Reading: The Wanderer

Moving: walked 2.7 miles

House: Didn't install a bracket for the rod in the back closet

19 June 2000: lots

I took the camera with me when I walked to work Friday.

This slays me. Leopold Bloom might be at home here. Are they going to chip out the Stars of David and put in shamrocks?

This is part of a local castle. Or not. It's a B&B now.

Ooooo, a confluence. Eerie, isn't it?

I am not sure, but I think there's a room in this cottage decorated entirely by shells and that it is visited by a fawn named Snow.

I would like to know why this building is called Esther.

I have no idea what this is about.

I might be getting my buildings confused, but I think this belongs to the American Lung Association. In that case, its built-in pipe organ makes a lot of sense. Those columns might be a chimney, but an organ would be funner, wouldn't it?

I figure this gingerbread only appeals to me because of its colors. When it starts to fade it'll just look gaudy.

It's always a delight to find a new journal, isn't it? I exchanged email with Caoimhe a few months ago, asking about the bit of Gaelic she uses as a farewell, which Denver Doug picked up and used in an email to me. Now I've caught up with her archives.

Last year when we changed apartments moving was a breeze. We moved from Building 1 to Building 3--a distance of Building 2 plus the leasing office and the tennis courts. Not far. Hao and I trudged with armloads of stuff while SPM, JEM, and RDC wrestled the furniture. JEM nearly ate some honey and SPM smashed a finger, but otherwise the day was without incident.

The smoothness of the day might have had a little bit to do with our heretofore lack of a couch. The furniture store had given a delivery range between 8 and noon, so well before that I was in the new apartment with Blake, water, and orange juice, putting together shelving and waiting for the furniture dudes. They showed up at 8:03 (which I appreciated), trotted the mushroomy couch, chair, and ottoman into the living room, and left.

I missed those two burly guys the day we moved into the house. I missed SEM too and told RDC as much. "If SEM could've come out this weekend," RDC grunted from under the boxspring, "I'd've paid for his ticket."

This year we had only Hao, and while she is my favorite of last year's three helpers, even I can recognize that she is the least burly. Or perhaps not: she's been going to the gym and SPM can get kind of squishy sometimes.

We loaded the rented truck and she loaded our car and hers and off we went to the house. We unloaded the cars and began to unload the truck. Everything was groovy and RDC and I had even mostly stopped snapping at each other, and then were only the couch, chair, mattress, and boxpring left.

First, we experimented with the chair. It might have fit down the front stairs, located conveniently between the front door and the tv room, but shoving it down the back stairs would tell us how possible it would be to get the couch down at all, since the front stairs could never accommodate the latter. Even after we removed its wee stumpy legs, getting the chair around the corner by the fridge and through the doorway to the back landing was a squeeze. The couch is the same height, top to bottom, and so it also would squeeze through the doorway, but of course it's longer, so getting it around a corners with a refrigerator was another story. Luckily the fridge moved on casters, and the plumbing for the ice maker was long enough that the fridge could move way, way out. Nothing could widen the doorway, though, and no amount of hoping for that doorway in the landing in either Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency or The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul proved fruitful.

In the end we got that fucker through the kitchen doorway and down the back stairs, but only at the expense of a long scratch in the beautiful oak hardwood floor of the back landing.

Hao was much impressed at our defeat of basic physical laws. I was impressed that I was able to shut up and just let RDC direct it. Neither of us is good at taking orders but in this case I deferred to him, who has moved more often and--though I hate to admit it--is stronger than I.

I asked RDC how we'll ever move it out. "Chainsaw," he replied.

So. This all connects. Give me a minute.

Someone recently told me about an acquaintance of hers who has hired an Animal Communicator to tell her cats that they're moving to a new house.

What?

The Animal Communicator apparently can tell the pet things that their human companions--who know and have an ongoing relationship with them--cannot. Why the Animal Communicator does not work with Koko the gorilla or Alex the African Grey or, indeed, with the dolphins who can probably tell us all kinds of useful information, I know not. Perhaps because Animal Communicators only convey information, not learn any.

The killer point about hiring an Animal Communicator is that this one lives in West Virginia. The animals being addressed and their human live in Denver. The human is flying the Communicator to Denver.

Would Blake have suffered less if we had engaged such a go-between? He didn't suffer at all, as far as we could tell; as long as he's with us he seems willing to do anything, go anywhere (except maybe Florida with four cats).

So anyway. Today I was reading Caoimhe and came across this. We could have spared our floor if we had just flown her in from Cork to intercede for us on the couch's behalf.

Darn.

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So at lunch I finished Sharon Creech's The Wanderer. I started it in bed last night. I finished Miss Wyoming, plucked up this, and was so entranced that RDC had to remind me to turn off my light after snoring indicated I was asleep. I liked Bloomability a lot, didn't like Absolutely Normal Chaos, found Pleasing the Ghost fine but younger than my usual tastes, thought Chasing Redbird was quite good, and them blam, The Wanderer.

By the time I got to work I was on page 145. I have never been such a clock-watcher as I was today. Usually I go out at 12:15 or 12:30; today I went at 11:45. I lay under a tree on the Plaza and read and read and read.

Sophie reminds me of Jessie. Jessie, you may take that as the highest compliment. Jessie calls herself the Pollyanna of the journaling world, but the similarity I see between Sophie and Jessie is their exuberance to see and do everything and know the stories behind it.

Creech's books have similar themes: a 13-year-old girl makes some sort of journey to discover Her Hidden Past (there is also often a Boy and a Kiss, but those are secondary). Sal goes on a car trip with her grandparents and we find out about her mother and her friend's mother. Whatshernose in Bloomability reluctantly goes abroad to become more herself. A boy cousin in Absolutely Normal Chaos travels to the protagonist's town to discover his past. Zinny clears a path to her family in Chasing Redbird. Sophie crosses the Atlantic in a 45' cutter. You might think this plot would get old. You'd be wrong. ANC didn't work for me, but each of the four has been original. Walk Two Moons was my first Creech, and The Wanderer has been the best since.

I belong to a bookish listserve. Actually I don't belong, because they read a lot more nonfiction and sf than I do. One of the few recent discussions I've participated in concerned unreliable narrators and Lois Lowry's The Giver.

Folks suggested Jonas is unreliable, but I disagree. I distinguish between first-person narration and third-person narration through the protagonist's point of view. (The Giver uses the latter.) I can't think of any third-person narration that's obviously unreliable. Jonas is young and lives in a sheltered society. Perhaps he doesn't see what we, in a different culture and--on the listserve--older, want to know. But he doesn't deliberately or even unconsciously deceive or edit.

Benjy in The Sound and the Fury might not be bright and might therefore be considered unreliable, but he sees a lot more truth than anyone else. The protagonist in A Pale View of the Hills is insane, as the reader gradually discovers. The nineteenth-century novels I usually as my initial examples are unreliable only in that we, as twentieth-century, postmodern readers, realize that the framing device might be a convenience for that character to slant the story his own way. (Probably; Nellie Dean does have an axe to grind, as has Dr. Frankenstein.) Someone suggested the author in Misery, which I haven't read, as unreliable. I've seen the movie, and from the movie at least, I wouldn't call him unreliable. I'd call him trapped and ignorant and kept in suspense.

Anyway, now I want to suggest Sophie in The Wanderer as unreliable. Most of the narration is hers, the log she keeps of her pond-crossing. Somehow it's more believable that she could record this than that Mary-Lou Finney (in ANC) could record her summer. Interspersed with her chapters is her cousin's log book, and through his observations the reader sees the glimpses of what Sophie refuses yet to know. Is she unreliable because she refuses to think of what she doesn't want to know, or because she cannot remember it? Or is she reliable because she records only what's important to her, and she evolves and becomes able to know more as her journey progresses?

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Someone suggested in the book discussion that at the end of The Giver, the possibly hopeful ending is--spoiler--only a vision, a hallucination caused by cold and hunger. That doesn't sit well with me, but I think with Lowry's faulty construction that it's a valid theory.

My 19th-century examples of authors who didn't intend their narrators to be unreliable (however much they're read thusly now) include two Brontës, Emily's Wuthering Heights (Nellie Dean) and Anne's Helen Huntington, the tenant of Wildfell Hall. But if hunger and cold can induce happy endings, then sister Charlotte might not be without an unreliable narrator her own self.

What if, after losing her money and eating pig slops and sleeping outdoors, Jane Eyre just dies in her hedgerow? And before dying, has a vision of happiness, with the Rivers as cousins and friends, a new teaching position, an inheritance to share, and reunification with Mr. Rochester? That's all too good to be true, isn't it? If--spoiler--Jonas is just going to die of cold and hunger, then maybe Jane did too.

Well, I thought it was funny.

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I found The Saturdays. Mrs. Oliphant's first name was Gabrielle, and the deaf aunt was Amélie.