The Joy of New Books

My love of reading started in elementary school, likely fed by the mean kids in my neighborhood who would, at times, drop me like a hot potato and leave me with nothing better to do than read. Thinking about it now, that's probably the best thing that could have happened. I learned to love books, and that passion has never waned. I believe I spent my entire summer between fourth and fifth grade immersed in books, compelling my mother to make countless trips to the library. People didn't buy many books in those days -- at least we didn't. It was all about the library, and that was fine with me. But during the school year, my favorite days were the days the teacher passed out those flimsy Scholastic book catalogs-- and the days when the books finally arrived. I loved to choose books and check the little boxes to order them almost as much as I loved receiving them. I guess I always have been a big fan of anticipation.

But has anyone seen a Scholastic handout recently? You'd be hard-pressed to find a book on it. In fact, the latest one my boys brought home did not have one stand-alone book. Instead you'll find games for the Wii, games for Nintendo DS, games for Leapster, games for your PC, games for GameBoy. It's Scholastic's "Interactive Learning Club." Aah yes, my sons will learn so much playing Pirates of the Carribean: At World's End. Better yet is the next page of the catalog titled "As Seen on TV (and the Movies!)." Now our kids can learn to "problem solve" by playing Drake & Josh or Zoey 101. There's only a handful of books in this catalog and all of those come with CDs or CD-ROMs. I think it's time for "Scholastic" to change its name. Does anyone have a fitting suggestion?

Clunky sentences

I'm currently reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. It took me a while to begin to appreciate it, but the other night it kicked in and I read a hundred pages when I should have been sleeping. That night I came across this sentence and I found it just dreadful. Here is most of the paragraph; the last sentence is the clunker:

Mariam swooned. Her eyes watered. Her heart took flight. And she marveled at how, after all these years of rattling loose, she had found in this little creature the first true connection in her life of false, failed connections.

False, failed connections? I read that sentence and it was like hitting a rutted dirt road in the middle of a smooth ride. Does anyone else find it clunky? How did it make it all the way to publication?

An Anniversary & a Poem

Six years ago today my mom died. It feels more vivid to me this year; I am not sure why. It's odd how you adjust eventually. At some point, and I know it took more than a year, I stopped thinking I would give her a call. Now such a thought crops up rarely. When it does, I almost feel happy -- that she still feels possible and real. Here's a poem I wrote two months after she died:


Thanksgiving

your veins ran to crimson
your bruises to mulberry
your skin to honey
before autumn even arrived

my eyes I could not lift
suspended
I was transfixed
upon the unexpected
passage of your seasons

so I drank your honey skin
warmed myself
at the bedside of your illumination
tenderly held
your stained and thinning hands
in September, thanksgiving was upon me

now winter is nearly here
but your autumn haunts me still
the hushed morning
a Saturday
when your last leaves blew away

Terry Gross

For my fortieth birthday my husband gave me a Sirius radio. I am obsessed. This is probably the best present I've ever received. There is little radio reception where we live. Well...little reception of anything I want to hear. Namely, I can't get NPR. Honestly, I cannot overstate the delight I now have as I drive back and forth to school, baseball, soccer, church, the grocery store, everywhere. My car looks like a roving living room. Oh well. It doesn't matter. I can listen to Terry Gross. This morning she was interviewing Viggo Mortensen. What could be better? I guess just the way Terry Gross says, "I'm Terry Gross and this is Fresh Air." She says it with such relish. And why not? She's got quite the gig.

Highs and Lows

Tonight my youngest son had a baseball game. Fall ball in our little league is supposed to be an instructional league -- in other words, not all about winning. Tonight's game was a devastating loss: 15-2. Son3 emerged from the dugout with downcast eyes and an expression I'd never seen on his face before. Son1 is all about competition and winning, and if this had been him, I would have known just what to do (which is listen with restraint, wait for the storm to pass, then wield a bit of humor). But Son3 is a bit different, not competitive in the same way. I couldn't quite figure it out, although losing by 13 doesn't make anyone happy.

When we got home, I got down on my knees and hugged Son3 and he melted into my arms and laid his head on my shoulder. It's really so sad that this time passes from childhood -- the time when a hug will do it. Our time for that is ticking away -- when a physical connection can make the emotional one. What a loss that will be.

He was pretty reticent about the real problem. I finally resorted to a wee bit of manipulation to weedle it out of him. I let him skip his shower and simply wash his oniony armpits with a soapy cloth, so I said, "Hey, since I let you skip your shower, I think you should let me know what the trouble is." As it turned out, there were two problems. First, he felt he'd made a bad play when he threw the ball from second base (acting as the cut-off man) to home to get the runner out. It was a good throw, but too late, and then the runner on first advanced. It wasn't the worst mistake and certainly plenty of teammates had urged him to make the throw. But he hates to blow it; his competition is all with himself. Poor buddy, it's tough to have such a demanding taskmaster. The second problem was something his coach said. It was, as Son3 said, "The D word." Is it sick that I love that the use of a bad word makes him so sad?

So, these are his baseball lows, but two weeks ago after his first practice when he blew all his coaches away with his mad skills at second base, and then the coach took them all out for ice cream at a nearby dairy farm (delicious), he said to me, "I feel like a million bucks."

And my highs and lows? On the rare ocassion when all of us actually sit down and eat dinner together, we play high low (a concept we stole from the movie The Story of Us). What was your high today? What was your low? So today, my low is my continuing battle with fleas, a battle that started two weeks ago and wore thin on the first day. My high? Writing my first blog entry.