JUST COULDN'T READ THEM

This list is mostly a matter of taste,  but the books all either met with much acclaim and/or were from authors I've enjoyed and admired, and were certainly a let-down.   I think disappointed would mostly be more apt than dissatisfied.

Koontz, always a favorite, must oddly enough claim one of the threeWORST of all time ---Winter Moon.   Dull and contrived, Gross and YUKKY.   Tossed it and pushed the coffee grounds right down on top. 

Joseph Heller’s Something Happened---nothing did.   Blah-Blah-Blah, in every sense.   Tossed

The Lovely Bones   Alice Sebold       After months of hoopla and hurrah, I gave in and tried this one.    I simply could not get more than thirty pages into it, not all of which had to do with subject matter.   I skipped along a bit, encountered one of those “I know he killed someone; he might hear me, he might GET me, but I’m sneaking into his house alone, anyway,with nobody knowing where I AM” mentalities which have been done to down-the-dark-stairs-with-a-candle death.    I gave up and returned it to the libary as soon as possible.     Just couldn’t do it.   (Nor the movie).   

Mailer’s Ancient Evenings        Yawn, and EEEEW.   Almost tossed, but it was a huge hardback, so I gave it to the library.  Just not my taste. 

Any book by Ayn Rand---I can forgive and stick with Ponderous, but Pompous makes even ME throw books.   

Gone with the Wind falls on neither list.   It has scope and breadth, but surely Mrs. Mitchell didn’t mean to write such a sweeping, touching, grand novel about so many ninnies.   I cannot think why she’d portray chivalrous, valiant men and brave women as such simpering fools.    How did she expect them to find their shoes, let alone fight a WAR, with such expectations and mannerisms?   And on the MEN---those silly simperings and  rich folks' awww shucks, ma'am groveling-for-attention-from-Scarlett should have sent her scurrying her hoopskirts up the nearest tree.

Rhett, Melanie, Mammy, Belle Watling and Ellen O'Hara seemed to be the only sensible ones in the lot, most of the time, and the latter two rated so little page-time as to be mere glimpses.

If she patterned any of the characters on real people, I can only hope that it was but the upper-class, plantation-owning social set which could succumb to such affectations---No WAY did any of my Southern-for-two-and-a-half-centuries, callus-handed, hard-working, humble forebears ever simper, lady OR gentleman.    I promise.

FAVORITE BOOKS

East  of Eden---the Old Testament according to Steinbeck---I think of this as The Great American Novel, for sheer scope.

Tied for

First Place

with  To Kill A Mockingbird, whose untouchable perfection, unforgettable story, and a Hero for all time, put it in a class by itself.    Kind of like East of Eden gets the biggest Blue Ribbon, and To Kill A Mockingbird, the Purple Rosette.

Fried Green Tomatoes---and not just because of the two perfectly-rounded, interlocking stories portrayed in the movie.   Between each chapter of the book is a little “newspaper column” for the local weekly, and the reporter, Dot Weems, is a perfect smalltown newshound, of the social/sensational/nondescript kind, with tiny snippets of news ranging from weddings and funerals, to “Idgie's getting up a carful to go to the picture show on Friday night, so call her if you want to go.”   I’ve known Dot  all my life, and she’s one of the most true-to-life characters ever written.    

A Woman of Substance    It was the first time I ever heard of Barbara Taylor Bradford, and the fat brown paperback was on the shelf at my library.   I wonder if I’d feel the same about it now, all these years later, for it was a rags-to-riches piece spanning a few decades (then continued in succeeding books, with the heroine as the Grandmother, but those just didn’t interest me, somehow---the rich young folks in impeccable clothes, designers mentioned prominently and often---smacked too much of the over-wardrobed folks on Soap operas, who lunch in Chanel and wake up in lip gloss).    

The Rolling Years     From my high-school library---I re-read it every other year for decades.  It was also a follow-a-family of women down the years, and the people were sympathetic and of good character, with what I realize now were neatly-tied-up endings,  some bittersweet.

Winter’s Bone---Though a grim, desperate story, this is quite possibly the best putting-together-of-words in all my reading life. The craft and flow of the words is absolute genius, with gems of phrase on every page.    You can feel the cold and the pain and desperation of the questing; you walk the snow-path with bleeding feet, hear the begat line as if it were your own list of blood-kin.  You stand up to the fierce, pragmatic women doing the bidding of their implacable patriarch, smell the burnt gunpowder and the bitter-scent of squirrel guts as you hunt and clean your meager dinner, and come away with a smoky-shack, hard-life mountain twang to your inner voice.   

I have not the words for Woodrell’s words, and cannot tell you enough how impressed I am.   Who could ever forget Ree Dolly?

Watchers---Dean Koontz     THE shining star out of anything from the Koontz/King genres of the past decades.   Also the most appealing, absolutely BEST animal character EVER.   "Home is where the weenies are."

The Stand---we waited long and edgy for this one, and it delivered.   ( Though ONE character was taken---speech, life, and activities, straight out of Eudora Welty---I could just SEE Phoenix Jackson gathering that corn and baking those pies).

Understood Betsy and all the Maida Books.   Lovely little-girl books, with interesting adventures, kind friends, and loving families acquired along the way.  

The UN-favorites---perhaps another day.

BORROWED WORDS

A few little jottings from my Journal of Kept Words:

Kelle Hampton, on a visit to relatives:

 . . . and slept five to a bed last night, with bodies of cousins overlapped like a nice lattice crust.

_________________________________________________

Chris, on a Senior Moment:

That’s what happens when your mind gets scattered.   (small
pause)   Scattered’s not so bad---it’s the covered and
smothered that gets you.     

______________________________________________

I’d tell you to go to Hell, but I work there, and I don’t
want to see you every day.   

A character in CROSS, by  James Patterson

__________________________________________________ 

The sweetest joy, the wildest woe is love. What the
world really needs is more love and less paperwork.  
Pearl Bailey    

_____________________________________

The Meaning of Life is to find your gift; the purpose of
Life is to give it away. 

Joy J. Golliver

____________________________________________

Me---I spend a lot of time pickin’ flowers up on
Choctaw Ridge

Ode to Billy Joe---Bobbie Gentry   

__________________________________________ 

Cary Tennis, on Blogging:

We are all pen pals.

We are all prisoners. We are all doing time. We are
all tapping on the walls late at night waiting for
answers from distant cells.

__________________________________________

And to all my fellow inmates of this lovely, bright,
multi-windowed place:  

Happy Weekend!

SAMSONITE

I know I’ve mentioned before that my Shopping Gene got left out at birth.   If not for a sale now and then in the Lane Bryant catalog, I wouldn’t have a rag to my name.    And a MALL---I wince when I write that word, for it affects me like it sounds---like PALL and MAUL and FALL and GALL---any of the rhymes which connote unpleasant things.

But last week, we took Sweetpea to a lovely little playground inside a m***.    It was huge, with a thick, rubber carpet, nice comfy benches all around, and several smooth, safe things to climb on and drive and slide down, with wonderful puzzles ranged all around the wall, just at child-height.

And sitting there in the cheerful small chaos of two dozen little ones, I caught a fleeting whiff of yesterday, something so unmistakably linked with other days, other travels, that I sucked in great gulps of the familiar scent, like I’d just emerged from an underwater swim.

That leather/plastic/powder/Woodhue/Coppertone scent was right THERE as I tried to soak it up, thinking I must be dozing off in the sunny comfort, the chatter of small voices, the after-lunch lethargy of a busy morning.    And in a few moments it was gone---perhaps wafted away down the hall in a mingling of perfumes, of the breaths of expensive stores, of ladies fresh from the Club and the Pool and the Spa.    It was all those things, and none, for it was a scent of ITSELF, from fifty years past.

It was the indescribable scent of the little square chunky SAMSONITE train case of my teens, with all the fresh shiny nylony lining in that perfect golden beige, and the pale buff mother-of-pearl outsides.    And, though my own train travels had been limited to riding from home to Memphis and back, just to shop for the day, “train case” it was---exotic and elegant and the Audrey Hepburn in my Jane Withers world. 

We had the whole set, and they were perfect for our family:   Mother and Daddy shared the BIG suitcase, I had the second size, Baby Sis’ little shorts and shirts and playsuits just fit in the smallest one.   

 Mother and I put all our toiletries, rollers, hairbrushes, suntan lotion, and any other small needs in the nice almost-cubical sturdy kit with the neat flip-up-lid-with-mirror.   

The arranging of the unyielding SQUARE rigidity of the luggage and the cases of canned goods always caused Daddy about a three-cuss packing of the trunk, along with the bags of groceries and toys and beach necessaries.   We always got a motel with a “kitchenette” in anticipation of getting enough crabs for a “boil,” for aside from the one big night that we went out for a seafood dinner, we ate almost all our meals in the motel.  

Then  the little train case and the games-and-colors-case for Sis in the backseat with us girls, most times with a case of Pride of Illinois corn beneath our feet, and off we went.

And I LOVED that little train case---I’d gently click the latches over and over, just to look in when it was filled, and sometimes I’d raise the lid just a fraction, just to lean down and smell that overwhelming scent of the extraordinary, the not everyday, the going-places.   There was a sweet aura of mystery to that clean, fresh, one-of-a-kind mingled scent which accumulated beneath that magical lid.  

 

Everything in its place, captured in the most cunning little shirred-garter things all around the sides, with the shining fabric clutching the long-ago fragrance of every item.

We pack now, in soft zippery bags which sling over a shoulder, contour to fit a trunk or beneath a plane seat, roll along neatly behind our quick airport strides, and it’s JUST NOT THE SAME.   They smell of poly-something, and nothing-in-particular, unless the Listerine got loose, or maybe the little purple flask of CROWN, with the accumulated odors of airport gates and passing strangers and stale coffee, and will never have the fleeting, scrumptious, faraway-place allure of that clunky, elegant old Samsonite.

Et Encore----tres chic, non?

Any elusive, illusive, evocatively  memorable scents which conjure, conjure?

PAXTON PEOPLE---THE MILAM SISTERS

Miss Eve and Miss Edna  Milam---whose invitations and most mail, unless an individually-addressed note, were addressed to The Misses Eve and Edna Milam---were two getting-there maiden ladies who kept cats.    They were the only people in Paxton with THE in front of their names, and the only nearby one was The Right Rev. at the Presbyterian in Expedia, the next-town-over.

The ladies and the myriad cats and one old lump of a dog lived over by the Methodist, in a small gray house with a little porch.   There were quite a few bird-feeders around their house for the amusement of the cats, and the ladies had had Havlon Bright in to bump all the windowsills a foot out into the room and stretch indoor/outdoor carpet on the boards, so that all their kitties would have ringside seats to all the activity out in the yard.   On any day of the year, a group of little faces were aimed at the bird-centers, and at twilight, the still silhouettes outlined against the lamplight of that tall thin house with the two little chimneys caused many of the town’s young folk to call it The Halloween House.

Miss Eve was tallish, a spare, lank woman in print  shirtwaist dresses cinched with a matching belt and nearly-always-matching shoes.   She’d always leant toward pretty wedge-heels, and had a pair of canvas ones in almost every color she could find.   She knew her looks were nothing to boast, but she was proud of her beautiful shoes.  On most other women, the bright canvas shoes would have connoted a snap of gum and big chunky plastic earrings, but shoes were her only vanity.

Though she had not a flirtatious bone in her body, she had a way of sliding her feet way forward under her big metal desk at the Mayor’s office, so that her peep-toes would, indeed, peep out just a little bit in their neat charm.  But lately, the sevens she’d always bought seemed a bit snug and tottery, and she was veering into unknown, frightening territory---squarish lower heels, size 8½. 

    Her iron-gray perm waved to the left, for she was left-handed, just as her sister’s stiff, lighter-gray shingle-bob waved off her face to the right, and both ladies’ oyster-blue eyes gazed gently out at the world through thick glasses framed in clear pink plastic.

 

School Secretary through four principals and more than three decades of pupils, Miss Edna was a shorter, stockier woman, with no apparent vanities at all---given to solid colors in dark jumpers and pinaforish garb, for her own job entailed dealing with countless small hands and notes-from-home and excuse-pads and mimeograph drums and handfuls of go-show-the-principal-what-you-brought-to-school-THIS-MINUTE, Young-Man!.   And her own shoes---she seemed to have gone straight from little hard-soled Buster Browns to the big-heeled lace-ups favored by nuns and nurses. 

 Miss Edna could be glimpsed out in the yard every day at 5:40 a.m. and almost the same time of the evening, standing patiently looking cloud-ward with her back discreetly to the street, her glasses smeared and her dress creased into a gentle wedgie, as  she waited for the chunky old dog to do her business.

The two ladies were ladies in the sense of decorum and modesty---they referred to “limbs” and “powder rooms” and “expecting,” even in their own conversations at home, and were equally modest in even their bedtime baths and robings.   They never sat in the living room in their night-attire, but changed into loose, comfortable smocks as soon as they got home from work, and wore them through Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy and on into the evening til the clock chimed nine.   

After nine, there were only the hour-long dramas, mostly unfit for good folks to watch, so that was it for the day.   (There WAS that year that the premiere of Rich Man, Poor Man came on for the first chapter at eight o’clock, and they were hooked.   The mere TIME of it made it watchable, and even with the shocking moments, they enjoyed it immensely.   They followed it to the end, and when the teenage Nick Nolte held his dying mother and murmured "I've got cha," they both fished in their pockets for their hankies and sobbed quietly.

 Miss Eve was the Town Clerk, sending out the Water Bills, balancing the books, and collecting the wadded dollars from the procession of folk filing through on the First and the Third, when their checks arrived.    Her modest salary and their modest needs coincided nicely, and Miss Edna’s School Check was equally sparing. Their small existence, with that houseful of cats and their little church activities their only outlets, was pitied by all but the Banker.

Only he knew of the bonds and the Savings and most of all, the Serena Chase Scholarships, named for their late Mother, and benefiting students anonymously for thirty-some years, and then the good-sized Trust left to continue when they’d both passed on.   Miss Edna's daily proximity to all the students gave her a deep knowledge of which were the most deserving candidates for their help.   Not the best grades, nor the most activities, which seemed to be the criteria for all other awards, but which of the young people, by character and behavior and promise, deserved the impetus and the boost offered by the assistance.

 The house, reeking of CAT, was eventually sanitized and sold, and the money put into the Trust, with the cats parceled out to anybody that would take them.

There are almost two generations of young folks whose educations were mightily encouraged and enabled by those two quiet, unobtrusive ladies, and not until that new young woman at the bank meddled where she shouldn’t be and let it slip at the beauty shop, did anyone learn of it.

I’ve read that it’s one of life’s niceties to do something good in secret, and be found out by accident.