Excerpt

Back when I wrote It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, I started out with a second paragraph that reflected one of my reactions to the first line of A Christmas Carol, but on editing the post I realized the second paragraph didn’t fit with what I had started to say. I kept it for a rainy day. It's raining, so here is how the post originally started:

“Marley was dead, to begin with.” I am rereading A Christmas Carol. The beloved tale that encourages generosity, celebration, family feeling and empathy at Christmas and all other times begins with the words “Marley is dead”.

As I read them, I am put in mind of the words of that other merry Victorian prankster, Robert Browning. Do you remember reading or hearing these lines as a child?

The year's at the spring,

And day's at the morn;

Morning's at seven;

The hill-side's dew-pearled;

The lark's on the wing;

The snail's on the thorn;

God's in his Heaven—

All's right with the world!

They are from a longer dramatic work called Pippa Passes. Pippa is a young girl who works at a silk mill in Asolo, Italy. She is spending her one day off a year out in the sunshine, walking the town and singing. As she sings the lines above, she passes a house where a young wife and her lover have just murdered the wife’s elderly husband. Hearing “God’s in his Heaven”, they are stricken with guilt and commit suicide. No, I did not make this up. I think the Victorians had more of a [morbid] sense of humor than we give them credit for.

In the course of her wandering and singing, Pippa also inspires an assassination. I hope none of her descendants turn up on American Idol.

Extremely Annoying and Incredibly Sad

Usually when I go to see a movie, it doesn’t occur to me that it may have been based on a book. I had heard of  The Help and Eat, Pray, Love before I saw the movies, The Help because it was recommended by a friend and Eat, Pray, Love because it was the basis for a sales campaign by World Market. I did not know that The American was based on A Very Private Gentleman by Martin Booth until after I had seen it.

I don’t like reading books after I have seen the resulting movie because then I can’t get the actors’ voices out of my head. If you’ve ever read The Julie/Julia Project, you know that Julie Powell is not Amy Adams. So when it did occur to me that Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close might be based on a book, I decided to search my Kindle before searching movietickets.com, and that’s how I found Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel.

The main narrator in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is nine-year old Oskar Schell. I say “main narrator” because there are three different narrators in the book. In addition to Oskar, we get to read letters written by each of his grandparents, his grandfather’s letters having been written around forty years before the action in the book takes place, and his grandmother’s letters being written contemporaneously with the events in the book, although that is not clear until the end. What is also not clear is how the reader ever gets access to the letters.

Oskar is also an unreliable narrator. He is an unreliable narrator for reasons inherent in being nine years old: he has a limited understanding of other people’s behavior, limited access to facts that are relevant to his situation, and limited interest in understanding any point of view other than his own. 

Oskar is variously described in reviews as “precocious”, “unusually intelligent”, and “not a typical nine year old”. Of course he isn’t. He’s the author’s conception of a precocious nine year old as shaped by the author’s need to have a coherent first person narrator, and possibly as shaped by the author’s recollections of himself and his friends at the age of nine.

Nine year olds are funny. They are still children, but in many ways you can see the emerging adult they will be, not just in temperament (which  is apparent in infancy), but in the way they speak, the gestures they make, the sense of humor they show, the facial expressions they use. They can go back and forth between babyishness and a seeming adult sophistication so fast it gives you whiplash. So the author’s choice of a nine year old as not just the main character, but as the main narrator, makes a lot of sense. 

The problem is, nine year olds, even very smart nine year olds, just aren’t that coherent. Ask a nine year old to tell you about a favorite book, movie, or TV show and three sentences into the narrative you will find yourself asking questions to keep oriented. Children that age are still in the process of developing a sense of what the listener needs to know. They are much better at it than their three or six year old selves, but not good enough to sustain a book.

So the Oskar who narrates the book is not believable. The Oskar who is a character in the book, however, is. Oskar’s father died in one of the Twin Towers on September 11, and Oskar is trying to come to grips with his father’s death. Oskar’s mother also has a male friend, Rob, and Oskar not only resents and dislikes Rob, but also the fact (as he states it) that his mother is moving on with her life.

Oskar also has a therapist that he sees on a regular basis, with whom he has no rapport. The therapist is a stock character: child psychologist who has no rapport with children. This therapist is necessary because Oscar’s interactions with him give us another view of Oskar, but a therapist who could actually make Oscar feel safe to share his hurt about his mother moving on with her life would give us an entirely different story, one the author doesn’t want to tell. For a reader who isn’t, like me, standing outside the story thinking, “This just doesn’t work”, that would not be a problem, but I kept wondering why Oskar’s mother didn’t just find him another therapist, especially when it becomes clear she has her own disagreements with the man.

It’s not as though she is without financial resources. She and Oskar continue living in the family apartment in Manhattan, one that is large enough that Oskar’s father has his own closet. This is an important plot point. Oskar goes into the closet one day, notices that his father had his tuxedo laid out on a chair in the closet, and in the course of other explorations, finds a key. Oskar sees the key as a message from his father and embarks on a search to find the lock it goes to, and the message it holds.

And when I say “embarks on a search”, I mean literally wanders around Manhattan on his own for hours at a time. It turns out that Oskar’s mother is not nearly as clueless as she seems all along (remember, Oskar is an unreliable narrator), but even so, Oskar is allowed a lot more latitude than one would think is prudent for a nine year old in a big city.

This is true despite the fact that Oskar has an overprotective grandmother who lives across the street. Oskar has only been able to get her to allow him to bathe alone by holding a piece of her knitting yarn as she sits outside the door, occasionally giving it a tug. Grandma has reasons for her issues, as the reader finds out in the course of reading letters she writes to Oskar. The letters are another example of the author choosing a narrator for convenience, not realism. In the first letter she writes, Grandma goes into detail about her sex life with Grandpa, in a way that one would not expect her to do with a nineteen year old grandson, let alone a nine year old. It is not clear from the book that Oskar, as opposed to the reader, ever reads the letter, but still. It seemed like every three pages I found myself saying, “What are these people thinking!”

And yet, despite the book’s flaws, I found Oskar’s story compelling and true to the incredible sadness and confusion that comes with losing a parent at an early age. Even if Oskar’s mother, grandmother, and therapist had been far more adept in dealing with his pain, they still would have been helpless in the face of his grief. When a child loses a parent, there is no good thing the other adults in the child’s life can do. Oskar tells us this, in the way perhaps only an overly precocious, unrealistically articulate, badly supervised and unreliable nine year old narrator could.

The Wrong Person

In the past few days I have followed a crooked trail from Fred Clark’s summary of a book by Mark Driscoll to a blogpost called So You Think You’ve Married the Wrong Person. 

The “so you think” is a dead giveaway that the blogger's conclusion, even not having met you and knowing nothing about you and your spouse, is going to be “well, you thought wrong, bozo”. (“Bozo” is not stated, merely implied.)

The post is a short one, and starts out with:

From time to time I hear a husband or wife wonder if perhaps they made a mistake in marrying the person that they did.
Things have usually gotten pretty bad by the time this question arises. Maybe the differences between the husband and wife are much greater than either one anticipated. The husband is neat, the wife is messy. The wife is talkative, the husband is quiet. The husband is always on time, the wife lives more in the moment. The wife is social, the husband is a homebody. These differences, which were initially just an irritant, have grown into something massive. What was once a tiny gap has become a great divide.

Pretty bad? Here’s my list, culled from real life and internet blogs and message boards, of things getting “pretty bad” that cause people to reflect that they might have married the wrong person:

1) A spouse having multiple affairs and giving the other spouse an STD;

2) A spouse who cannot hold a job, not because of the poor economy but due to inability to get along with supervisors;

3) A spouse who is an alcoholic, gambler, or unrestrained spender;

4) A spouse who treats the other spouse purely as a source of supply, of sex, personal services such as housekeeping, or of income;

5) A spouse who is abusive towards the children;

6) A spouse who is abusive to the other spouse.

To be fair to the blogger, however, it may just be the case that when he meets spouses involved in those situations, they aren’t just wondering if they married the wrong person. They’re pretty damn sure of it.

The post goes on to quote some words of Paul Tripp and then to conclude:

Your marriage, and the struggles in your marriage are not an accident. Even if you married a non-Christian, you’re [sic] marriage is not an accident! God is sovereign over all your struggles and sins, and he is using the differences between you and your spouse to bring himself glory and to make you more like Jesus.

I am trying to put myself in the mindset of those who are regular readers of The Blazing Center and whose beliefs would make this comforting advice. I am failing dismally. If you are miserable in your marriage, at war with your spouse and worried about the effect your quarrels are having on your children, I don't think a glory hound god who did this to you on purpose is going to make you feel better. This post makes me feel like a cog in the machine of God’s Greater Glory, Inc rather than as if I matter. Furthermore, rather than my spouse being considered an actual person in his own right, he’s apparently God’s object lesson for me. I don’t know about God, but I see my spouse as so much more than that.

The blogger has added a “side note”, which I don’t remember being there the first time I read his post, but it may have been. It goes 

There are obviously a thousand different variations on marriage. If you are in an abusive marriage, I am not saying that you need to stay in the path of harm. That conversation should be had with your pastor or another wise Christian.

No, that conversation you need to have with the police, or an attorney, or an expert on spousal abuse. 

I understand that the author of the post is speaking from a faith tradition in which marriage is forever. That is why he cannot bring himself to utter the word divorce even in cases of abuse, preferring to pass the buck to some other pastor or “wise Christian”. That’s why he trivializes the concerns of people whose marriages are in trouble. Those of us who have spouses who merely talk more than we would like don’t necessarily think we’ve married the wrong person. We think we need to buy more earplugs, and maybe some duct tape, but we don’t think we’ve married the wrong person. 

My first marriage was to the wrong person. Although I grew up in a liberal Methodist church that tolerated divorce and although I was not a practicing Methodist at the time, I took seriously the vow I made “until death do you part.” I took the vow seriously through years of verbal abuse. When it began to seem that the death in question was likely to be untimely, likely be violent, and likely to be mine, however, I decided “I didn’t sign on for this” and threw my now ex out of the house. I like the way Wayne and Tamara Mitchell put it, “ When you married for better or for worse, the worse refers to life, not what the wrong person decides to put you through.” 

The funny thing is, though, for most of my marriage, I thought we were right for each other. I thought I was a good person to deal with my ex’s volatile temper, name calling, and threats, because I was brave enough to stand up to him and not be manipulated by him. If he hadn’t progressed to physical violence, I would have stayed in a bad marriage and agreed with the writer that no one is perfect.

I like to say that when my ex beat me up, he did it in the kindest way possible. He came home from work, picked a fight over nothing, and worked himself into a rage with no participation on my part. There was no room for me to say, “Well, maybe if I had . . .” As a result, when I met my husband, the right person, I was free to marry him. And you know what? He talks too much. When we are going somewhere, when he says he is ready to leave what he really means is he will spend the next ten minutes heating his to-go cup of coffee, looking for his car keys, wallet, and sunglasses, and going back into the house to check if he left something on. He refuses to get rid of items I see as junk and clutter.

And he has his list of my little irritants as well. Despite all these, we are amazingly in synch. If he says he is thinking of something, it’s very often the same thing I was thinking of as well. If I have a yen for nachos, he is likely to come in from some errand he is running and say, “I thought we’d go get Mexican tonight.” We have the same values, the same political views, and many of the same interests.

It’s more than that I am just physically safer with my husband. If I had stuck with my ex, I would never have known the well-being that comes from a relationship with someone who actually is the right person. I probably would have agreed that people divorce too easily over the wrong things.

As it is, I consider myself fortunate that when I was dealing with a bad marriage, I didn’t go to anyone like the author of So You Think You’ve Married the Wrong Person for advice. He would definitely have been the wrong person.

Small Accomplishments

Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I like to look back on the year past and make a list of things I accomplished. “Resolving the Middle East situation” and “curing cancer” have never made my lists and never will, but it’s nice to know that I can achieve goals, even without a set of formal resolutions.

So here is the 2011 list:

• I donated about 4 boxes and 4 bags of things I no longer need to  the Boys and Girls club and about half as much again to Goodwill. I took care not to give them anything dirty, stained, missing parts, or dangerous, but I can’t guarantee that nothing was useless or outdated.
• I bought clothes that I actually like and I make myself wear them. I say “make myself” because even when I have nice things in my closet, I tend to wear beat up T-shirts. The beat up T-shirts are gone, except for two or three I keep for painting and other dirty jobs.
• I also make a point of wearing my jewelry instead of letting it sit in my jewelry box unseen.
• I started an exercise program. Unfortunately, my efforts at exercise class resulted in the infamous broken foot, but I can now both ride a bike and walk fast enough for thirty minutes to raise my heart rate and break a sweat.
• I restructured my daily eating habits to include more fruit, nuts, and yogurt and several days a week, to eat my main meal in the middle of the day and a lighter one in the evening. I also lost 17 pounds. 
• I started baking yeast breads again.
• I got the photographs I took in Africa digitized and on a disk. We won’t say how much that cost.
• I wrote 120 blog posts, compared to 18 in 2011 and 26 in 2009.
• My good friend D and I meet several times a month for walking, lunch or day trips.
• I kept in touch with friends from work and met them for lunch several times.

Feel free to add small accomplishments (or big accomplishments) of your own.

It's All Their Fault

A story greeted me this morning in the People section of our local newspaper: Expert: Women in ’50s may have triggered obesity issue. Women in the 1950s were regularly blamed for many things, so I suppose this shouldn’t have surprised me. Furthermore, the booming economy and loosening of wartime restrictions on food products like sugar, meat and butter, women’s return to the home when they were kicked out of their wartime jobs, and the increasing availability of convenience foods like cake mixes, probably did change family diets in the fifties. 

That isn’t what our expert meant, it turns out. No, the problem is what young mothers of the fifties were doing while they were pregnant with us baby boomers. Fitness and nutrition expert (according to the article) Melinda Sothern 

has a theory that the tide of obesity that has swept the nation in the last two decades had its roots in what young mothers did, or didn’t do, in the postwar, suburban sprouting 1950s.
. . . [S]he thinks the obesity rates soared just when they did  - in the 1980s - because a generation of young women decades earlier smoked, spurned breast feeding and restricted their weight during numerous, closely spaced pregnancies.

Okay, let’s say she’s right. Were these young women smoking, restricting their weight, and bottle feeding their babies in defiance of the best medical advice of the time? Not really. 

“Sothern points to her own family as an example of the obesity trinity in action.

Her mother was told by her obstetrician in the 1950s to gain less than 20 pounds during pregnancy. Smoking a pack of cigarettes a day was a good way to keep the weight down, the doctor said. [emphasis added by me, because somebody had to.]

Later in the article it is mentioned that women who were pregnant in the fifties were advised to gain as little as 10 pounds a pregnancy.

So why does the headline say “Women in ‘50s may have triggered obesity issue” rather than, “Doctors in ‘50s may have triggered obesity issue “? Or to be less pejorative, “Medical advice in ’50s may have triggered obesity issue”? True, the choice of “women” rather than “doctors” may have had to do with space considerations on the part of the headline writer, but the headline does seem to reflect the emphasis of the article: not on the bad medical advice women of the decade were given, but on the women’s behavior that resulted from that advice. 

When I was in graduate school, the speech department occupied a small section of the medical school. During a bout of ovarian pain, I consulted some of the obstetrical textbooks available, and was that ever an eye opener. The text book writers infantilized women and encouraged their doctors to do likewise. Your OB/Gyn was not just a person with a specialty that you paid for advice the way you consulted your car mechanic about your car or your butcher about how to cook the Sunday roast. He (and most likely he was he) was a father figure who saw you as a bundle of irrational actions wrapped around a womb.

There was no internet, no trained midwife, no nurse practitioner to consult. It was Dr. Know-it-all or nothing, and Dr. Know-it-all knew nothing about nutrition, mom’s or baby’s. It was not his fault. In advising his patients to restrict their weight gain, he thought he was giving the best medical advice of the day, advice that would prevent the problems he ultimately, if our expert is right, caused. But to say “Women in ’50s may have triggered obesity issue” and ignore the  reasons that women in the 1950’s acted the way they did is to obscure the problem that our expert is trying to solve. Sometimes even the best educated members of our society don’t know enough, and what they think they know is dangerous. It’s not their fault. Medical researchers are trying their best to learn the healthiest ways to live, but it takes time and some wrong guesses to do so. 

But it’s not mom’s fault, either. She was trying to give her baby the best start she could by following her doctor’s advice. The unthinking tendency to generalize about women of the 1950s (not all of whom were pregnant mothers, some of  them were grandmas who were ridiculed for reminding their daughters that they were eating for two) is cruel and unhelpful. It’s not science to ignore the societal factors that led pregnant women in the post WW II era to take bad care of themselves during pregnancy thinking that they were doing the reverse. It’s the same old mom blaming, repackaged. 

Answers

Okay, time to match the famous first lines listed in It Was A Dark and Stormy Night with their respective works, although I am sure anyone who was interested has Googled the ones they did not know. It turns out the line “It was a dark and stormy night” made famous by the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, was also used as the opening line of A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle.


Thank you Amaryllis, Dr. Ngo, and Nenya for your contributions.

• Call me Ishmael.  Moby Dick
• Marley was dead, to begin with. A Christmas Carol
• In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis
• There’s my last duchess, painted on the wall . . . My Last Duchess, poem
• I sing of arms and the man.  The Aeneid
• Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, who knew not Joseph.   Exodus
• Happy families are all alike . . . Anna Karenina
• In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. The Hobbit
• "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents.”* Little Women
• To Sherlock Holmes, she is always the woman. A Scandal in Bohemia
• In the land of Uz there lived a man whose name was Job. Job
• The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville Nine that day. Casey at the Bat, poem
• The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. The Wind in the Willows
• All children, except one, grow up. Peter Pan
• My mind now turns to stories of bodies changed into new forms. Metamorphoses, Ovid

Poems contributed by Amaryllis:

• Once upon a midnight dreary, as I pondered weak and weary... The Raven
• Two roads diverged in a yellow wood... The Road Not Taken
• Because I could not stop for death... Death
• In Xanadu did Kubla Khan...  Kubla Khan
• Let us go then, you and I... The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
• The went to sea in a sieve, they did... The Jumblies
• I met a traveler from an antique land... Ozymandias
• Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert... To A Skylark
• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways... Sonnet 43 Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Oh what can ail thee, knight at arms... La Belle Dame Sans Merci
• Let me not to the marriage of true minds... Sonnet 116, Shakespeare
• When I was one-and-twenty... When I Was One-and-Twenty
• Listen, my children, and you shall hear... Paul Revere’s Ride
• So. The Spear-Danes, in days gone by... Beowolf

I must admit, I thought the line for The Jumblies belonged to Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

This one from dr ngo, which I had to Google:

• He was born with the gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad. Scaramouche (I was way off with my guess of Pudd'nhead Wilson.)

And finally, from Nenya:

• It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. A Tale of Two Cities
• It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. Pride and Prejudice
• In the beginning was the Word... The Gospel of John
• It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. 1984

So I Have All This Stuff

Two months ago, I wandered into an antique/gift shop next to the place where I get my hair done. As I looked around, I saw some green dishes and serving pieces that looked very similar to a small cabbage-shaped soup tureen I had bought in Tennessee this past summer. I don’t need the green dishes, but I asked the owner how much they were. She said she had really only bought them to accessorize the cabinet they were sitting in, which was for sale, but she would sell me the whole set for $28.00.

The cabbage soup tureen

I decided I really should talk to my husband first, not because of the amount of money involved, but because he’d have to live with them, too.  My husband didn’t have any major objections, but he did ask the obvious question, “Where would you put them?”

So while I pondered this problem, weeks went by. John started to organize some financial records and noticed he didn’t have all the statements for our savings account. “I keep them up here,” I said, pointing to the cabinet over the baking center. This led to a round of moving the statements to his files, shredding old duplicate checkbooks, and otherwise clearing out the closet. Suddenly we had room for the green dishes. 

What I didn’t have was $28, what with Christmas and all, at least not until the end of December. No rush - the store owner hadn’t intended to sell the dishes anyway, and if she did sell them to someone else, I knew it wasn’t to be. 

In the meantime, as John brought down Christmas ornaments from the attic, he decided to take stock of what else was up there. Some of what else was up there was cardboard boxes with glassware that had belonged to his mother. “Why are you holding on to that stuff?” I asked. “Because the appraiser told me it was antique,” he replied. 

“Well, maybe we should bring it down from the attic”, I said. (Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!) “Oh, you know what else is up there? Those dishes your mom gave me.”

I was referring to a set of 8 place settings of Mikasa Fruit Panorama that my sister-in-law had given her mother about twenty years ago. My MIL took offense at the gift (something of a hobby of hers) because she already had dishes, and never opened the boxes. So when MIL moved from her house to a retirement home, she gave me the dishes. I had intended to use them, but they wound up in the attic with her other possessions, and whenever I thought about getting them down, it seemed like too much trouble.

The cleared out space over the baking center would be perfect for the Mikasa, however. As for the antique glassware, it could go in the big armoire that is cluttering up the living room and serving no useful purpose. Well, it held a few of the Christmas decorations, but they are now in plastic tubs in the attic with their buddies.

As for the green dishes, in the big Christmas decoration reorganization, I freed up shelf space in the mudroom. I had a hair appointment this morning, so the plan was go back to the shop and buy the green dishes, if they were still there.

But yesterday John decided to bring the boxes down from the attic. “How many do you want me to bring down?” he asked.

“How many are there?” I asked, picturing maybe three boxes of crystal. “Ten or twelve,” he replied.

Oh, dear. When I said to bring the boxes down from the attic, I thought we were talking about maybe 16-24 glasses, not every bit of kitchenware MIL had ever owned. Now I remembered why the boxes were up in the attic to begin with.

We settled on bringing down six boxes to start with, not counting my Mikasa dishes, and to go from there. I quickly discovered that the boxes labelled “Antique Glassware” should have been labeled “collectibles that are currently popular but may not be 13 years from now”, and ones that were unlabeled should have been labelled “miscellaneous kitchen debris collected by an 80 year old woman who never threw anything out”, and “miscellaneous knick-knacks with which you can clutter up every surface in your house.” That’s why the boxes were in the attic.

Once the first few boxes came down, however, it was clear they all needed to come down. The boxes are disintegrating, the items in there are speckled with black coffee ground like matter that my husband assures me are roach droppings, not mouse droppings (I have roaches in my attic, what a comfort), and my husband actually let me add a few items to the box we were filling for Goodwill.

Some of the items, it turns out, are big platters, serving bowls, and a punch bowl. They will not fit in the armoire. My husband wouldn’t give them to Goodwill. My shelf  space in the mudroom may be gone. John did suggest we could get more plastic tubs and put anything that doesn’t fit in the armoire back in the attic, but I wonder how happy he will be to do that if I bring more dishes into the house.

I didn’t even look in the shop when I went for my haircut today. Maybe the green dishes are all gone to a good home anyway, one where their new owners don’t have quite so much stuff.