Methodical instruction from my nephew Nick. My lesson was after Sanguinity’s, so I benefited from some pedagogical refinements like learning to turn before learning to push.
As you can see, I favor the goofy stance.
heron
By the end of the week, on Friday, I was feeling nature-deprived. In the car on the way home from chinuk lolo I said to Sanguinity, “On Sunday we could go for a hike in the Gorge.”
“We could do that,” she allowed.
“I want to.”
She agreed right away. It was that kind of I-want-to in my voice.
On Saturday, while Sang was teaching in Salem, I ran down through the college canyon. Well, mostly I walked, especially once I was on the trail and looking around. I became aware of how much I was telling myself stories in my head that I already knew, about what plants were growing near each other, what was in season, what birds were on the water. Sometimes I find it comforting to know all that stuff, feel local, narrate it to some invisible audience in my head. But now I was sick of it and felt a strong desire to learn something new from walking through and watching. Anything new, just something.
The salmonberries were ripe, but the thimbleberries hadn’t turned red yet. A juvenile mallard swimming with its parents was still in its fluffy plumage, but not for long. The turtles were sunning on their usual log; the bee tree was busy.
I continued down across the landbridge and into the lower canyon. As I crossed one of the small footbridges I saw a heron out of the corner of my eye. It was close, a few arms’-lengths away, and standing still. Clearly it did not want to be noticed.
And that seemed to be enough for me– discovering a new heron hangout. I don’t even know if it’s a habitual one, like the spot further up by the peninsula. The itch for something new was scratched. It was even okay to skip the hike on Sunday for the sake of getting the tomatoes, basil, and peppers into the garden before it really was too late, instead of just feeling too late.
When I mentioned the heron to my dad in an email, he wrote back: Great blue heron’s 2nd defense, if not being observed fails, is to stab the attacker’s eyes. We had to wear protective goggles when banding g.b. herons in a nesting colony. Even nestlings know, “go for the eyes.”
book review: The Beginner’s Goodbye, by Anne Tyler
This review contains spoilers!
The Beginner’s Goodbye is fewer than 200 pages long, and some aspects of it felt too slight. It’s a first-person narrative, but the beginning is strangely summary-like, flitting from incident to incident in the narrator’s attempt to explain the phenomenon of his dead wife’s reappearance and his theories on why it might be happening. It isn’t until 25 pages in that we see the circumstances of her sudden death…and those scenes, at their house and in the hospital, are masterful. The unreality, the weird details, the dialogue and misunderstandings, all perfect. The book is worth reading for these ten pages.
The portrait of grief that follows, however, didn’t bring much I haven’t seen before in Anne Tyler’s other books. It reminded me very much of The Accidental Tourist after Sarah leaves Macon, but without the humor of Macon’s devising his domestic systems. This protagonist even has a job similar to Macon’s– he edits a series of questionable how-to books for beginners on every conceivable topic. And as in Tourist, someone the protagonist knows in a professional capacity starts dating his sister…but unlike in Tourist, there’s not much tension, as we have every indication the guy is decent and successful and it’s a good match.
I wouldn’t say that this was merely Accidental Tourist Lite, but I did feel that a lot was left undeveloped, or mentioned too late. The new love interest at the end seemed almost random, like the narrator could have picked a different co-worker just as easily, to show us the importance of getting to know, love, and cherish someone because time goes so quickly. Turns out he and his new wife have known each other since first grade, which would have colored their relationship for me throughout the book, but I didn’t know til near the end.
The observations and word choices I have admired for so many years are still here (this is Anne Tyler’s nineteenth novel). Yes, Thanksgiving sweet potatoes are cobbled with mini-marshmallows. Yes, 911 dispatchers’ questions sound like statements, with the pitch going down at the end. The doctor’s chef-like clogs and too-long pants and crisp white coat rumpled by the practical satchel strap, and her blunt bad haircut, are perfectly in focus in my head. But not so much the history and texture of the marriage, though we’re dutifully told about their first meeting, courtship, wedding, squabbles. Maybe the problem is that the narrator is waking up to the missed opportunities and misconceptions he had, and we the readers aren’t getting there any faster than he is. I spent a lot of the book not being able to see as much as I wanted.
Daniel Pinkwater and Anne Tyler are two authors who have meant a lot to me (a lot!) over the years, but whose books I don’t rush to anymore. Maybe the part of me that drank up their work got saturated at some point. Even if their new stuff is just as wonderful–and I can’t really tell if it is or not, I can only tell that it’s largely the same–I can’t imagine loving it the way I loved the older work that I was so thirsty for.
just a tidbit
Even though I couldn’t delude myself into making my usual annual birthday declaration that “this year I’m going to write in my blog EVERY DAY,” I am feeling the urge to post more! Here’s a photo my uncle took of me and my conscientious security detail at my sister’s wedding in Colorado. (Okay, it’s me and my cousin. But he was conscientious in keeping stray raindrops off my hairsprayed ‘do.)
Now to the garden, to get beds ready for tomatoes, basil, and peppers. It suddenly feels almost too late, but it’s not, it’s just the first really warm weekend in ages.
Four Minute Diary
I peeked in at Lynda Barry’s Tumblr, which I’d sort of forgotten about for awhile, and read about the four-minute diary:
Why is it so hard to keep a diary?
IT ISN’T!
Keeping a diary is much easier if you limit your writing to four minutes each day: two minutes spent writing a list of what you remember from the day before and then two minutes making a list of things you saw.
Her post included a video you can use to time the four minutes, but I didn’t. Also, I misremembered about the second list and wrote what I did, not what I saw. Still, I wrote. Yesterday:
- I stood at the kitchen counter shelling fava beans onto a plate and listened to the radio.
- I gave Simone some “mixed grill” wet food, and she was all excited about it and jumped up onto the counter before I could put the dish on the floor, but then she didn’t finish it.
- I played a round of Farm Hustle, and watched Sherlock vids with Sang before bed.
I guess this goes here since FB and G+ can’t accommodate simple html tags
“I like to think of myself as a coworker with lots of experience rather than a boss,” Franklin said.
I like to think of myself as a boss more than a slave but mostly I prefer to not think about it at all because when I think about it, I can’t stop.
“Okay,” I said.
I was worried Vanessa Veselka’s Zazen would be too hip or lit-fic for me, but I think I’m going to love it.
Opaque and Transparent
Authors whose books I admire greatly but have to read over and over again because I never quite get a complete understanding of them:
Ellen Raskin
E.L. Konigsburg
Diana Wynne Jones
Henry James
Authors whose books I read over and over because they are transparent to me and show me myself (they feel too close to me to say I admire them greatly…though of course I do):
Beverly Cleary
Jean Little
Daniel Pinkwater
Lois Lowry
Jane Langton
ETA: when I typed tags for this entry, all the authors on the opaque list were already in my tags. Only DMP from the second list was already there. I guess there is a trying-to-understand motive when I blog about books? (unless it’s a showing-off motive.)
Moving In
There’s a cat that’s been watching me when I putter in the garden. It wears a worn harness that seems to be made out of an old bandana, but the cat herself is sleek and healthy. She’s unafraid of the dogs next door, so maybe she lives over there.
But on Saturday, she decided it was time to move into our house as well. She accepted a little petting from me as I sat in a lawn chair by the back door, then inspected the door. It’s a heavy screen door with metal bars, and she’s not small enough to slip in at the kitten-sized gap where the concrete doorsill is worn away.
She strolled away, but an hour later I was making lunch and turned around to see her in the kitchen with me. “Hey!” I said. “What are you doing in here?” She had tried the front screen door, and found that only the top was screened. The bars at the bottom were far enough apart that she could stroll right through.
She ignored my protest and went to explore the bathroom. I was busy with my pasta, but I heard her jump into the tub and out again. I went and opened the front door wide, then stood outside the bathroom so I could keep her from continuing to the basement when she came out. “You do NOT live here,” I told her, doing the annoy-the-cat stompy dance with my feet as I walked her toward the door. “No. Hey. No, you don’t get to see the rest of the living room.”
She stopped at the doormat and considered having a lie-down. I accelerated my foot-stomping, at which she got quite indignant. There was even a little hissing. Then she left.
“And STAY out,” I said, closing the wooden door even though it was nice and sunny outside. After awhile I peeked out the door, and she was still on the steps. She gave me an accusing look.
When Sanguinity came home I heard her talking out on the porch. “Well hell-O! Aren’t you just the friendliest kitty!” And then, “Oh, you think so, huh? No, I don’t think so!”
We took the screen off the top part of the door and moved it to the bottom panel. Nobody is telling the kitty that there’s still an open part a few feet up.
All the Livelong Day
At work I’ve gone from 3/4 time to full time for the next couple of months, to help fill in for someone on medical leave. Last week was my first 40-hour work week in ages. Let the whining commence!
Nah…I miss my schoolkid schedule, but it’s temporary. I’m cutting back on nearly everything else– no going to Chinuk wawa three times a week for awhile, and I don’t know how many walks with refgoddess I can fit in when I have to be at the office by 8:30. Running remains on the back burner. I think I’ll do best when I make things very simple: work, writing, and basic maintenance of health and household. Monastic contentment, right? And I can use the money, with a Colorado trip coming up and some furnace-and-roof debt still on the books.
But I do feel a rumble of resentment and panic when my time starts to resemble a sliding-tile puzzle, where I’m moving blocks around but constantly running into the walls of work and sleep. When I consider getting up a half-hour earlier to do something, and it won’t work because it will disrupt things back into the previous evening. Life shouldn’t be like that.
At least I’ve been better than usual this week about taking advantage of short writing opportunities. Ten minutes suddenly seems worthwhile, I’m writing on the bus a little because I might not get another chance all day, and an hour feels like luxury instead of obligation. I hope I’ll have a little to show for it after eight weeks, as I very very slowly conjure up this novel.
Today Sang and I got out to Powell Butte for a little hike– in fact we were all done and back at the house, with a grocery trip thrown in, by eleven o’clock! The wind was cold, so we hastened to the forested far side of the hill. Lots of yellow violets blooming, and the nettles are knee-high and looking pretty darn vigorous already. I was happy to hear a raven, after a winter of staying in town hearing crows.
Yesterday I got around to making soda bread, after buying the buttermilk just before St. Patrick’s Day. Warm with butter: so good.
Next book to read: Lisa Lutz’ Trail of the Spellmans, fifth in a series that makes me laugh out loud. (I’m currently finishing up Kage Baker’s The Children of the Company: satisfying to fill in some knowledge-gaps, but Mendoza is the heart of the series for me and she doesn’t appear in this one.) As for TV, Sang and I are re-watching the first season of Sarah Connor Chronicles, which feels much richer and more suspenseful than the first time around. (So many shows I’m iffy about the first season. Will they all seem better on re-watch?)
hahaha…now what?
I was reading this middle-grade novel from the library, When Life Gives You O.J., kind of absent-mindedly, skimming and keeping track of the tropes: best friend at camp leads to shifting friendships, mm hm, Jewish family moved out of New York into an all-gentile neighborhood, yup, annoying little brother, sure, bonding with harder-to-like grandparent after the easier-one-to-like one died… and then I turned a page and a line made me laugh out loud:
I said, “Bubbles would have liked it here.”
Ace sort of snorted in response, but it sounded like he was agreeing with me. He looked down the hill at where my mom was now sitting on the cooler.
“IN ORDER TO BEGIN TO LIVE IN THE PRESENT, WE MUST FIRST REDEEM THE PAST, AND THAT CAN ONLY BE DONE BY SUFFERING,” he said, adding “CHEKHOV.”
“Okay,” I said, more confused than ever. I was pretty sure he meant his favorite playwright, not the guy from Star Trek. But with Ace, you could never be too sure.
I wished I’d read the whole book more respectfully and intently, because look, it made me laugh! But now it’s back in trope-land.
I think I had this same experience with Diary of a Wimpy Kid. One or two things that just slay me, in the midst of everyday stock. (And they’re things that I can’t exactly explain why they’re so funny.) I don’t know what to do with it.