Word of the Week - 19

Art by Joseph Mugnaini, illustrator of many Ray Bradbury stories.

Word of the Week: SUMMER

The wide, free days of childhood summers glow with their own light.  The sun rides higher in the sky, convincing us that sleeping in is a wasteful act, for who would choose to miss the hours of deep morning shadows, the long-absent joy of shorts?

Reading and summer remain forever paired, beginning with a weekly stack of picture books from the library, evolving to whatever we wished to sample from the family bookshelves.  It was the season in which I discovered Carson McCullers and for years re-read southern writers then, aligning myself with the heat from their fiction.  The temperature also matched tales from Ray Bradbury's "The Illustrated Man."

"Prologue

It was a warm afternoon in early September when I first met the Illustrated Man. Walking along an asphalt road, I was on the final leg of a two weeks' walking tour of Wisconsin. Late in the afternoon I stopped, ate some pork, beans, and a doughnut, and was preparing to stretch out and read when the Illustrated Man walked over the hill and stood for a moment against the sky."

"...Though it was a hot late afternoon, he wore his wool shirt buttoned tight about his neck. His sleeves were rolled and buttoned down over his thick wrists. Perspiration was streaming from his face, yet he made no move to open his shirt."

"...The pictures were moving, each in its turn, each for a brief minute or two. There in the moonlight, with the tiny tinkling thoughts and the distant sea voices, it seemed, each little drama was enacted. Whether it took an hour or three hours for the dramas to finish, it would be hard to say. I only know that I lay fascinated and did not move while the stars wheeled in the sky."

I doubt if statistics support my belief that there exists a time of year in which imagination grows richer, sprouts, then broadcasts its seeds which take root and repeat the process.  Space and time, two Bradbury themes, describe summer as I knew it in childhood, as I know it now in retirement.  I give thanks for the luxury of a wandering mind, never lost but now able to poke along unexplored paths I had to pass up when real life held me more rigidly in its grip. 

 

 

Edward Gorey and others make their way through the Panama Canal

Happy 88th Birthday, Edward Gorey.  Issuer of licenses to be odd to children who may think they are doing it wrong.

One form my oddness takes is forgetting to do things that make me happy.  I forget, sometimes for what seems months but may only be weeks, that I love to read.  Then, with shrinking thoughts of having ever been away, I find myself shoehorned back into gobbling books, not wanting to do anything but read, planning - or wondering - what will be next.

And if my thoughts are filled with other matters, I can forget the necessity of music.  I do not have much knowledge of classical or opera, so I return over and over to folk and some of what was popular from the 50s until the 80s, after which I lost my way, somewhat.  Broadway shows, Cole Porter, New Orleans jazz, other styles are shuffled in.  Most times when I am awake in the middle of the night, there is someone singing in my head.  Since Sherry O'Keefe mentioned it several days ago, it has been Bob Dylan's "Girl from the North Country."  My version includes Johnny Cash.

I have no wish to put my forgetfulness or neglect under the microscope, peering at cells that may indicate a disregard for self, or not.  Having given it as generous a ponder as it's going to get, I've decided that I, and likely most of us, have been nearly eclipsed by overwhelm, the world is too much with us no matter how we wish or labor to have it not be so.  If I keep track of somewhere between four and a dozen things that matter to me in any given day and spend some time with each of them, I feel I'm doing well.  Sleeping, breathing, writing and seeing that the household is fed and watered. That would be a minimum day.  Each added favored activity is another step up my personal evolutionary ladder, if only for that day.  I survive through a combination of compartments and the water that lifts and lowers essentials; my life is the Panama Canal.

Making good use of Feb. 29

Just as I treasure the additional hour when we fall back into Standard Time, no matter how seriously it disorients me, I find the gift of an entire day something rare, to which I have never given any thought.  It is on a par with the skill of a superhero, conquests of space or time or gravity.    Here is the calendar saying, Oh, look what we've found for you.  Silly us, we'd put it aside for just such an occasion.   Go ahead, we want you to have it.

By now, this bonanza is nearly 9 1/2 hours gone and I'm only beginning to imagine how best to use it.  Like discovering the bank balance is higher than remembered, it is found time,  birthday money, a MacArthur genius grant.  I would describe my relationship with time as conflicted, had I not realized that accepting its liquid properties, and my weightless drifting thereupon,  almost allows us to be friends.  I am not as troubled by its unreliable ways as I once was, having first supposed that when I had less to do, there would be more of it.

During years of job, family, freelancing and life, I felt like a losing contestant on Beat the Clock.  The seconds ran out long before I chased the ping pong ball across the finish line, armed with cans of Redi-Whip as propellant.  Or something like that.  A day was too impossibly small to contain all that it was expected to hold.  Each morning I looked at the bed before sprinting out the door, wondering just how long it would be until I could sleep again.   I had no experience of time as mutable; I had no awareness of choices.

Leap Day feels like Ferris Bueller territory.  I wish I'd planned for it, paid better attention.  I'd have a list of frivolous must-dos to check off, squeezing the bonus good out of each second.  Now it is too late for anything other than improvisation, which may be the best response after all.  Divided into scheduled activities, it would have been just another day.  I think I'll start with reading and see where that takes me, the perfect seque to a guilt-free nap.  If only Starbucks delivered.

Reading...reprinted from Jan. 27, 2010

Because I am, at this moment, under the spell of Dickens' David Copperfield and am still digesting Great Expectations, unready yet to write about such total captivation, I resort to the expedient trick of the re-post. Apropos of nothing, my favorite quote of the weekend came during the Miami-Dallas NBC Finals game when one of the broadcasters referred to Jason Terry, he of many 3-point miracles, as a "crafty veteran." I would be happy to be called the same.
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Good fortune is what I would call the diverse, textured, possibly unmatched segments of my life. While in the living of them they more or less flowed into one another, there is also an element of separate chapters, compartments, with few threads connecting them. Still those sturdy fibers endure.

It was not my intention, this sampler of costume changes, mobile scenery. And by many standards with which I am familiar, my story likely seems rooted and static. I have never lived in another country, have only flown across one ocean, have seen my name in print but never in lights, have yet to visit anything but a few of the edges of America and have mostly lived within a two-hour drive of where I was born. Yet even those limitations provided opportunity for what feels like an existence in which boredom was never an option.

My belief is that if we love to read, we will never be bored; we will never feel time weighing upon us as something to be gotten through but rather something of which there is too little. As they used to tell it, my parents - mad readers - had begun to doubt that I would ever be their TRUE child and take up the book as best friend. Their deliverance was Miss MacPherson, third grade teacher and tide-turner who, though she wouldn't permit Nancy Drew stories for book reports - and our library didn't stock them (think pulp fiction) - she didn't discourage her students from reading anything that called to them and it was the same in my home.

So we have reading as one of the threads, mysteries as genre of choice though nothing was ever rejected without inspection. I still haven't found my way into, let alone through, Proust and the list of haven't-gotten-to-yet...well, back to that notion of too little time. In my most hopeless moments - and years - it wasn't difficult to read a book a day. Not much else was achieved but the list of titles consumed grew longer. In a period of compulsive spending, bookstores were always my destination. At that time I worked in Burbank and had the luxury of two of the now-vanished Dutton's stores within lunch-hour distance. Then it was poetry and contemporary fiction. I still can think of no greater indulgence than a bag of new books.

Once I fell under the influence of Miss MacPherson, and Carolyn Keene's spunky characters, a stack of Nancy Drews, individually wrapped, was the hoped-for sight on birthdays. It is easy to picture my Aunt Dot walking up our long driveway with such a gift in her arms. My mother had been a follower of the girl detective and in second-hand shops we'd find editions from the twenties and thirties, more exotic and enigmatic than the fifties versions with their "modern" dust jackets. Not so long ago I read some of the newest incarnations and was shocked, not like Claude Raines in CASABLANCA, but truly stunned, to find murder in a Nancy Drew plot. Some things are just not done.

As I write this and realize it is determined to be what it wants to be, not anything close to what I'd had in mind, I feel the stability of what remains consistent. I thought I would be writing about a range of disparate experiences over the past six decades and end up, instead, celebrating word on printed page, a phrase for which I feel much affection, recalled from Van Morrison's song, "Rave On John Donne." It would not be a hardship to have every entry here, at the very least, reference reading, authors and titles and, at most, having that be the main theme. When I read reviewers whom I think find their way to the heart of things and use language that lets us know what is true, I acknowledge that I am not destined to write reviews for all the things I love, for I would be dragging in vague references (oh, she asks, are you not doing that already?) and being entirely consumed by what I like and unable to speak with any intelligence or impartiality about something I don't.

Maybe it would be wise to permit myself to praise books that stay in my mind and simply say why. But that would mean having to go back and read them again, fresh information and not slightly foggy memories. Darn. In my experience, we are nudged or frequently shoved into a direction other than the one we intended. What a gift, what an adventure. No, you didn't take the wrong bus, you just didn't know it was the right one until now.

1 comments:

Erin in Morro Bay said...

A woman after my own heart! Voracious reading has been the constant in my life throughout almost 60 years of changes, permutations, and re-births. One of the most exciting days of my life was when I began working for the library system here in San Luis County 20 years ago. First crack at all the books!!
Erin
January 27, 2010 11:00 AM