Looking Back: The 2018 Books

My last library receipt of 2018

Way back in January, I started the year with a "challenge" (in the most casual sense of the word) to read 50 books in 2018. (Well, it wasn't my challenge exactly but the challenge my friend and yoga instructor Amanda put out in the world.)

Okay, I passed 50 books sometime in March. Yes, I am bragging. No, I am not bragging because I knew going into the year that I read a lot. 50 did not surprise me in the least.

So where did I finish the year? At a respectable number, but not as far as I had hoped. As I noted before, November and December took a lot out of me in so many ways, and reading was one of them. I finished with a solid list, but maybe 30 to 40 books off the projected mark.

So what were my final 2018 books? These:
203. Why Religion? A Personal Story by Elaine Pagels (this memoir/examination of faith by a preeminent religion historian is stunning; I could say so much more but words fail me)
204. Who Asked You? by Terry McMillan (I always enjoy McMillan's writing and this novel from 2013, written on the edge of the heroin epidemic, was no exception)
205. The Names of the Mountains by Reeve Lindbergh (this was a reread of a novel by the youngest of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's children, in which Reeve first explores, albeit in fictionalized form, her mother's dementia)
206. Said I Wasn't Gonna Tell Nobody: The Making of A Black Theologian by James H. Cone (reading #203 led me to Cone when Pagels thanked him extensively in her acknowledgments, mourning his death in 2018 and expressing gratitude that he completed this book, his memoir, of being a "Negro graduate student" who was transformed and radicalized by the Black Power movements in the 1960s, and becoming a Black theologian who pioneered black liberation theology; I cried several times while reading this one)
207. An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott (while not Little Women [let's face it: nothing is Little Women], this is nonetheless a classic Alcott tale of a poor but resourceful young woman who finds purpose and love in her life; this was, of course, a reread)
208. Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home by Nora Krug (this graphic memoir is an amazingly open look at the author's research of her German family, their lives in Nazi Germany and whether they participated in the Nazi regime, and her finding a small piece of hope and comfort in tracking down the son of a Jewish survivor who possibly kept her grandfather from imprisonment and prosecution post-war for being a registered Nazi)
209. The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (a reread of the beloved story of Milo, who finds his way, replete with Jules Feiffer's brilliant illustrations)
210. Sarah, Plain and Tall by Patricia MacLachan (the wonderful Newbery Award novel about two young children and their father "testing" out a mail order candidate for matrimony; known for many years as the "shortest" book ever to win a Newbery, this book lost that status when the Newbery committee honored Last Stop on Market Street, a picture book, with the medal in 2016)
211. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (in the memoir above [#203], Pagels writes about her interest in ancient texts and her writing of this book, which in 1979 caused a great uproar in the Christian theological world; as someone who intentionally (deliberately, thoughtfully) left the Christian faith for lots of reasons, I found this book enormously enlightening and comforting, but I can see why the Christian theological establishment attacked Pagels and this book when it came out)
212. Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson (a reread of another Newbery classic, this one by two-time Medal winner Paterson, the story is narrated by Sarah Louise, who carries hurt in her heart until she realizes she was loved and worthy of love always)

I finished that last book late yesterday afternoon and wondered which way to turn next. Some weeks ago, I had started The Dollmaker by Harriet Arnow, a gut wrenching Appalachian novel that I read years ago. In light of my Appalachian readings earlier, I had turned back to it, then set it aside when library books, with due dates, flooded in. (Spoiler alert: If the title sounds familiar, there was a made-for-television version decades ago starring Jane Fonda in the lead role: the happy ending manufactured for television is NOT how the book ends!)

But speaking of libraries, my last check-out receipt for 2018 is above, showing that I saved over $3500.00 in checking out library books this year. I don't think our library started tracking checkout costs until March, when it joined a large consortium, so my 2018 savings were probably even larger. Still, $3500.00 is nothing to sneeze at, and when I posted the photo in the 2019 No Spend Challenge Facebook group I belong to, it got a lot of Likes and Loves.

So what have I learned this year?

A lot.

A. Lot.

One thing I learned about myself was that I do not like tracking my reading. I have good friends (Mel especially comes to mind) who faithfully record their reads, titles and authors, in ledgers, some of those ledgers dating back many years. Me? This year was interesting but no thanks moving forward. I read what I read and if I feel like talking or writing about it, I will, but no more lists.

What else have I learned? More than ever, my 2018 reading, which included some very deliberate choices, slammed me in the face with what privilege I have as a white reader in a country which primarily publishes (and reviews and promotes) white authors.

Holy smokes.

One of the challenges I set out in early 2018 was to read through this list of 46 books by women of color. Our library consortium contains all but three of those books, so I had 43 books to read. As of yesterday, I had read 38 of them (88%). Many of those books, especially the essays and even the acknowledgments, led me to other authors of color of all genders.

And it was a humbling experience. I had to read outside my box to see the larger picture. And it is not that this picture is "new" or the result of the current administration, loathsome and racist as it is—this reality of racism and bias and "otherness" has always been here in this country. Always. I am the one who has failed to acknowledge it in any significant way.

I could not read authors of color in 2018 without recognizing this over and over and over again. I could not look at the publishing house lists and the New York Times book reviews without seeing this. I could not think of books for my grandchildren (the two here and the one coming) without wondering what I get to read to them. (Other than Last Stop on Market Street for both households!)

"Own your privileges," say writer Roxanne Gay and social activist Vijay Gupta, among many others. Here are the privileges I own: as a white person, as a woman of a certain age, as a college educated woman, I have so many privileges that I more than take for granted that allow to move through my day and my life without hassles, without setbacks, without struggles. Yes, I have had other setbacks and barriers, socio-economic and family of origin issues chief among them, but my white status has given me a leg up. These privileges are so inherently a part of my life that I don't even think of them. And reading books by authors without those privileges made me have to face those privileges, have to think of those privileges, and, like Vijay, think of how to move ahead not taking those privileges for granted but using them in ways to move us all forward. To paraphrase and turn back on myself a Black food activist quoted in Buttermilk Graffiti (#135), what am I willing to give up so that others may succeed?

A most apt question on which to start a new year, especially as I am starting to take a deeper and longer look at time and especially my health, which continues to decline, albeit slowly and gently. In my daughter-in-law's (and grandchildren's) culture, death is often spoken of as the person "walking on." I have seen my life, especially in recent years, as a long walk first towards and now into the foothills of the mountains, knowing that my old companion Death is walking alongside me. When I walk on, I want to have left this community in better shape. And more than ever, many of my readings in 2018, by those shut out, have moved me to greater commitment than ever.

Here's to 2019, and all the books it may hold for all of us.

Inch One Hundred Fifty-Two: Soapbox

My friend Margo summed it up best. "I'm learning to be loud."

I don't like confrontation, which is why I never enjoyed trial work. As a mediator, my goal is to find common ground. I don't typically engage in electronic shouting matches or post political memes on Facebook (although I often "like" them).

But sometimes I read something and think "I have to say something." And this is that time.

In last week's post, I wrote of my fears and concerns about the incoming administration. A longtime reader, a friend and fellow blogger in the blogosphere, took me to task: "Please don't believe everything you hear, especially about the election. News media is very bias[ed] and most of what gets reported is not correct.Wait and see of what comes of this new administration. My bet is that it will get better."

Give the President-Elect a chance? He has already announced Cabinet choices, most of whom I disagree with politically and morally. Rex Tillerson? Steve Mnuchin? Betsy DeVos? JEFF SESSIONS????

So with all due respect, I think the President-Elect has already indicated the tone his administration is going to take, at least out of the gate. So I don't think I need to wait and see. 

The second comment was far more upsetting and this had to do with the upcoming planned armed Neo-Nazi march in Whitefish, Montana, against the Jews in that town. Armed march, mind you, because that's how hate groups roll. The blog comment was "I just saw what you were talking about at Whitefish. A bunch of idiots, who were not supported by those in charge. I don't see this any different that 'black lives matter' groups that condemn white people."

I agree that the President-Elect has no connection with or endorsement of the Whitefish march. But I am stunned that a man who is on Twitter relentlessly, a man about to become President of this country, who can chastise a Broadway cast or a SNL skit at the drop of a hat, cannot bring himself to tweet a criticism, even a mild one, about Whitefish. Or one about the Klan marches in North Carolina on December 3. Or about the Hitler salutes thrown at the alt-right conference in D.C. 

Hoping I was wrong, I spent time on Google hoping for a tweeted comment or criticism from the President-Elect. Nothing.

I find that silence, especially in light of the man's volubility, disingenuous.

But what struck mw to the core was the casual comparison of Neo-Nazis and the Black Lives Matter movement. The latter is a movement arising out of deliberate and unlawful killings of citizens, primarily black men and usually unarmed, by law enforcement. Period. It is not a "let's kill the white people" or even a "let's kill the police" movement, despite what FOX News reports. (Talk about "most of what gets reported in not correct.") Black Lives Matter is about calling attention to the very real threat that millions of Americans live with daily because of their skin color. The Whitefish march is about threatening and intimidating a population because of its religion. I cannot begin to connect those dots.

In my gut, I feel my personal security and civil liberties are threatened by the upcoming administration. So are the safety and civil liberties of my sons (Hispanic and Jewish), my daughter-in-law (Native American), and my granddaughter (Native American, Hispanic, and Jewish). And so are the civil liberties of million of American citizens because of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual identification, disability, and gender. Regardless of what the President-Elect may believe, he has surrounded himself with staff and cabinet choices who are against me and others of us in this nation. Think of Steve Bannon, chief strategist for the President-Elect, and tell me I am wrong.

Three final comments and then I will step off my soapbox.

First, contrary to others in my circle of friends, I do know people who voted for the incoming administration. One of my very closest friends, Katrina, campaigned for the President-Elect. We may have to tiptoe around political discussions for a long time. Yet I am confident that our friendship will last because I believe that should my worst fears be realized, she would not turn her head and pretend she did not see. Katrina would have her Colonel Welch moment.

Second, Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote The Wave of the Future (subtitled A Confession of Faith) in 1940, a little book which was seen at the time and forever after as an apology for and a plea for accepting the evils of Nazism and fascism as necessary to better the world. (Among the many critics of her work was E. B. White, in his December 1940 essay "The Wave of the Future," in which he neatly dissects her disturbing position.) AML followers like me now know that Anne was heavily influenced and pushed to write this by her husband, Charles, who was anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi and may not have had any choice to do otherwise. That's not the point. That book cost Anne her reputation for decades. I own a copy of the book and have read it, but I cannot bring myself to read it in 2017.

Third, I am not allowing comments on this particular post. It is a soapbox of one. In my personal life presently, there is too much going with friends and family to respond to "yes, but you didn't consider this" comments. This is not an equal time open forum today.

I wish I were braver. I wish I were louder. And I fervently hope that, when tested, I speak up and say "this is wrong."

Inch Eighty-Nine: The Shoe Fits

When Anne Morrow Lindbergh's older sister Elisabeth died young, Anne wrote: A long long week, so strange and unreal and artificial now, and suddenly dropped into the past. A week of false hopes and false dreams: all kinds of plans and schemes that now seem irrelevant—because Elisabeth died. 

Last week was our long long week because Dale died.

And now we are moving on. Life goes on, a fact that my brother Dale understood as well as anyone. Even while he was busy dying, he was vitally interested in what we were all doing and remind us that those other things—the rest of life—were also important. Chemo sessions, laundry, the World Series--all the stuff of daily life keeps flowing no matter what the Big Event is.

I am writing this Tuesday night although I won't get it posted it until Wednesday evening. Earlier tonight I was reading Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest by Wade Davis. It is an excellent history and a good book for long chemo sessions. But I have set it aside to browse through The Tightwad Gazette III, the last of the Amy Dacyczyn collections.

Sometimes I just take comfort from reading about the frugal efforts of others, and tonight is one of those nights.

When I was in Oregon in September (was it only six weeks ago?), I came back with four pairs of new never-been-worn running shoes, all free. This was thanks to the kindness of a woman, now a friend, who I've known for almost 40 years--the last love (and one of the earliest loves) of my first husband, who died so suddenly a year and a half ago. Jennifer works for a small company that tests running shoes and she showered me with shoes. I at first felt silly with that many shoes, but I now smile realizing I will likely never have to buy sports shoes again. From a frugality standpoint, it's a win situation and my feet, racked by neuropathy as they are, appreciate the variety.

Monday I came home from work early, put on one of my pairs of shoes, and walked to a nearby park. The park runs along the Olentangy River, a childhood playground for me and my brothers. The sky was an impossible blue and the maples and other deciduous trees were aflame. I walked the mile loop slowly, reveling in the fall spectacle. I thought of my dead brother and the hours we spent at the river; I snapped a photo of the river and texted it to my youngest brother, to let him know where I was.

A walk is one of the best ways I know to pull together loose ends: mental, physical, emotional, chronological. This walk was no exception, which is good because I had a lot of loose ends. By the time I made it back home, I was drenched in autumn, and anchored once again by life moving on.

Inch Eighty-Seven: End Days

My older brother is dying. He was diagnosed with metastasized lung cancer earlier this summer and began treatment immediately. The oncologist was able to rein that cancer in. What no one anticipated was the liver cancer, which turned out to be unrelated to the metastasized lung cancer, suddenly going rogue and exploding in size and impact in the last three weeks. Treatment has stopped; hospice is in the home.

My older brother is dying with grace and humor and sadness and tears and laughter. The cancer is consuming him so quickly that his face is not the same face it was just four days ago. His energy levels are dropping by the minute.

My older brother is dying. I have always had an older brother and there will be a gap now. I think of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's writing when her older sister Elisabeth died, and the grace and sorrow with which Anne wrote about the loss of her sister and the hole in her world. 

I am at work as I type this. A half hour ago, I had to walk a block downtown to do some banking for my Aunt Ginger. When I stepped outside, I was hit with the intensity of the October day. The maple tree at the law office across the street is aflame; the sky is brilliant blue. All I could think of as I stared up at the sky and smelled the sweet smell of autumn was that I was fiercely glad my brother is dying in the midst of all this beauty and splendor. What a season to exit the world in.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's sonnet, "God's World," came to mind:

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!

   Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!

   Thy mists, that roll and rise!

Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag

And all but cry with colour!   That gaunt crag

To crush!   To lift the lean of that black bluff!

World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,

         But never knew I this;   

         Here such a passion is

As stretcheth me apart,—Lord, I do fear

Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year;

My soul is all but out of me,—let fall

No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

May my brother's way out of this world be marked with the brilliant burning leaves of this season.

Inch Seventy-Nine: Learning to Conserve

Conserve.

My battered red Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary tell me the word means to "keep in a safe and sound state, [especially] to avoid wasteful or destructive use."

I am learning to conserve.

Let me make clear what I am conserving. Not money, not land, not my tangible household goods. I'm good in that regard. I consider myself fairly thrifty and frugal, and I reflect regularly on ways to reduce my eco-footprint. I recycle and reuse. I limit my spending and vigorously eschew conspicuous consumption. While I am not at the same level of routine subsistence living as my son Sam and other millennials, I easily surpass most of my coworkers, all of my siblings, and many of my friends. Long before the Non-Consumer Advocate adopted it, I had already made this World War II slogan my own: Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.

So what am I conserving if not the treasures of this world?

I am learning to conserve me.

I have moved into a new phase of cancer: chemotherapy. My new regimen is two consecutive days (Tuesday/Wednesday) for three consecutive weeks, rest one week, then resume. Because I have am incurable, unsolvable, and terminal cancer, chemo is not for so many weeks or courses. It is an infinite loop until it or I fail.

It is such a wearying prospect.

I have just finished the second week of the first round. It could be a lot worse. Way worse. So far I am not experiencing acute nausea. I am unlikely to lose my hair. It does not take all day, only about three and a half hours with driving. On the first day, I went to our monthly legal clinic afterwards. I have gone to work afterwards three of the four chemo days. So I am well aware and grateful that I am tolerating chemo so seemingly well.

All the same, I am becoming increasingly aware that the chemo is charging a heavy tariff.  And in that regard, I am the wastrel, the profligate intent on squandering her assets while the tax collector waits in the hallway, shifting stolidly from one foot to the other.

Our home life often moves at a fast pace and as of late it has moved at a frantic pace. Most of the most frenetic activity is in Warren's spheres, which invariably spill over into mine, but some of it is of my own doing.

I need to learn to step away. I need to learn to turn off the engine. I need to learn to conserve.

I took a baby step a month ago, resigning my seat on our town's civil service commission. I have served on the commission since 2006 and that was a hard letter to sign. Afterwards, I cried, especially after the note from the fire chief arrived in my email.

I am taking bigger steps right now, wrapping up a yearlong court project with my old court. The project was community building in the truest sense and I am proud of my work. But as I draw up my project punch list, I find myself handing over the reins (and the paperwork and the responsibility) to the new court coordinator with a palpable sense of relief rather than reluctance. It is time to let it go.

I am learning to conserve myself.

The most daunting frontier of conservancy is personal. I can not, I will not winnow my friends. But I have to start limiting my engagements. And that is hard, hard, hard. No, I can't meet you for lunch; no, I can't do coffee that day or even that week.

It is hard and I resent it. But then I come back to the definition of "conserve" and the reality of my life now. To be able to work, I must conserve myself. To be able to write, I must conserve myself. To be able to be Warren's companion and helpmeet, I must conserve myself. Already others have called me on the carpet. My friend Kevin wrote "Especially while you are in treatment, if the choice is between baking and taking a break, you should take a break!" Kim echoed him in her email: "Lastly, I know you are the mentor and I am the mentee but I do have to say April take care of yourself. I only say this because it seems that you're spreading yourself really really thin even for person who had 100 percent health. " And my wonderful friend and coworker Dodie looks at me and says, bluntly, "April, just go home!"

So I must learn to conserve. My friendships will carry on, even if the emphasis shifts to emails and shorter contacts. One dear to my heart, discussing my health, wrote "God has blessed you both with many friends.  Hold tightly to them." I hold those words tightly and gratefully.

I find myself thinking a lot of Anne Morrow Lindbergh and E.B. White, the two writers I return to time and time again. Anne was famous for the sheer volume of friends and acquaintances she had. Her correspondences, tea and luncheon engagements, and evening events (plays, dinners, concerts, movies) were staggering. She wrote in her lyrical Gift From The Sea:

There is so little empty space. The space is scribbled on, the time has been filled. There are so few pages in my engagement pad, or empty hours in the day, or empty rooms in my life in which to stand alone and find myself. Too many activities, and people, and things. Too many worthy activities, valuable things, and interesting people. For it is not merely the trivial which clutters our lives, but the important as well. We can have a surfeit of treasures.

Anne did not often take her own wise counsel, although she passed it on.

At the other end of the social spectrum was E.B. White, who tended to lean far away from the limelight and the social bustle. Quiet and introverted by nature, he filled his days, but tended to fill them at his pace and with his writing. I have been rereading the exquisite Essays of E.B. White. White's writing is deceptively simple, so clean and clear that you read and then catch your breath in sheer delight. In one, he wrote:

There is one big boulder down in the pasture woods where I sometimes go to sit when I am lonely or sick or melancholy or disenchanted or frightened, and in combination with sweet fern, juniper, and bayberry this old rock has a remarkable restorative effect on me. I'm not sure but that this is the true energy, the real source of man's strength.

Fall is just over the horizon and conserving—canning and harvesting—is in the air. I don't have a rock but I can sit for hours on my deck and watch the bees ply the sunburnt flowers. Doing so has a remarkable restorative effect on me.

"Conserve" also means to preserve with sugar and a conserve is a candied fruit mixture, much like a very thick jam. It is time for me to take stock. It is time to candy those memories and store them against the darkening days, the gray winter ahead.

It is time to conserve.

Inch Sixty-One: "Are You A Writer?"

The last concert of the symphony season is upon us; the performance is Saturday night.

Wednesday night, I found myself at rehearsal. I had been planning on attending some of it because we have a guest composer here, the amazing Richard Blackford, and I volunteered to shuttle him from the concert hall to his lodgings. I thought I could arrive at 8:00 or so, spend an hour, and then be gone.

The phone rang soon after they left. Would I bring the orchestra bells? Yes, yes. So I spent two hours at rehearsal and never shuttled Richard, as he had to stay to work on a sound issue.

I tell this story not to complain, but to point out that there has been a whole lot of music and music talk and music stuff the last several days. On Wednesday, before rehearsal, Richard, Warren, and I had a light meal at the house before the two of them went off.

The talk was of music and the therapeutic drumming program Warren created and the art of composing. Then poetry was introduced (it was still National Poetry Month, after all) as Richard had collaborated with Maya Angelou on the work "King" (he wrote the music; she wrote the lyrics). That added a layer of poets and poetry and verse to the music discussion.

Warren excused himself after the meal to change and pull together his case for the rehearsal. Richard looked at me and asked "Do you write?"

Shades of the old high school cheer with the emphasis on a different word in the short sentence. Do I write? Do I write? Do I write?

I fumbled my initial response. "Yes, but not professionally. I mean, I blog and I write a monthly column for an online site but I don't make money at it..."  Then like the receiver downfield, I recovered the conversational ball and had a surer grip. "...and I used to write a monthly column about local architecture for our newspaper, so yes, I do write." I paused to draw a breath and added "I love to write."

"How about poetry?"

Not really, I admitted. About poetry, yes. But not poetry.  Richard nodded.

He acknowledged that he preferred to write prose. "But I'm writing a novel," he confessed, his face lighting up. "I've finished the first draft and am now on the second."

A novel! I jolted upright. A novel! And while he explained where the novel stood, including the novelist friend who'd read and marked up the first draft, my mind raced to my own confession.

I finally opened my mouth and said, "I'm writing a youth novel and am about two-third through my first draft."

We did not talk plots. We talked about leaning a scene down, about moving a scene along after it had stalled out up a blind alley, about the aha! moment when you realize what the character really was up to and why the character did what he or she did.

I said that for me the hardest thing was making time to write. He talked about the shortage of time; I talked about honoring that time.

"Yes, I write." The statement, buried though it was, opened an amazing door.

There is an entry in the journals of Anne Morrow Lindbergh after Harcourt, Brace accepted her first book, North to the Orient, for publication. She received a call from Harcourt himself, who after praising it and tell her the firm accepted it, said "You've written a book, my dear." Anne hangs up the phone and stands looking out the window, "completely happy. They like it—and my happiness was pure and tangible and right there. It's true—I have it, then...[one of those] moments of personal triumph."

I've never submitted a book for publication, let alone ever had one accepted. My manuscript, in first draft stage, is at 21,000+ words and maybe (I think, I hope, I want) about two-thirds complete.  But...

"I write."

"I'm writing a novel."

The glow of those words—just getting out those words—carried me through the rehearsal and on into the night.

Inch Forty-Nine: Nostalgic Reading

I am awaiting the arrival in the mail of two books from my past. These are titles that have teased my memory for years and I finally succumbed to the lure of Amazon and bought cheap copies of each.

The first book is An Empty Spoon by Sunny Decker. Decker was a young, white, idealistic, well-off college graduate who wanted to change the world in the late 1960s. Spoon is her memoir of her year of teaching inner city black youth in Philadelphia, capturing her triumphs and her failures, her shock at institutional racism, and the death of her naiveté in thinking she could change the lives of her students, let alone the world, in one short school year.

The other book winging its way to me is Dave's Song by Robert McKay. McKay was an Ohio author who wrote several short young adult novels. I believe most if not all set in Ohio. Dave's Song was the Ohioana winner for Juvenile Literature in 1969, which is probably why my classmates and I were reading it three years later in Arlene Gregory's sophomore literature class. It is a soft, safe romance between Nice Girl Kate and Lone Wolf Dave. Part of its appeal was Kate's desire to flee the stifling little Ohio town she was living in (a desire I recognized immediately and one that she abandoned in the very last sentence of the book, to my deep disappointment). (For the record, I would note that I did not want to date a Lone Wolf like the title character, I wanted to be a Lone Wolf like the title character.) The other lure of the book was McKay's weaving the lyrics and music of Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" throughout the narrative. I had a 45 (yes, a 45) of Noel Harrison singing that song that I played repeatedly for several years until it wore out, it being the only remotely "pop" song I listened to in high school. (Take my word for it: my musical tastes in high school were as out of sync with those of my peers as were my intellectual interests.)

Both books were slim paperbacks. Both lingered in my life and were read occasionally for two decades or so, which means I carted them to Chicago, back to Ohio, to Oregon, to Ohio, to California, and back to Ohio once again during the years I owned them. Each eventually disappeared during one of several Book Purges that dotted my adult years.

I am looking forward to seeing the books again. I have been trying to pull a line from Spoon out of my memory, something about T. S. Eliot being wrong about April being the cruelest month. Decker said it was February, for reasons I cannot remember, but as I check this morning's temperature (5 degrees at 4:30 a.m.), I am convinced that she was on to something. And I just want to know if my memory serves me correctly and that the last words of Song are "and Columbus was just another dot on the map."

There is the risk in looking back across a gulf of four and half decades to books so continuously read at the time. That girl I used to be is long gone and the woman I am now has a hard time recalling her passions and ideals (other than my burning desire to get out of this town). These books may be insipid, they may disappoint, I may read them with 59 year old eyes and wonder what I was thinking at the time.

It's a roll of the dice.

When she was a few years older than I am now, Anne Morrow Lindbergh published the first of her several volumes of diaries and letters. I read Save Me A Unicorn, which covered her college years and post-college romance with Charles Lindbergh, in the same general high school years as Dave's Song and An Empty Spoon. (Unlike those two books,  AML is still on my bookshelf.) In looking back at her adolescent self, Anne wrote that she had a "certain respect" for the youngster who was "so many lives removed" from the older adult. "I can laugh at her and am often embarrassed by her, but I do not want to betray her. Let her speak for herself."

Thankfully, I no longer have my high school or college diaries, but my book choices are a form of diary keeping. I am eagerly waiting to see what two of those choices reveal. I am waiting for those choices to speak for that long ago me.

The Land of Counterpane

When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay
To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.

The Land Of Counterpane, by Robert Louis Stevenson 

I have read a lot of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry in my lifetime, although not so much in recent years. Stevenson seems to have fallen out of fashion among the nursery set. In looking back, I am not sure I read a great many of his poems to my children. Ben, maybe; Sam, certainly not. (Sam early on had a fascination with Longfellow's "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," and that was pretty much the extent of Sam's childhood poetry exposure. I probably read it to him nightly for six months when he was five or six.) (An aside: As I reflect upon what I have shipped out to Ramona so far, I shamefacedly have to acknowledge that very little poetry, let alone Stevenson, has been sent. What is wrong with me?)

So why Stevenson now, today? (Especially coming so hard on the heels of Robert Frost?) Stevenson is on my mind because lately I have been spending way too much time in the Land of Counterpane. My end of May trip to Los Angeles and this week's trip to St. Louis and Chicago (a three day, thousand mile excursion) both ended with me sick, sick, sick. Nothing critical, just my less than robust immune system falling on its face yet once again.

The Land of Counterpane is not so pleasant as an adult. I have no toy soldiers or fleets of ships to send in and out of the blankets. I don't even have any Legos to while away the hours. No, as an adult I have crumpled tissues on a nightstand, a book shoved to the side of the bed so it won't get lost in the bedclothes, my glasses perched precariously nearby. There are lone trips down the stairs to the kitchen and a desultory search of the cupboards and refrigerator (knowing in advance that there is nothing—nothing!—in the house, indeed the whole town, that I am even remotely interested in eating). There is the eyeing of the clock at random moments, resulting in my thinking one of two things: Is that all the later it is? or Is it that late already? 

No, the Land of Counterpane holds no charms for me. At least not as of late.

As it turns out, it held no charm for Stevenson either, whose short life was notable for both his prolific literary output and his stunningly poor health. A few years before his abrupt death at age 44, he wrote, "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution."

It is late Sunday morning. The last of the laundry has dried outside in the strong sunlight and I will go take it down shortly. I am not in the Land of Counterpane today, nor yet entirely of the world either. Like Stevenson, I am in search of my boots, preferably the seven-league ones.

The Train Trip

Chicago's Union Station

Because the space in which the Symphony performs is closed while OWU renovates the chapel organ, Warren did not start 2013 in the midst of rehearsals and executive preparations for a March concert. While it is never easy for him to slip the surly bonds of the Symphony, February represented as good a time to get away as he was ever likely to get. So we were extravagant with our time and took the train to Portland to meet Ramona.

If passenger rails still threaded this country, I would never fly again. It was that wonderful an experience.

We traveled by train from Toledo, Ohio (our nearest Amtrak station) to Chicago, where we boarded the Empire Builder to Oregon. As a nod to my health and energy levels, we bought a roomette. (More about it later.)

We have traveled by train before, but never so far for so long. We left Toledo in the early morning, after a very short night and a two hour drive from our home.  I thought briefly of napping on the five hour trip to Chicago. But as the train rolled through the dark, I caught a glimpse of someone standing in their kitchen, the yellow light of the room spilling out into the still, dark morning and I could not go back to sleep.

It is that intimacy—that quick glimpse into peoples' lives—that makes train travel so gripping. Train travel is travel at a personal level and rhythm. The train flashed through Indiana downtowns that mirrored our own, the Italianate structures so familiar that I felt I could walk down those strange streets and not feel disoriented. As we moved further west, we passed little towns pinned in place by the train tracks that split through them. The vaster the spaces became between communities, the more the train served as connecting thread and viable short-distance mass transit.

Montana 

There is a soliloquy about baseball in the movie "Field of Dreams," about the importance of baseball to this nation's history. I feel the same about railroads and train travel. As E.B. White noted more than 50 years ago, we did ourselves a great disservice when we turned our backs on passenger trains and took to the air. Now, as airlines disappear and airports contract back in upon themselves (St. Louis and Cincinnati, to name two), I wonder whether we will turn our eyes back to the rails as a viable way to travel.

As I mentioned, we bought a roomette for our travels. An adventure in micro-living if ever there was one, a roomette requires two adults to live in a space in which one youth might comfortably take up residence. It taught me a lot about packing light and being compact in how much space one takes up. Fortunately, Warren and I are highly compatible travelers (no surprise), so we made the roomette work with a great deal of laughter and love. While a roomette adds to the cost of travel, it includes hot showers (a wonderful luxury), linens, and all meals, which on Amtrak are substantial and excellent. (There is a full galley on a dining car, and the food is cooked right there on the train.) I don't think Warren and I stopped smiling from the time we got on the train in Chicago, we were so pleased.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like E.B. White, also spent a lot of time on trains, even after she took to the air. In a letter to her younger sister, written while en route from the east to Mexico City (where her father was the US Ambassador), she wrote, "Tonight all through supper, having ordered baked apple with cream (I hesitated between that and cornflakes), I regretted the cornflakes. And it occurred to me later that life might so easily be that eternal "If only I'd ordered cornflakes—"

At breakfast, I contemplated the hot crab cakes versus the Amtrak french toast. I chose the french toast. It was magnificent.

I did not once regret the crab cakes.

Sunrise over the Columbia River Gorge 

Updates

Every now and then, a post cries out to be updated. Sometimes the update comes about because of something a reader or friend pointed out, sometimes an update comes about because of the passage of time. Here are three recent posts that are just ripe for updating.

North

I raved about this play two weeks ago, having seen its final "rehearsal" before the for/word theatre company headed to New York for a one month long off Broadway run. 

Here's the great news. North is getting some amazing reviews.  

Did I call that one or what? 

If you want to read the reviews in their entirety, they are on the for/word company Facebook page. If you want an amazing theatre experience and are in New York this month, buy a ticket. Then sit back and fly.

The Wasp and the Nose

Back in August, after a trip north to Wisconsin, I wrote about being at Yerkes Observatory after over three decades. A few readers clamored for the "story" behind the chiseled columns and I told what I knew of it and what I was able to piece together from various Yerkes sites.

This week has been a grueling one. It is Concert Week, which of course means Warren is working 100+ hours and our personal schedule has been booted aside. On top of that, I attended a two-day seminar on mentally ill juveniles in the court system. Excellent speaker (she spoke eight hours each day with the barest of outline), excellent information, absolutely and totally draining. So it was great delight that after dragging home the first day, I found an email from one Richard Dreiser, who has been giving tours at Yerkes since 1980.

Richard pointed out a factual error in my post (the observatory was dedicated in 1897, not 1896 as I had erroneously written). Factual corrections are always welcome. But what warmed my heart and has left me with a debt of gratitude to Richard was his sharing two photos from Yerkes.

The first is one of him holding a photograph of William Rainey Harper, the first president and the force behind establishing the University of Chicago as a bastion of higher education. 

Richard Dreiser and William Rainey Harper

Richard commented that he doubted the wasp ever had a face (and you will see why he feels that way in a minute) but that the chubby man below Rockefeller (whose nose you can just see at the top of the column) is almost certainly Harper minus his glasses and with an adjusted hairline. Given the satire afoot in the column, I agree with Richard.

But here is the photograph that blew me away:

Rockefeller and the Wasp

Richard believes this photograph dates to 1899, which is after the dedication and suggests that it took some time before George Ellery Hale convinced University officials (no doubt Harper) that the wasp had to go. Given the caricatures carved into the column, I might suggest that Harper had a better sense of humor than Hale. 

Ramona

I have not blogged a lot about Ramona yet. She still seems so new in the world, at least from my vantage point in Ohio, that there is a fantasy-like quality to her existence at all. Last weekend, Ohio and Oregon skyped, and seeing Ramona in her baby seat, kicking and bubbling and cooing, made her real in ways that I had not grasped before that moment. (Yes, I babbled incoherently for the first several minutes.)

Since my last post about her, Ramona has traveled a bit (Montana and New Orleans), been baptized (by her grandfather, who also married her parents two years ago), and has attended not one but two powwows. That's pretty good for a kid who is only six weeks old as of today.

Ramona and Grandpa Joe at the baptism

As I noted above, it's Concert Week. More to the point, the Symphony opens its season tonight. Tonight. I feel the clock ticking and it is time to turn away from writing and turn instead to the rest of the day. More Ramona photos and stories will follow in the months to come. For now, I will leave you with this image of Ramona at her second powwow, this one in Helena, Montana. Note what she has on: her fancy dance shawl! 

With Aunt Jenna at the Montana powwow

North

When we finish a good book, we feel as we do at the end of an appetizing meal—satisfied, refreshed, ready to continue our normal lives with renewed energy. When we finish a great book, we feel, Jonah-like, as if we've been swallowed up and tossed onto an unknown shore, lucky to be able to breathe at all.  (Margaret Quamme, "Great books demand transforming,"essay from the early 1990s.)

I have carried around Quamme's quote for some twenty years because she is right in the largest sense of the word. Good art—a painting, a book, a concert, a play—suspends time briefly and then lets you gently back into the everyday world.

Great art tears you right out of the comfortable world in which you live and pounds you into another reality all together.

I just had a great art experience.

Last Saturday, Warren, our friends Margo and Gerald, and I watched the final rehearsal-before-opening-off-Broadway of a one act play, "North."

"North" is about Anne Morrow Lindbergh and a weekend meeting between her, her husband Charles Lindbergh, and the French aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. All but a handful of lines in the play come from the writings of the three main characters, especially from Anne's published diaries and letters.

I came to the production with high hopes and expectations. The reality far exceeded anything I had imagined.

The play is excellent. The actors who play Charles and St-Ex, as Anne referred to him in her journal, are superb. The staging, the set, the costumes, all incredible.

But Anne? Anne was alive for the hour plus of the play. Christine Ritter, who plays Anne, is Anne Morrow Lindbergh, moving through her life and her words and her thoughts right there in front of us. I sat through the play with one hand literally to my throat, the other figuratively on my heart. Seeing Anne come to life was draining, exhilarating, and deeply moving.

Afterwards, the cast, the playwright, and the stage designer held a conversation with the audience. Jennifer Schlueter, the playwright, asked us for feedback and questions. There was that brief awkward silence while everyone looked around furtively, weighing whether to be first, and then someone jumped in with a comment.

"Someone" jumped in? Oh, it was me. You know that.

I looked at Christine and said, "You were Anne." I explained that I was a rabid AML fan and how deeply I responded to the performance. Christine grinned and admitted she was a huge AML fan. It turns out that a number of the audience members were also huge AML fans, and at times the post-play dialogue turned into the Anne fans, as Margo referred to us, commenting on this or that nuance of the performance based upon our cumulative knowledge of Anne.

The four of us went out for ice cream afterwards, still talking furiously (an Anne phrase if ever there was one) about the play. Warren and I talked about it before falling asleep that night and again over breakfast Sunday morning.

You know you have seen an amazing play when Warren, who knows very little about Anne, Charles, and St-Ex and absolutely nothing about their meeting, was still talking about it.

The "North" poster at 59E59 Theatre

The cast and crew of the for/word company left for New York city and as of this writing, have arrived. They open this Thursday at 59E59 Theatre and will be there all month. For anyone who is or will be in New York this month, find some time and go see the play. Even if you have never heard of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Charles Lindbergh, or Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, go see the play. I dare you not to be moved by what you see performed.

In theatre circles, the saying for a successful run is "break a leg."

Break a leg? Break a heart.

God-Moments

I spent an hour plus this morning in Columbus having coffee and conversation with Pastor Glenn of my favorite church, Maple Grove. Warren had a series of meetings in Columbus this morning in connection with the Symphony, so we rode down together. Warren asked me what I thought Pastor Glenn and I would talk about.

"Oh, probably God."

I mean, heck if I knew. This meeting came about because I blogged about the Easter sermon Pastor Glenn gave and he invited me to meet with him and talk.

So we met. And talked about who we are, about who we were, about reading, about Maurice Sendak and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, about our families, about some of my spiritual wanderings, and about community and building community.

And we talked about God. We talked about what Pastor Glenn called God-moments in his initial email to me—those moments when the veil is lifted and you see God.

Our discussion stemmed from the Easter sermon and Mary Magdalene finally recognizing the gardener as the risen Jesus. Glenn talked about what it took for Mary—what it takes for us—to realize that God is always there, but for whatever reasons, we do not always see through the veil (of life, of tears, of "chatter") and realize it. I alluded to the short story, "The Gardener," by Rudyard Kipling, where a similar scene is play out simply in a vast cemetery holding the dead of World War I.

I shared with him a Pearl Bailey quote I keep in my quote collection: People see God every day, they just don't recognize him. And I voiced my belief, courtesy of my friend Patricia longing for God to speak to her, that God talks all the time to us, we just aren't listening.

We happened to be sitting outside the coffee shop, with the traffic going by, and I gestured with my hand. "We are so busy filling our life with chatter," I said, "that we don't hear Him."

For two self-admitted introverts (who lead extroverted professional lives), we did pretty well talking.

Afterwards, I walked north along High Street to spend time in a used bookstore while waiting for Warren to finish his event. As I walked along, I thought of many things. The day is beautiful—"a handsome day," Warren called it earlier—and I relished the fresh midday. I thought about how rarely I have ever walked in Columbus—I probably have logged more miles on foot in Chicago in the last five years than in Columbus in a lifetime. I thought about the streetscape along High Street—the small shops and small brick apartment buildings on the street front, and the glimpses of neighborhoods tailing off down residential side streets.

And I thought of God-moments.

As I pen these words, I am sitting in a noodle shop diagonal to the bookstore, finishing a small lunch and still thinking about God-moments. Sometimes you are just going through your everyday life and there is that moment—that small, quiet light that glows on like an old-fashioned vacuum tube. It is as close as a cup of coffee with a new acquaintance. It is as near as the brief snatch of conversation with the elderly woman I crossed the street with 15 minutes ago, who laughed and sprinkled blessings on the day. It is as immediate as the genuine small smile yesterday from the surliest of the current crop of students in the Victim Awareness class I help teach.

Those moments are the treasure we tuck in our pocket and carry along, touching from time to time for comfort, or reassurance, or happiness. They are not always BIG or flashy or loud. Sometimes they are so small and quiet that we have to hush ourselves and slow ourselves down to appreciate them.

They are the God-moments.

***********

Linking with Michelle and Deidra!  

The Last Gift of Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I recently wrote about Anne Morrow Lindbergh and my just learning that her family was about to publish a sixth and final volume of her diaries and letters. (The first five volumes were brought out during Anne's lifetime.) Thanks to the wonders of the interlibrary loan system, I checked out the book last Thursday and just Sunday morning slowly and reluctantly read the last entry.

It was the kind of book that, as I read it, I would have to set aside and walk around a bit to regain my balance. It was the kind of book that, as I read it, I would sometimes put my hand to my throat to catch the emotions welling up in me.

It was the kind of book I will read again and again until it is imprinted on my heart like so many others of hers.

I emailed Margo when I had read about a third of it. "Heartbreaking." I saw Margo briefly at Saturday's concert and we talked in a few quick sentences. "Heartbreaking," I said again.

Why that choice of word? All that came to mind was this year's Easter sermon at Maple Grove: "Easter begins with Mary, weeping in the dark."

Let me not give the impression that Against Wind and Tide is a sad book. No. While Anne captured the sad moments that life holds: the deaths of her mother and her husband, the loss of friends through misunderstanding, the limitations on her life as she aged, she also celebrated the joyous ones: a family wedding, the arrival of grandchildren, talking with a dear friend.

So why do I find this book heartbreaking?

I wrote in my blog post that I looked forward to meeting the older Anne. I have not been disappointed. The older Anne is even more understandable and approachable than the younger Anne. I recognize myself (not for the first time) in her words, not the least in her frustrations over her writing.

So why heartbreaking?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh, like any of us, had many different roles in her life, including some (wife of an aviation icon and a pioneer aviator herself) that none of us will ever attain. One heartbreak for me was reading her struggles (when she was in her 50s, incidentally) against roles which no longer fit or she had never asked for in the first place. It is hard to read in her own words what price she paid to fit so many roles, including that of "good girl."

How many of us struggle with being a "good girl"—a good wife, a good mother, a good daughter, a good friend—and feel we constantly come up short? Or feel someone else does it better or more effortlessly? How many of us strive to achieve that impossible goal and then resent what we must set aside, or suppress, or not say or do, in order to be good? (Go ahead. Admit it. You know we do.)

There is even more heartbreak in Anne's reflections on her own writing. In 1955, she published Gift From the Sea, a reflection on the various stages of a (married) woman's life. The book was an immediate best seller and has never been out of print. As Anne ruefully noted, she had finally won vast acclaim and adoration for a book (and sentiment) in which she no longer believed. There is her jealousy when Charles, with whom she had a long, complex, and often lonely marriage, won the Pulitzer prize for The Spirit of St. Louis. While she pegged some of her resentment to his lack of support when she went through a long period of therapy for depression, she also ground her teeth and wrote that her life, her writing, their marriage, and their family, were all sacrificed to The Book, and that she ended up supporting the writing of it at the expense of her own dreams and projects. It is hard to read that entry and feel her pain and bitterness.

That, ultimately, is why the book is heartbreaking. It is sad, but not heartbreaking, to see her struggle in her marriage and in coming to a satisfactory relationship with Charles. It is poignant to read her worries over her adult children's problems.

But it is heartbreaking to watch her agonize over her worth and ability as a writer. I swallowed hard when Anne, in her late 70s, finally admitted in her diary that she could not pull together another book.

As I read this book, I was grateful that Reeve Lindbergh (and other family members) thought this volume was needed to complete the personal portrait that Anne had started with the publication of the first volume. For those of us who find her writing so arresting, so sure and so beautiful, the book is a gift. I am also grateful that the Lindbergh family did not wield the same heavy censorious pen that Anne (and certainly Charles) would have. They have let Anne speak—in reflection, in sorrow, in love, in anger, in joy, and in humor.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh turned again and again to the written word to carry her through the difficult times, the joyous times, and the ordinary times of her life. Although she was rarely satisfied with the results, Anne was a writer and she understood what writing meant: Writing is a glass-bottomed bucket through which one looks to the still world beneath the ruffled surface of the waves. It is the blind man's stick with which I tap my way along the pavement. It is also my keel, which keeps me steady in choppy waters and gives me direction. So you see I write because I have to. 

A glass-bottomed bucket to see beneath the waves. A stick to tap along the pavement when you are blind. A keel to keep you steady in choppy waters.

And for those of us reading her words, Anne's writing is a gift, one last gift, from her beautiful pen.

The Palette

A good friend just gave me an exercise his therapist had given him as an instant tool to draw upon during anxiety attacks.

Think of three colors you really like.

Got them?

Now think of a word that you associate with each color. For example, you might think of a deep chocolate brown and think "comforting." Or a sage green and say "soothing."

Got your words? Good.

When you are feeling stressed or anxious, pull the colors out of your mind's pocket, think of them one by one, and think of the word you associate with each color.

Simple, no?

My friend related this technique during a brief phone call, and I had just enough time to ask if I could pick different colors for different scenarios. The answer came back, "well, I guess so," which I took to mean "why not?"

"Why not?" indeed.

I got to test the workability of this technique this evening. It is Friday night of Concert Week, which means dress rehearsal. I ended up volunteering to run an errand for the Symphony before many musicians arrived and my mood was, well, let's just say it was less than positive. So as I sat at an impossibly long stoplight, I thought of the colors I had named to my friend an hour ago and pulled up the words that went with them.

Darn if it didn't work. At least enough that my irritability level dropped several notches.

It worked enough that when I got back to the rehearsal, I turned it over in my mind, thought through my color choices, and came up with two palettes.

One is my de-stressing palette: blue, deep purple, silver gray.

          Blue (a nice, solid but not too dark blue): calming
          Deep purple: restoring
          Silver gray: tranquil

The other is my pick-me-palette: primary yellow, turquoise blue, and brilliant white.

          Primary yellow: upbeat
          Turquoise blue: strong
          Brilliant white: uplifted

I am writing these words as the musicians come on stage and start to warm up. My mood has flattened out from earlier but not yet risen. I have another errand to run yet this evening so we don't have to run it at 10:45 after rehearsal. There is a letter I want to write. I am just beginning the newly published final volume of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's diaries and letters, and it is just heartbreaking. (Yes, I will be writing about it when I finish.)

I am not sure as I sit here that I need my de-stressing palette.  I needed that earlier when my irritation level was high and threatening to hit flashpoint. Those embers are cold now. Maybe I need my pick-me-up palette. I could use feeling strong and uplifted right now. I need to feel upbeat.

Primary yellow: upbeat
Turquoise blue: strong
Brilliant white: uplifted

Turquoise blue.

Postscript
I wrote the above post before running the errand, dodging raindrops, and getting back to rehearsal to find the orchestra deep into the Debussy. While I drove, I though of turquoise for strength, primary yellow for being upbeat, and brilliant white for feeling uplifted.

As I sit here, watching Jaime and the musicians do what they do so well, and feel the music swell to the ceiling, i open my hands and let the colors seep through my fingers.

Primary yellow.

Turquoise blue.

Brilliant white.

Rediscovering Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Well, not truly "rediscovering." It is not as if I set my knowledge and admiration of Anne Morrow Lindbergh down somewhere and then just walked off and forgot about her. Anne has always been near at hand, my fingertips just grazing a quote or a passage from one of her books. But it has been a long time since I have immersed myself in her works.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh is, in my opinion, one of the two most graceful and lyrical American writers ever. (E. B. White is the other.) Her writing, especially her published diaries and letters, are ones that I have turned to over and over again for almost 40 years. When I was undergoing my two stem cell transplants in the summer of 2005, Anne was on the bedside table in the Cleveland Clinic, along with pictures of Ben and Sam. Whenever I play the "if you were stranded on an island and could only have five books with you" game, Anne is always on my list (along, not surprisingly, with E. B. White).

I first discovered this amazing writer in 1973, while still in high school. A quote from her second volume of diaries and letters, Hour of Gold, Hour of Lead, was the prompt for a timed essay I was writing as part of a competition: "I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world be wise, since everyone suffers."The moment I finished the essay, I went straight to the library and checked out both that book and its predecessor, Bring Me A Unicorn. I had to find out who this person was.

I ended up taking Anne Morrow Lindbergh to heart and have never let her go.

On the crowded tabletop in front of me are two small books, each bound in red: North to the Orient and Listen! The Wind. These are her two travel books, detailing the early (1930s) global navigation expeditions she undertook with her husband, aviator Charles A. Lindbergh. I'd read them before, probably 25-30 years ago. In between "new" reads earlier this week, I picked them off my Lindbergh shelf to dip into again.

I am not disappointed. This scene, from North to the Orient, is an example why. Anne and Charles have stopped to see her family before setting off on their lengthy and dangerous trip and they have just finished their goodbyes:

The next morning we are off again, I with an extra handkerchief tucked into my pocket. "You will probably need an extra one, you know." That extra handkerchief seemed to set a seal of success on the trip. It made it at once intimate and possible. Hadn't an extra handkerchief taken me to school and back, and put me on the train for college, and sent me out the day I was married? One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief--especially if it had a blue border.

I came across that paragraph and closed my eyes in delight and memory. It is classic Anne. In the midst of telling us this tremendous aviation tale, she brings us back with a personal moment: a mother insisting on tucking an extra handkerchief into her daughter's pocket. It is the smallest of touches and the bravest of attitudes: "One could go anywhere with an extra handkerchief--especially if it had a blue border."

Anne was born in 1906, 50 years before me, and died in 2001. Her last volume of diaries and letters, covering the years 1939-1944, was published in 1980. She went on keeping her voluminous diaries and writing fistfuls of letters, but I assumed that, other than the excerpts appearing in Scott Berg's stunning biography of Charles Lindbergh, written in 1998, those diaries and letters would never see the light of day. So it was with total shock that I learned that Anne's daughter, Reeve Lindbergh, is publishing her mother's diaries and letters from the mid-1940s to 1986.

The book, Against Wind and Tide, will come out on April 24. I am hoping Reeve edited her mother's words far less harshly than Anne, who often trimmed her own thoughts to appease her husband and maintain the Lindbergh image. The Anne of this newest volume will be an older Anne, a woman I am eager to meet and get to know, especially now that I am in my mid-fifties. I cannot wait to read it.

But for now, I am with the young Anne as she and Charles head north to the Orient. The death of her father, which will happen while they are on this trip, and the murder of her firstborn child, which is only a year away, are still in the future. Her husband is still the great American hero and they are about to undertake a great expedition that no one else has attempted. The hour is golden, the future is bright, and Anne has an extra handkerchief, one with a brave blue border, in her pocket.

Juvenilia IV: Let Her Speak

In Bring Me A Unicorn, the first of five volumes of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's letters and diaries, the author spoke about the embarrassment of rereading, let alone publishing, writings from her teen and college years. In explaining why she chose to do so, Anna noted that she "had a certain respect for the early efforts of this struggling adolescent, who now seems so many lives removed from the self of today. I can laugh at her and am often embarrassed by her, but I do not want to betray her. Let her speak for herself."

I feel the same way about this last poem from my early years. As I typed it out for this post, I saw lines and phrases I wanted so much to rewrite. I corrected a few spelling errors, but otherwise chose to let the poem stand on its own awkward legs.

This was written after going with my parents to a family funeral down in the Kentucky hills. Over 35 years later, my cousin Atheen still mentions this piece and how he "never was in a poem in [his] life except for that one." Atheen wasn't much for poetry by his own admission, but he reckoned he liked this one.

**********

Kentucky Funeral

Atheen, my cousin,
    his face unlined yet worn for all his thirty-five years in the hills,
stood in the door of his cabin - shack - home
and waved us goodbye
    before returning to the mourners inside.

These past two days he had made
    twenty or more trips up the side of the Nelson hill,
digging the grave out for great Uncle Bill in the cold March air,
    using blasting caps when the thin soil gave out
    and only bedrock was left.
As family trickled in from all parts of the country,
    the men folk all made the trek up
    and pitched in to help bury their dead.

After the funeral, sparse and commercial,
    and the twisted drive from Greenup to our land,
contingents of neighborhood men waited upside the hill -
spaced at neat intervals to relay the coffin up the slick mud path.
    Me and Burl raced up after
    being two of the first people to the top
following the valley pallbearers, coveralled and hunting clothed.
Waiting for the rest to join us
(the minister and fat little funeral director
puffing and picking their ways up more slowly),
I examined my ancestors' final plots, Iven and Minnie,
    my Nelson great grandparents.
They say this little hilltop graveyard was one of two,
    my more ancient forbearers being one hill over.
    Burl pointed out towards another rise
where we'd someday make a similar climb to lower my
other clan great grandmother, wrinkled and bent,
into the selfsame wooden vault and hear,
    as they were now doing with Bill,
the mud and rocks thud back down upon her.

Atheen joined us briefly,
    grinning like a small boy,
and held up some old terrapin that had braved the cold and rush of humans,
only to be captured by this Kentucky hills man.

Angels at Death

I recently discovered Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx and spent an hour last week touring it online. The site is filled with beautiful, evocative photos of statuary that reminded me yet again how close death always is, and how different our responses to it are through the eras.

We forget, in our modern, technology-driven society, that death in America prior to the mid-twentieth century was a very real and immediate event. People died young back then. People died at home. Women died in childbirth, children died of diseases we have now largely banished, people died of infections and illnesses that have become distant medical memories.

We tend, in these modern times, not to talk or think too much about death, because it is "depressing." In these modern times, death is something that doesn't happen to most of us (or so we think) until we are old. We have conquered many common illnesses; we have even miraculously turned many incurable cancers into "manageable" diseases instead of imminently terminal ones.

But it wasn't always like that.

Woodlawn Cemetery reminded me how close death always has been. In the nineteenth century, death was personal. Death was someone who lived not in a far away country, but right next door or, all too often, right there in the house.

The statuary reflects the intimacy of death.

There are angels, but I am not certain I have ever seen angels with such piercing glances.

All photos are from the Woodlawn Cemetery website, www.thewoodlawncemetery.org

Angels who seem deep in thought about why they have been called to earth and captured in stone.

Angels who seem troubled that there is so much sorrow.

The writer Anne Morrow Lindbergh, one of my favorites, was no stranger to death. Her firstborn child was murdered; her older sister Elisabeth died in her thirties of heart disease. In her journals, Anne wrote movingly of her losses. Trying to make sense of her son's killing, she saw death as "a little door" for such a little child. When Elisabeth died, Anne wrote that it was

a week of false hopes, and false dreams; all kinds of plans and schemes that now seems irrelevant - because Elisabeth died. Roads that set out and never got anywhere, half-finished sentences, half-drawn sketches of the future - and the whole thing insubstantial pasteboard to be knocked down in one breath.

Death is always just that close, just that little door away, just an angel's wing beat away.

While traveling last weekend, we received word that the adult daughter of very dear friends of ours had died suddenly. We got back in time to attend the memorial service.

Gail had struggled with alcoholism and mental health problems for many years. Someone found her body at home last week, just days short of her 57th birthday. It was a sudden, blunt end to a life that had come unraveled piece by piece over the years, despite the love and intervention and help of her family and friends.

The memorial service was spare and simple. The minister made us all laugh, recalling the brighter times and moods that were Gail. She then spoke quietly and plainly about the horrific illnesses that, ultimately, Gail could not conquer.

The homily was based on the first two Beatitudes

                    Blessed are the poor in spirit,
                    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
                    Blessed are those who mourn,
                    for they will be comforted.

The minister spoke of Gail as being poor in spirit, not as a chastisement, but as a reflection of the painful emptiness that alcoholism had carved out in her life. She spoke of Gail being now in the kingdom of heaven, her spirit renewed and whole. 

Surely any angel alighting on Gail's grave would resemble one of the Woodlawn angels, with a fierce, troubled gaze.

Our town was emerging from an ice storm that had paralyzed the area, but the church was full. The mourners had braved the ice and the cold to attend; the mourners had braved the hurt and the pain to assemble. Afterwards, we all gathered with the family to exchange memories and tears and laughter and hugs. There was an outpouring of love and support, from the teammates of the teenage son Gail left behind to her friends and the friends of her parents.

There was comfort for those that mourned.