Jen's Latest Reads

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray:

I was warned that the author did some crazy things with the punctuation, so I expected it. There are no quotation marks in some chapters, sometimes periods are the only punctuation, and sometimes there are no periods at all, causing the reader to rely on capitals to know where a sentence begins, which is confusing because names, too, are capitalized. After I got used to it, it didn’t detract from the story, which followed the ups and downs of a family of four for several years.

The characters: A father whose pride leads him to embezzle; a wife who sees her husband as a cash cow, then belittles him when he runs into financial difficulties; the teenaged daughter, a high achiever who strays into alcoholism; and the young son, bullied because of his father’s shady dealings, and ignored at home.

Reviewers refer to it as a tragicomedy, which is as it should be, because laughing while crying is the way of the Irish. And how does a writer combine tragedy and comedy when the story itself is distressing? By using unusual or funny descriptions and vocabulary, and by making the source of the misery absurd—like a bee string. But other than these nods to humor, this book broke my heart. One of my prime credos is “be kind to the people you love,” but those four characters were wretched islands in that house. There was no conversation, no approval, no encouragement, no honesty.

So why did I enjoy the book so much? Because of the compelling writing. Honestly, I couldn’t put it down. The story and characters will stay with me for years. Cited as one of the top ten novels of the year, it was, indeed, profound; and if you dip into only one piece of fiction this year, this is the one it should be.

 Mania by Lionel Shriver

I’ve read two other books by this author—The Motion of the Body Through Space, and We Need to Talk About Kevin—if you look her up, you’ll see that she’s prolific. As with the two I’ve previously read, Mania is rooted in societal issues. It’s set at the point of the pendulum’s journey where political correctness has gone too far.

When it’s decided by the PC police that referring to some people as “smart” hurts the feelings of those who aren’t smart, it becomes illegal to use any words that categorize someone as being outstanding or gifted in any sphere; and it soon follows that words that have anything to do with being “lesser” are banned; for instance, not only can you not call a person “slow,” you can’t say “this song is asinine,” or “this food tastes awful,” because denigration might stir up negative feelings. Tests are no longer allowed in schools because grades show that some students are smarter than others—and this leads to an uneducated society.

Mania is clever and dry. The snarky main character is ostracized because she can’t stop herself from declaring that political correctness is “dumb.” She loses her job, she loses her children, she must go on the run. On every page, another stratum of society falls victim to the trend, until there are no educated scientists, doctors, writers, or teachers. I enjoyed the concept. And don’t worry. It ends well.

 I Cheerfully Refuse by Lief Enger

This is a post apocalyptical odyssey; indeed, it is along the lines of Odysseus’s journey, so keep the reference in mind as you begin reading. Highly imaginative, it’s set in a world where no one knows where their next meal will come from, or where they’ll sleep when night arrives; and this universal desperation speaks to the truth that those who are unpleasant in ordinary circumstances become evil monsters when they’re backed into a corner; and that people with stalwart hearts become saints.

And yes, there’s a plot, though it pretty much involves rushing from one precarious predicament to another. A musician’s wife is found murdered; the grieving husband inadvertently possesses drugs belonging to a drug lord; a chase across Lake Superior in a dilapidated boat ensues; a little girl, fleeing from her abuser, becomes a stowaway. Threats are made, heroes are captured, borders are breached in the dark of the night; murders are witnessed. If you’d like to try something different and easily navigated, this is a rich and resonating read about resilience, persistence, and the triumph of the righteous.

 The Covenant of Water by Abraham Vergese:

Abraham Vergese authored Cutting for Stone several years ago—and I still recall the writing as being spiritual and lyrical—as is The Covenant of Water, which makes food preparation magical, lends holiness to farming, and understands the soul of the sunrise.

It is a lengthy multi-faceted saga which begins when a twelve-year old girl, Mariamma, is forced by her uncle to marry a forty-year-old man. As this occurs, the reader shudders; but the child’s husband turns out to be a kind and wise man, and she comes to love his son as her own; and she’s happy with her new neighbors and her house duties. And, as I said, this is only the beginning of a long, engaging, and complicated yarn .

This multi-generational tale is set in a Christian area of southwest India. The characters include not only Mariamma and her family, but every person she or her family members encounter during her long lifetime. In short, the reader comes to know many, many personalities, all unique, all substantial, some with fascinating and ambitious agendas, others who are simply happy to have enough to get by. Also, a mischievous elephant plays a part. Aspects explored: greed, envy, love, prejudice, disease, disappointment, communication, death, duplicity, aspiration, betrayal. Yep, it’s a box of chocolates.

Covenant, in the title, refers to an inherited weakness and disorientation when immersed in water. As bizarre as it sounds, drowning runs in the family. The solution has always been for the family to stay away from bodies of water, which is difficult to do, as they’re surrounded by it. See what happens to this fear of water when science and research are applied to this unusual condition. It was a splendid read. If you’d like to bask in the beauty of another culture for a few weeks, get started on this lovely book.

I’m currently reading A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. I’m about a third of the way through, and, so far, it’s a befuddling hodgepodge and a lot of work. It won the Pulitzer, so hopefully it’ll become more cohesive. David is reading Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson. He insists that I’d like it. He knows I prefer fiction, so when he rhapsodizes so enthusiastically about the written word, I take him seriously. And that’s why my next read will be the Benjamin Franklin bio.

My Kindle propped on our kitchen’s malevolent chicken. Why? For fun.

Word Problems

Our priest retired a couple of months ago and so it’s fallen to us, the vestry, to organize a search for a replacement. I’ve been helping to write the text of the profile that shares information about our church; and this profile will go online and, in that way, it’ll reach priests who might be interested in serving here in Marble Falls.

This hasn’t been a difficult job. In fact, because I love to write, I’ve enjoyed it. As I was raised methodist, I’m not versed in the traditions and vocabulary of the episcopal church, and the other members of the profile committee were helpful in advising me. As expected, my phrasing, word choice, and intentions were weighed and commented on. But one suggestion disturbed me on a visceral level: in reference to our fellowship meals, a woman thought I should reword with something along the line of—and then we fill our bellies with delicious food.

I took pause at “bellies,” which is a perfectly acceptable word, but its presence on my screen disturbed me. The woman used it naturally and comfortably; but it’s not a word I use and it’s not a word I like; and I don’t know why I would feel disdain toward those simple two syllables. Do I harbor a weird inhibition when it comes to naming body parts? The word brings to mind ticklish babies; or the unnaturally hard bellies of old men. Maybe the reason I wouldn’t consider using it in the profile is because its evocation, stemming from my specific personal experience, is alien to the context. It’s a puzzle.

My bizarre reaction to “bellies” started me thinking about how, at times, I’ve used a word, or heard a word used, that was completely inappropriate in one setting, but hey, move across the country, and its meaning is totally different.

In Scotland, I once lunched with a group of American women—five of us from Texas, the other from the east coast. When the easterner called one of the Texans a twat, the table went silent.

“What?” she asked as, horrified, she looked around the table. “What did I say?”

“What do you think twat means?” I asked.

“You know, a goofnut, a fool.”

“In Texas it’s indecent and insulting,” from another woman. “Polite people don’t use it.”

“What does it mean in Texas?”

The woman next to her leaned over and whispered the meaning into her ear.

“Oh, no,” she said. “Where I’m from it’s a family word. Growing up, we called each other that all the time.”

I imagine brothers and sisters playing tag in their yard, shouting “Twat!” at one another so loudly that they could be heard half a mile away. How delightfully funny!

Another time, at Mahjong, I called another woman a pill. She grew silent and a minute or so later I noticed that she was near tears. We others at the table gazed at one another in confusion.

“What’s the matter?” one of the women asked.

“Jenny called me a pill,” she said, giving me a mean squint.

“What does pill mean to you?” I asked her.

“My mother called me that when she was mad at me because I was being rude and embarrassing. It was always followed by a hard spanking.”

This woman was originally from New Jersey; and yes, she was always overly dramatic in her reactions. Nevertheless, the same situation—a word’s meaning depending on its time zone.

“My mother called me that when I was being mischievous and cute,” I told her.

How befuddling. Speaking of befuddled, here’s a word story with another slant:

Years ago a British friend told me she had found the perfect whore chair.

“Whore chair?” I asked, thinking I must’ve heard wrong.

“No, Jenny, a whore chair.”

“Whore chair? You found a whore chair? A chair for a whore to sit in?”

She figures it out and is irritated by my ignorance; also, it’s likely that this was the first time in her life someone hadn’t been able to understand her perfect Home Counties accent.

“A hall chair, Jenny, a hall chair,” she said, putting a mean-spirited accent on “hall” and exaggerating the Texas accent.

To this day, no matter how hard I try, and I have tried, I can’t make the word whore sound like hall.

As I have no pertinent picture, I thought I'd show this baby quilt I made for my nephew and his wife. I fear there was too much black--but babies like color, right?

Picky

David has been involved with Habitat for Humanity since we moved to Marble Falls, and these days he’s the president of the local chapter. This involves getting permits from the towns where the homes are to be built, taking bids and hiring plumbers, electricians, and roofers. Before he took over, the accounting had been poorly handled, so he’s taken on a few people to help with the finances, and things are now on the right track.

David’s not in this alone, though. All the crew chips in by picking up supplies, managing the site, directing the labor, and meeting the contractors and installers. They’re all team players and seeing the way they work so well together has been a joy.

One of the tasks that’s fallen only to David since he began this involvement almost ten years ago is providing lunches on their two workdays a week. This is the most thankless and difficult responsibility there is.

“How did you end up being the one who has to hunt down the lunches?” I ask.

“Nobody else wants to do it,” he tells me. Typical David.

Several of the local restaurants, like Subway, Chic Filet, and Pizza Hut have been good enough to occasionally donate lunches. Mostly though, the food’s provided by volunteers who bring sandwiches and chips. When my name came up in the rotation, I was happy enough to make tuna sandwiches. But when David came in at the end of his day, he informed me that one of his workers didn’t eat his sandwich because he had a “sensitivity” to pickles, and that the next time I made tuna it would be appreciated if I made one without pickles. This seemed audacious to me in that, yes, they’re volunteers, and they certainly earn their lunch, but I, too, was volunteering and I didn’t think I should be required to construct each sandwich according to the different needs of each individual.

In the case of the pickle “sensitivity,” the next time I made sandwiches I did as requested; however, though I marked it clearly as his, someone else got to it before he did, so once more, no sandwich for him. Also on that day, David brought home a complaint about the type of bread I’d used. Apparently one of the guys prefers the brand with an abundance of wholesome seeds and grains and the picture of the macho baker on the packaging. In other words, the most expensive bread on the shelf. And another worker said he didn’t like sandwiches filled with salad—not tuna, not egg, not chicken.

So, pretending to care about all these special preferences, next time it was my turn to furnish the lunch, I made roast beef sandwiches using the costly bread, only to have David tell me later that one of the men had an aversion to red meat.

That was it. Never again. There had been a time when I thought that, as sandwiches are a simple food, it’d be impossible to mess them up, but it was obvious that I would never get it right. By this time so vexed was David that he actually considered making a list of preferences to give to the lunch makers. Thankfully his sense caught up with him before he went down that rabbit hole.

In a way, this reminds me of years ago when I volunteered at a downtown soup kitchen in Houston. It fell to me to be the traffic cop for the food line, where I was instructed to allow five through at a time—and I was surprised to hear grumbling about what was being served, which was usually chicken in some form.

“Chicken again?” “Pasta? Yuck.” “I hate green beans.” “The gravy looks like barf.”

To gripe about a free meal shows an arrogance so profoundly incongruous that I simply could not comprehend it. This lunch for the homeless was graciously prepared and graciously served by volunteers; but there was no grace to be found in the meal’s consumption.  

While providing food for the homeless isn’t the same as providing it for the Habitat crew, it kind of is in that people are complaining about a meal that’s being prepared and offered in the spirit of kindness. It’s a sad truth that, in a lifetime full of meals, every morsel isn’t going to be delectable and wondrous. It’s just sandwiches, guys. Eat whatever’s on offer and then finish out your day.

A great group of hard workers!

The Reluctant Caregiver

Our parents were called The Greatest Generation—and if by great you mean prolific, then yeah. Our generation, Baby Boomers, is the result of that greatness. There’re more seniors living in America than ever before, an immense population over sixty-five that’s been anticipated since the birthing spree of the nineteen fifties.

Occasionally I hear grumbling about how much we’re costing society. And it’s true. This multitude of non-working people on Social Security and Medicare is costing the taxpayers dollars that could be better spent on infrastructure, education, and oh, so many other things. The generations following us are having to pay higher taxes because we live. It’s a warped system.

The reason I can hear the grumbling I mentioned is because I wear hearing aids. Ten years ago you could only get them through a doctor of audiology. Just think, students went to medical school to learn to turn noise up and down with a knob and watch sound waves on a screen so they could end up make a living by being a hearing aids salesperson. Then along came the Baby Boomers; and entrepreneurs, recognizing the need, rushed to make hearing aids better and cheaper. In a short amount of time, the price dropped to a couple of hundred bucks and they’re available online.

This is only one of the many innovations created because The Greatest Generation’s progeny has grown old. How about those chairs that’ll carry you right up the stairs? Or Siri on your phone asking if you’ve fallen and do you want her/him to call 911? Hip replacements, knee replacements, shoulder replacements—doctors and their ilk, knowing they’d be hit by a wave of gray humanity with worn out joints in the twenty-first century, have been perfecting replacements since the sixties.

Away from the musing and on to the personal: David has recently had a shoulder replacement. He tried to prepare me for him not being able to use his right arm. He’s left-handed, so I figured he’d do fine. Though, like I said, he warned me.

I’m compassionate. I am. Well, in the abstract. I can get teary-eyed over a homeless dog or a hungry orphan, but when it came to the helplessness of a man who had a good arm and a brain, generosity abandoned me. The sling that kept his arm immobile was composed of many straps connected by Velcro, hooks, and buckles—most confounding. Working as a team, we mastered getting it off and on and, as I saw the necessity of it, I didn’t mind. But the other things he needed me to do for him were maddening, as were all the interruptions: Would you—dry my back? cut this lemon? pour this for me? Invariably I was in the middle of doing something else and I became impatient when I had to stop and help him.   

Getting him dressed was beyond irksome—buttoning his shirt, putting on his socks and shoes, pulling up his pants. And my attitude was awful. The most shameful thing was when I didn’t offer to cut his meat, but simply watched him tear it with his teeth like a caveman, telling myself that I’d just done this thing for him or that thing for him, and he can by golly manage to do this one thing for himself.

Remember the scene in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane where the mean sister, Bette Davis, brings a covered dish to the sweet sister, Joan Crawford, who’s in a wheelchair; and how, when Bette Davis lifts the lid, she sadistically displays her invalid sister’s roasted parakeet? I can still hear my mother’s gasp. The whole time David was fretting about his shoulder, I identified with Bette Davis. I didn’t channel her, but I understood where she was coming from.

When we were running errands and ran into someone we knew, they’d first ask David how he was doing, then they’d turn to me and ask how I was doing, showing unexpected sympathy for a reluctant caregiver.

“I’ve discovered that I’m a horrible person,” I answered truthfully. “I resent driving him to his medical appointments, which are an hour away, and I’m mad that ivy’s crawling up our house and trees and he’s unable to cut it back, and apparently having shoulder surgery means you’re unable to put things away or clean up after yourself.”

Appalled by my candor, they retract their sympathy from me and return it to David.

“I knew how she was when I married her,” he explained with a shrug.

We got through it and the whole process took less than six weeks, though it felt like months. David feels great and achieves a higher range of motion daily, but if he starts talking about pain in the other shoulder, I think I’m going to leave the country for a while.

David doing his physical therapy using a pulley system. Before the surgery he couldn’t lift his arm higher than his chest.

A complicated sling.

And for no reason other than she’s beautiful, here’s my granddaughter, Clementine.