adopting her head down, eyes on toes gait, or for having a healthy stride, or uncomfortable for not pairing up. This was hardly incentive for me to stay by her side, and I continued at my own pace.
While she didn't, I am glad to say, increase her volume to keep me within range, she did resume the haranguing when she got to the churchyard where we waited. She said something about how "everyone" must think me very rude to walk away from my mother. I didn't contradict the obvious weak bit in that, that passersby and driversby were unlikely to have noticed or judged our relationship, and that unlike her I didn't care if people looked at me funny.
Whereupon one of the little bluehaired ladies turned and said for herself and her companion, "We're looking at you funny." Now, she might have meant "Stop arguing/ with your mother /in public," but she was laughing as she said it, because she had said it while making a silly face: she was looking at me funny. I laughed at her, and smiled at my mother, saying, "My point."
Meaning, that this woman had just bolstered my point in this discussion, which is that no one was judging or dismissing me for failing to escort my 50-year-old mother along the sidewalk by her arm, or even for quibbling with her.
But my mother, anxious to see the worst in me and not engaging the interloping, ready to be chatty old woman, said, "You always think everything’s a competition. No one’s taking points." Just as she saw my walking my usual pace as trying to compete with her instead of just...walking.
Physically, of course, it wouldn't've been hard for me to match her pace. Emotionally, I had nothing but criticism to gain by accompanying her. And, I confess, I was thoroughly enjoying, at long last, my own automobile; and I wanted her to experience a morsel of my years of frustration at reprimanded for being "late" when I arrived at a meeting place at her dictated time rather than reading her mind and showing up five or three minutes early, as she had, and thus wasting her whole day. My car: my control. I didn't care if she couldn't or wouldn't keep up with me, or if she felt manipulated. I could have gone to the sale on my bike and spared us both the togetherness and the spat. Oops.
So anyway.
As I said, the Charenton cookies turned out better than the Denver ones. That is, most of them did, but I burned the first tray. HEBD crunched into one and opined, "That’s the best-tasting charcoal briquet I've ever had."
Later I told her, "One way I know I’m better is that your saying that didn't hurt my feelings."
We were bringing dessert to the lunch table at the time, so my mother heard the "One way I know I’m better..." sentence without any background or context. She criticized, "Listen to you, Lisa! You're 'better'?!"
At the time, it didn't occur to still naïve moi that she assumed that her younger daughter of course was comparing herself to others, at all and then daring to do so favorably, so I said simply--or arrogantly, depending on your point of view--"Yes, better. Once it would have struck me to the quick."
HEBD said, "I know exactly what you mean."
And why HEBD knows is that she listens to what I say sympathetically instead of critically...something I can do with almost everyone but my mother. I do recognize my own hypocrisy. Some of it. Sometimes.
---
Earlier I called my mother to tell her about the sharp-shinned hawk and the progress on the stockings. Blake was "helping." I had given him a couple of inches of wire-edged ribbon to pick apart, which was fun for a while; and he had his shoelace; and early in the beading process I made him his own little bead string to nibble so he wouldn't want mine; each of these things, because they were his own, quickly became unfun. His latest desire was the big plastic heads of straight pins, and then, possibly because they're shiny but possibly because he's just not that bright, the pointy ends. So on the phone with her I asked my mother how she had managed to sew with a little kid scampering around, although I granted that even I probably hadn't wanted to gnaw on straight pins. This she granted, and then she said something that really pleased me, because it showed that she remembered something:
"You just wanted to play with the cowboy and the horse."
I laughed and laughed. I had recalled the same thing when threading my own sewing machine. Her old Singer take-up and maybe tension levers moved both up and down and back and forth, and the upper one was a simple eyed doohickey while the lower was longer and had both an eye and a slot. To toddler me, these were cowboy and horse, galloping along, and even the thread became reins. My own sewing machine (surprisingly, I do own one, though this stocking adventure was its first time out of the box in many many years) has only a horse, not a cowboy.
She doesn't remember my first word or step from years ago or my goddaughter's name from minutes ago. But she remembers the horse and cowboy. That's something.
"Never heard of it."
I read Erewhon sometime during college, maybe after reading Utopia. Somehow I had heard of it before its mention in my Evil in Lit class. Maybe only seeing "A Room with a View" was reason enough for me to look up Samuel Butler.
Anyway, including this book on the Modern Library list is cheating a little: it was written well before 1901, and Butler belongs as thoroughly to the 19th century as do Dickens and Eliot. The list is the list and I assigned it to myself knowing it was stupid and chauvinist and omitted To Kill a Mockingbird, but of the 100 books, the only two not set in the 20th century are nonetheless clearly of the 20th, I, Claudius and Wide Sargasso Sea. I might disagree with the presence or placement of certain books but this is the only one that feels like it violates the list's own rules, not just mine. But this is not the book's fault.
About a third of the way through, a resemblance to Of Human Bondage occurred to me. Because of their coming from about the same era? I just googled Somerset Maugham, not daring to google "Of Human Bondage," because I didn't know its date: 1915. Way of All Flesh was begun in 1874. There is my tendency to conflate the late 19th century into the early 20th, and vice versa, e.g. trains in D.H. Lawrence startling me and never keeping straight in my head that Isabel Archer was born during the Civil War instead of, say, between Cleveland's administrations. Mostly it is the hostile parentage, Ernest Pontifex's own parents and Phillip Carey's uncle, and the self-serving and hypocritical Christianity these people profess. And the two heroes' foolish first romantic connections.
I learned the word laches: negligence in the observance of duty or opportunity; specifically: undue delay in asserting a legal right or privilege.