Interim Thoughts: The Eyes and Hearts of Women

With women writer friends at our annual luncheon
 

[I’m calling today’s post “Interim Thoughts” because it’s only been four days, not a full week or more, since I last posted, this summer having settled down into a once-a-week blogging routine.]

 

Only on the morning of August 27, very early, with the sky still dark outside my window, did I learn that August 23 had been the official Mari Sandoz Day and that, in my ignorance, I had completely missed it. Four days late already, and 67 years after Nebraska’s governor first proclaimed the day, I read about the date in a chronology of the author’s life at the end of a University of Nebraska edition of Sandhill Sundays and Other Recollections, by Mari Sandoz, memoir essays reaching back to her childhood days in the sandhills before she learned English (although born in Nebraska, her immigrant parents still spoke the French and English of their native Switzerland) and extending to the apartment she rented in Greenwich Village and occupied periodically for a number of years, beginning at a time when the Village was still occupied primarily by Italian immigrants.

 

Of the many volumes of fiction and history written over her lifetime, the two books for which Mari Sandoz is best known today are biographies, Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas and Old Jules, the story of her father’s life. Of the latter biography, she later wrote that

 

…it gradually dawned on me that here was a character who embodied not only his own strengths and weaknesses but those of all humanity – that his struggles were universal struggles and his defeats at the hands of his environment and his own insufficiencies were those of mankind; his tenacious clinging to his dream the symbol of man’s undying hope that over the next hill he will find the green pastures of his desire.

        - Mari Sandoz 

 

I read her Crazy Horse biography only last year but need to read it again now to answer my new question, which is if Sandoz also saw the struggles and defeats, hopes and insufficiencies of Crazy Horse as “universal.” How could he have pursued his desire – which would not have been his alone but that of his people – “over the next hill”? And after all, Old Jules was not one of those restless Westerners continually on the move, leaving one region for the next until stopped by the Pacific Ocean. He put down roots. I probably need to read Old Jules again, too.

 

Another, more general but personal realization came to me on Friday morning: without intentionally seeking out books by women for my reading pleasure this year, I have been discovering books by women, a dizzying variety of fiction and nonfiction, that seem to have sought me out: novels and a memoir by Penelope Lively; Barbara Olenyk Morrow’s book about the life and work of Gene Stratton-Porter; murder mysteries set in Cochise County, Arizona, by J. A. Jance; a re-reading of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God; Soon-Young Yoon’s experiences working with poor and indigenous women around the world; and numerous other books of both fiction and nonfiction.

 

So now I have another question, more general than Mari Sandoz and Crazy Horse, and it harks back to Mary Helen Washington’s study, The Other Blacklist, in which she notes that Black artists, writers, poets in the 1950s were encouraged to stop writing of their experience as Black men and women and write instead from a “universal” perspective, leaving race aside. My question is this: where is the “universal” to be found, other than in the particular? Each of us has only our own experience. Zora Neale Hurston could only write as a Black American woman, because that is what she was. Mari Sandoz could only tell her life stories from her own experience, that of a child of immigrants growing up during pioneer days on the Great Plains, and her interest in historical subjects was also shaped by her living in that place and at that time. So do these women’s writings fail somehow to be “universal”? Surely they are not writings only for women readers!

 

Shakespeare, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Marcel Proust – all of them, too, had the experiences they had because of where they were born, the era in which they lived, and how they were seen and treated by others. Their experiences were particular to them, and their writings were thus saturated by that particularity, whether or not it is obvious to all their readers. I am not saying these men failed to discover and write of universal truths – hardly! -- only that the universal is always and only to be found, as they found it themselves, in particulars, in the infinite variety of our endlessly repetitive human experiences. 

 

From the foregoing you may correctly conclude that I am not a Platonist. Peasy is not a Platonist, either. For him, life is all about discovering the ephemeral universe of smells, about making the most of each fleeting moment. 

Would you disagree? And if you say we need larger goals, that we should work to better our world, I ask you, what time do you have to work for those goals except right now? The present moment is the time we have, even as it continually slips away from us.

 

I Join Sherman Alexie in Recommending This Novel

In addition to being a brilliant writer, Leslie Marmon Silko is an unusually, almost miraculously patient writer. I finished my first reading (it will not be my last) of her novel Ceremony and have to say that Sherman Alexie did not exaggerate a bit when he called Ceremony “one of the greatest novels of any time and place.”

By calling her patient, I refer to the way she never rushes through a scene but takes time to note each shifting detail of the natural surroundings, along with details of the main character’s thoughts and memories and feelings and imaginings. She backtracks at least as often as she takes her story patiently forward -- backtracks and circles around and circles back again and again, in wider and wider narrative orbits. Thus the story expands and grows deeper it proceeds, and we acquire background as we gradually get to know the main character.

The main character is Tayo. That his mother “went with white men” and that his own unknown father was white is the earliest burden of his life, compounded when she leaves him with relatives and disappears from his life. Even before she dies, he knows he will never see her again.

Tayo’s Uncle Josiah and cousin Rocky accept him from the beginning, but his Auntie never lets him forget that he is not really Rocky’s brother, not her own child, and that his mother brought shame on the family, shame made visible to their village in his very existence.

Then – I am telling this chronologically, not in the order of the novel’s recounting of events – Tayo and Rocky enlist to fight in World War II. In the Pacific, they are captured by the Japanese, and the horrors of that time haunt Tayo on his return, disturbing not only his sleep but also his waking life. Nightmares, flashbacks, and disturbing visions cripple his spirit. Civil and military authorities, as well as his own people, doubt Tayo’s sanity, and he doubts it himself.

To return from the horrors of war to a previous life of normality – can it ever be easily accomplished? Tayo’s fellow veterans seek relief from their wartime memories in alcohol. Periodically Tayo does also, but he wants more of life than a haze of oblivion. He has inherited, in the time before the war, a dream from his Uncle Josiah. Materially, the dream consists of a herd of cattle -- not helpless Herefords, waiting to be brought food and water in time of scarcity and drought, but rangy Mexican cattle that can fend for themselves, like antelope, in an arid land. As Josiah explained the matter to Tayo:

“Cattle are like any living thing. If you separate them from the land for too long, keep them in barns and corrals, they lose something. Their stomachs get to where they can only eat rolled oats and dry alfalfa. When you turn them loose again, they go running all over. They are scared because the land is unfamiliar, and they are lost. They don’t stop being scared either, even when they look quiet and they quit running. Scared animals die off easily.”

Josiah reads books on the raising and breeding of cattle but is dubious about the practices recommended in  the books. He asks Tayo and Rocky to read them and see what they think.

The problem was the books were written by white people who did not think about drought or winter blizzards or dry thistles, which the cattle had to live with.

The books treated cattle as an abstraction, something apart from the land on which they were to live.

To deal with the effects of postwar trauma, Tayo’s family and Tayo himself turn to traditional medicine men. These ceremonies, both specific and metaphorical, form much of the book’s bedrock. I have emphasized the role of the cattle because that dream and that reality dovetail with the ceremonies. It is the land itself – and the cattle, that belong to the land – grounding those who would not fall victim to the destroyers’ sickness.

Spiritual connections, history, and ideas all have their place in the story, and while many of the themes are universal (“one of the greatest novels of any time and place,” to quote Sherman Alexie once again), the physical features of place are present in loving detail, so clear that someone who has never been to the Southwest might almost see and feel and smell it when reading certain passages. I open the book at random and easily fall on a paragraph of place:

He tied the mare in a clearing surrounded by a thicket of scrub oak. He sat under a scrub oak and picked up acorns from the ground around him. The oak leaves were already fading from dark green to light yellow, and within the week they would turn gold and bright red. The acorns were losing their green color too, and the hulls were beginning to dry out. By the time the leaves fell and the acorns dropped, he would be home with the cattle.

And there is so much more. For instance, almost offhandedly, in a single sentence, Silko gives one of the most original and beautiful analogies of lovemaking I have ever encountered in literature.

He eased himself deeper within her and felt the warmth close around him like river sand, softly giving way under foot, then closing firmly around the ankle in cloudy warm water.

I finished my first reading of Ceremony on Saturday morning, and later that day in my bookstore a customer saw it on the counter and said that he was reading it but was afraid of how it might end. I felt the same way as I saw the remaining pages grow fewer in my hand. And as Sherman Alexie said later in his words of praise for the novel, violence is part of the story, from beginning to end. But “You will be surprised” was all I told the apprehensive reader, and it’s all I’m going to tell you.

Neither, here, am I going to get into the issues of race and racism and brown vs. white and how blame is allocated (if you think it is) by the author. I’ll only tell all readers not to be afraid but to keep reading to the end.

Book clubs and discussion groups interested in exploring American history and issues of race in our country’s literature should not neglect this beautiful novel. Lovers of fiction, give yourself a gift. Read this book.

Retracing One Path in Children’s Literature

What books were being given to boys and girls as Christmas presents in the year 1928? Many probably received a set of Book Trails. The first volume, Book Trails for Baby Feet, begins with “Little Black Sambo,” a story told in many different editions over the years and revived in three new versions not long ago. It’s a story that’s been loved and hated and that has given rise to legends in which some vague, powerful, conspiratorial “They” pull out all the stops to censor children’s literature by making the story unavailable.

Here are a few facts from the book world as I have come to know it.

·     Children’s books, read over and over and not always treated gently, tend to survive in smaller numbers than adult books, and a family of several children probably had no more than one copy of a beloved book when the children were small. The likelihood of that copy having survived is small.

·     Popular and well-loved children’s books, like other published titles, usually go out of print over time.

·     Why isn’t a popular book reprinted? Most publishers of children’s books are conservative business people. They do not want copyright problems, and they don’t want storms of social protest -- unless the storms are going to sell books.

But also –

·     Every year publishers are bringing out new titles for children.

·     Illustration styles change over the years, as do parenting methods.

·     Social awareness grows.

Does anyone think the Dick and Jane readers fell victim to censorship? Well, actually, a few people probably do think that, but evolving (or at least changing) theories of education are a more likely explanation. As for why Dick and Jane books and Little Black Sambo have commanded such high prices on the secondary (i.e., not new) book market for as long as I’ve been selling used books, the answer is simple: supply and demand. When people remember books from their own childhood, want to get their hands on the books again, and the desired titles are out of print and surviving copies in short supply, prices go up.

It is not a conspiracy. If booksellers were that canny, we would all be rich.

But those who object to the character of Little Black Sambo as depicted in the story have a serious point to make. The little black boy in the pictures presents a stereotype, as does his name and the names of his mother and father, and so the story fosters continued stereotypical thinking about darker races among young white readers, while showing young readers of color nothing they can recognize that relates to their own lives.

Growing social awareness is obvious in another book that came to my hand recently, Bright April, by Marguerite di Angeli.

As soon as the book is opened, the illustrated endpapers invite the reader into April’s world, Philadelphia’s Germantown following the close of World War II. We learn that she has a sister and two brothers, that her father is a postman, and that she belongs to a Brownie troop.

In this mid-century African-American family, April helps her father clear the sidewalk of ice and snow and helps her mother set the dinner table, always trying to live up to the secret Brownie motto, “D.Y.B.!” There are hints of difficulties to come when other little girls say unkind things or when April’s serviceman brother (the year is 1946) writes home that he has been assigned to laundry duty rather than given an architectural assignment for which he was educationally trained and eager to execute. Today, perhaps, April’s parents would give their children more emphatic, less gentle lessons, but de Angeli certainly left “Little Black Sambo” behind.

And yet, simply comparing these two fictional characters misses something else. “Little Black Sambo” and April Bright are completely different kinds of stories, just as “The Milkmaid and Her Pail,” by Aesop, another story in Baby Feet, is entirely different from an almost infinite number of realistic fiction for young people written in the 20^th century. Fairy tales such as “Cinderella” and “Snow White,” feminists point out, gave starring roles to female stereotypes, not fully realized fictional girls and women. And what about all the charming princes? Ever meet one in real life who looked and talked and acted like the ones in fairy tales. And how about all the wicked stepmothers?

In fairy tales and fables the emphasis is on a simple plot, large actions, and lesson to be learned, while realistic fiction, for readers of all ages, present an ambiguous world peopled by distinct individuals trying to find their way in it.

Is there a place in our world today for fables and fairy tales? That’s a serious question. I wonder what others think. And where does contemporary YA dystopian literature fall with relation to fairy tales and realism?

Book Review: WHITE DOG FELL FROM THE SKY

White Dog Fell From the Sky, by Eleanor Morse (NY: Penguin, 2013) 

$16 paper

David and I don’t travel far from home for Thanksgiving or Christmas, going only as far as my bookstore in Northport on the days before and following the holidays. In imagination, however, and especially in the books we read, we are unconstrained by time and space. One gift that fell into in my bookseller life during the last, very wintry month of 2013 was a review copy of Eleanor Morse’s novel, White Dog Fell From the Sky.

Set in Botswana and South Africa during the period of apartheid (there is mention of Nelson Mandela still in prison), the novel weaves together the lives of a young black South African medical student and an older white American married woman. Alice came to Botswana with her economist husband to do government work, she in the Ministry of Local Government and Lands. She meets Isaac, an illegal refugee from the South African apartheid regime, when he comes to her house seeking work as a gardener, a task for which he is both unprepared and vastly overqualified.

We meet Isaac first. Upon his clandestine arrival in Botswana -- the border crossing a story in itself but quickly told, with quick flashbacks explaining its necessity -- Isaac meets by chance an acquaintance from South Africa, Amen, and, with little in the way of options, accepts Amen’s temporary hospitality, sharing the family’s single-room house and meals but declining to become involved with Amen’s mission, the then-violent ANC.

Isaac’s search for employment eventually leads him into Gabarone’s Old Village neighborhood and to the American couple’s house. If Alice had ever been in love with her husband, there is no longer much between them. When she learns he has been having an affair, he swears that it is “over,” but catching him in repeated lies convinces her otherwise. They have no children.

Alice does not want to be called “Madam,” she tells Isaac, and does not want a square or rectangular garden of marigolds. He should please himself with the garden design. Alice and Isaac recognize something in each other that commands respect, but their worlds touch only at the edges.

Isaac walks the long distance between Amen’s home and hers, adding hours to his workday, until Alice provides him with a bicycle. Now Alice has a job and a house, Isaac a job and a bicycle, but life for both is without any clear direction. Isaac has been cut off from his goal to become a doctor and see his siblings educated, and when Alice and her husband separate, their separation is uncertain and informal. Then on government expedition to gather information for the formulation of a land policy that will protect natives, their livestock, and wildlife, Alice meets Ian, an “uncivilized” Englishman whose passion is the !Kung San paintings in the Tsodilo Hills. And while she is away from home and falling in love with Ian, through a series of unfortunate blunders and outright indifference Isaac is arrested, deported, and imprisoned in South Africa.

What will become of Isaac? Is a future with Ian possible for Alice? At this point in the story, the worst is still ahead for all of them. But what of hope? If hope is reasonable at all, where does its reason lie?

Beginning with Isaac and Alice’s first meeting, I felt anxious in the back-and-forth movement between narrative lines. As fascinated as I was by the unfolding of whatever was happening with either Isaac or Alice, at the same time I couldn’t help worrying and wanting to get back to the other. The ignorance of both of what was happening with the other heightened that anxiety. Only when Alice and Isaac were in each other’s presence, speaking to each other, did I feel able to fill my lungs completely with breath, but even that was only momentary relief, as so many dangers and uncertainties and questions always persisted.

Of the characters we see at close range in this novel, most are good people. Not a single one is uniformly and always good and right, but they struggle, these people. In a beautiful land, they struggle in particular to see life as beautiful and meaningful. Whether or not – and how -- to try to “save the world” is a question that touches them all in one way or another.

Of other, more minor characters, such as prison guards, we see only a rough, inhumane surface. Even that made me think of the words of Nelson Mandela:

A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity. – Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Morse gives us only glimpses of these oppressors robbed of their humanity. They are not the focus of her story, but what we see gives the truth to Mandela’s words.

White Dog, who seems to have come from nowhere, is no haunt but a real if exceptional dog, her character marked by loyalty and integrity, and in very important ways she serves as a home anchor for both Isaac and Alice, and later for Moses and Lulu. Drought and dust are other characters in the book. Hunger is a character stalking many. Another is torture, its essence mindless, pointless, unreasoning cruelty.

The language and especially the figures of speech in this novel are lyrical and rooted in the landscape of southern Africa. “He braced his mind the way a wildebeest braces its body against a sandstorm.” “Yellow grasses blew in the west wind, rippling, as though a hand were being drawn across them.” Can't you just see it? The imagery of the white butterfly migration early in the book recurs in a later section, and the sunken garden Isaac begins, only to find it suddenly flooding when he hits a water main with his pickax, is eerily similar to the flooded mining pit of his nightmares, from which his father makes no attempt to escape. Only one passage went beyond a lyrical realism for me into something that stretched credulity, but because the author had so surely and skillfully carried me until then, I accepted the magic of that moment.

A writer can give his or her fiction any locale on earth or beyond, but only a writer like Eleanor Morse, who knows and loves a real place and has the ability to evoke it in her work, can take readers there and inspire them with love as well. The qualities of the landscape, its flora and fauna, and particularly its people – black, white, brown, and grey – did not seem “faraway” or “exotic” as I lived my way through this story. It was with the greatest reluctance that I left them on the last page of the book, all of them so real to me that I keep thinking, That was years ago. Where are they now?

---

As 2013 came to a close, I asked myself what I would rank as #1 of all the novels I had read during the year. My nonfiction choice had been made without difficulty: Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing, by Daphne Miller, M.D. (NY: William Morrow). Since closing the cover of the book reviewed here today and comparing it to other long fiction in my "Books Read 2013" list, at last I decided that this choice, too, was an easy one. My #1 fiction choice of 2013 is White Dog Fell From the Sky, by Eleanor Morse.

THE HELP Discussion (and Disagreement) Continues

I’ve decided to begin a new post to continue discussion on discussion (yes, that’s what I mean) of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett. I did go back and add into my last post a link (here it is again) to a review of the book, not only for the review itself but, much more, for the very lengthy train of comments that follows the review, comments left by American and British readers, native-born and immigrant Americans, black and white readers, women (mostly), men (a significant number), Northerners and Southerners both, and that’s where I want to begin today. Reading these comments held me enthralled for hours on Thursday morning, and I recommend the experience, especially if you are ever tempted to think that any one group of people, however that group is defined, will respond en bloc to any book written. If you visit the site and have the time and patience to read through all the comments (which I cannot recommend strongly enough), eventually you’ll come to a point where commentators are coming back to respond to comments made in response to their earlier comments, and that’s where the conversation becomes more difficult but, I believe, all the more worth pursuing for that reason. One of the black women who became a major voice in the conversation has her own website.

Whatever you thought of the book (if you read it), in my opinion the cross-racial, cross-gender, cross-generational, etc. conversation is much more riveting. We do need to talk to each other, to people who have had different experiences from ours, to people whose opinions do not agree with ours. Only if we can stay in the conversation, even when tempers flare, voices rise and tears start up--we can’t control others and can’t always control ourselves--is there hope for our country and for our world. I believe that.

So now, having opened up the can of worms with the question in my previous post (Can this white author portray the experience of black women?), I’ll stick my neck out and put my opinion of the book on the line, first making clear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying writers of fiction can only succeed in offering the experience of their own lives, i.e., that fiction should be given up and only autobiography written and published. Neither am I saying that a writer has no “right” to imagine a character of the opposite gender, of a different race or ethnicity or religion or sexual orientation or what-have-you. But just as freedom of expression exists for writers, it exists for readers, too. Not only reviewers and critics and academics but every ordinary reader, too, has a right to evaluate the success of a work of fiction according to her or his standards, however personal those standards may be.

Now, backtracking:

I approached the book with trepidation. I was wary. My defenses were up. I wondered (this is a point several people made in comments and reviews) why the black characters’ dialogue was spelled out in dialect but not that of the white characters, and all I could think was that maybe a white Southerner like the author doesn’t hear herself as speaking with an accent. A minor point, but it kept my defenses up, so that I questioned other authorial decisions all the way along, and by the time I reached the end of the book I still wasn’t sure what to think about it. I had entered into the story to a degree but not completely. The fate of the characters concerned me, but at the same time there were plot devices I could not fully buy. My resistance, not overcome by the novel itself, was not overcome by the library discussion group, either. Am I just stubborn, or what?

Then I found the California Literary Review site and realized I was not alone and that opinions about this book range all over the map! Reading those comments helped. They also took me into a much larger world of literary and social discussion, and I was moved and enlightened and encouraged by the willingness of readers to share their opinions and to disagree.

So here’s where my thoughts have taken me so far (for convenience and clarity I’ll number the few points I want to make):

1. In general, any writer attempting the point of view of a character with experience way outside the writer’s own has greatly multiplied the difficulties, already considerable, of producing believable fiction. No writer—in our country, at this time in history, at least—is barred from making the attempt. It does take chutzpah and invites more than the average amount of criticism. I have often heard it said of a male novelist, “His women characters aren’t real,” and certain novels by female writers are dismissed by men, either without comment or with a disparaging remark that “Men don’t talk like that.” It isn’t that men are not allowed to create female characters or that women aren’t permitted to create male characters, but that whenever we know the gender of the author we subject the characters of the opposite gender to closer scrutiny in the work. Hence the many female mystery writers who use initials rather than first names. (Fascinating studies have been done with subjects reading short pieces and not knowing the gender of the writers; when gender was revealed, most felt they should have been able to pick up clues to gender, even where they failed miserably. I don’t know if similar race-blind reading/writing studies have been done but would like to know of any out there.)

2. Anyone can say, or any work of fiction, “I don’t believe it.” Years ago I had an acting teacher who told our class that just as we didn’t have to be hens to recognize rotten eggs, anyone could criticize acting, simply by saying it didn’t ring true. The same holds for fiction. If you believe it, it succeeded for you; if not, it didn’t.

3. So what does it take for fiction to succeed, for characters to be believable to readers? As far as I’m concerned, the characters I’m reading about don’t have to be “like me” (how much would I learn if that were the case?), but I do need to feel that the writer has gotten inside the characters, so that I have at least the illusion that I am encountering a person rather than a type. Here the standard I keep coming back to over the years, because my first reading of this novel was such a watershed experience for me as a reader, is James Baldwin’s Another Country. I maintain that anyone coming to this book with no knowledge of the author’s identity would not be able to say with certainty that the writer was black or white, male or female, gay or straight, because Baldwin was able to inhabit all of his characters with sympathy. They were not simple characters, either. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, working with the material of her own life, had a similar ability. You don’t necessarily fall in love with all of Baldwin’s or Smith’s characters, but because of the depth given them by their authors (and here the word ‘author’ takes on its great creative power!), you realize at least part of why they are the way they are, and you grow in understanding.

4. So, finally, I’ll allow that I was disappointed in Stockett’s novel. Characters were recognizable, yes, but for me the third and fourth dimensions were lacking. Why did Minnie put up with physical abuse from her husband? James Baldwin would have given us some insight. Why was Miss Leefolt so cold to her own little daughter? Betty Smith would have let us see a little way into the mother’s hard heart and how it had gotten that way. I can imagine Minnie understanding how demoralizing life is for a black man and knowing that only at home can he have any power, and I can imagine that Mae Mobley’s mother might be unhappy in her marriage or doesn’t have pride in anything she herself has ever done, but I have to do all this imagining on my own, because the author hasn’t done it for me. These are limitations in characterization, and most of the characters are similarly limited. Besides this flaw, along with the very believable general circumstances (historical fact, many of them), there were other plot contrivances that I found unbelievable and/or forced.

So that’s what I think of the book. I’m not arguing with anyone who enjoyed reading it. I enjoyed parts of it myself. It isn’t a book I would recommend, however, given all the other, much better novels that deserve to be read.

What I think of the discussions it has sparked is something else again. The discussions I’ve found online I find very exciting! I left my own comment, saying that this, all these different people from different backgrounds with different opinions—this is the movie (probably documentary) that I want to see, not a film version of the book. “But if there is so much deep discussion because of it, doesn’t that mean the book had to be pretty good?” Someone posed this question to me, and it’s a good question, but my answer is no, I don’t think the quality of discussion depends on the quality of the catalyst.

I can, however, be grateful to the catalyst. Kathryn Stockett had a lot of chutzpah to write the book she did. She is a successful story-teller, with a best-seller under her belt, and now she will have a lifetime to grow as a writer. Meanwhile, for now, the controversy continues.

Disorientation Days

After our last night on the road in Monticello, Florida, just over the state line, we set out south again on Friday, stopping briefly for a visit with friends in Suwannee. It was a sunny day. Later, as we approached Weeki Wachee, a large fire was burning at the Chassahowitzka Wildlife Refuge. Intentionally set? Accidental? Other? I haven’t been able to find out yet. There was daylight left when we arrived in Aripeka. [Note added after the fact: the fire was intentional and controlled.]


More confusing sometimes than travel is having arrived, with the intention of staying for a long time. Being on the road has its own rhythm and is its own reason; settling into a place requires new rhythms and routines, as well as adjusting to staying still again after being on the move. Neither home nor traveling, one must make a temporary home, and so we spent the first evening unpacking the car, cleaning and organizing our things, and moving furniture to accommodate the way we will live here. The next day involved, of necessity, serious grocery shopping.


After all this we rewarded ourselves with coffee and treats at Paesano’s “to celebrate our arrival,” as David said, each of us reminding the other that such luxuries will not be a daily feature of the winter. Last year’s Florida winter frugality must be honed this year to a fine edge: such are the conditions of our getaway. A visit to Paesano’s for coffee alone is a treat, however: as I did on my first visit to Paris, here in Spring Hill too I can always take in the fare with eyes and nose and be well rewarded.




And yet the “Where am I?” sensation persists. Away from home, I buy more newspapers and feel more connected to the world beyond my skin and my door. Our frugal life is unthinkable luxury compared to life in Haiti, even before the recent tragedy! One of my 2010 financial goals is a secure enough income to let me subscribe again on a regular basis to Save the Children. Donating only at the end of the year does not feel like enough of a commitment, not integral enough to my life. Frugality will help. So will an increase of bookstore business, and I have plans for that, too.

By coincidence (I'm still thinking about Haiti), one of the books we’re reading takes place in the Caribbean. Writing 80 years ago, the young author’s language is unconsciously racist (so unconscious he would surely have denied it if charged) and the book difficult to stay with on that account, but the cover tells us he stays several years on the small island, and I am hoping his perspective will shift along the way.

The national holiday in memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., causes me to think back to last year, so close to the inauguration of President Obama, and all the celebratory and heart-lifting television programs we watched in motel rooms and at our friend’s house in Suwannee. World events in the memory of any individual are inevitably tied to personal life. Where were you, who were your companions of the moment, when you heard news of this or that unforgettable event? Whatever your answer, I’m sure the personal details are unforgettable, as well, linked forever in your memory to the event. I don’t know if this effect is stronger when one is away from home, but being away seems to add another dimension.

Earlier on Saturday morning as I drifted from sleep to wakefulness, the beginning of a short story was taking shape in my mind, so I got up right away to start the coffee and get the words down. “Mallory’s People” isn’t the kind of thing I usually write, and I may decide it isn’t even worth keeping, but it helped me ease into my Aripeka winter. Sunday morning began the same way, and by Monday morning I had 2300 words and called it done. It felt good to work, to fall into a productive morning routine.

David has arranged his studio space and cut panels on which to paint. We are getting into the rhythm. Sunday evening was our first walk to the bridge for sunset. I’ll close this post with a few separate moments of the view from South Fork of Hammock Creek at day’s end (Sunday).