Finally

Finally, as in I'm finally back here with another post after almost a month. How did that happen? How are there only 6 weeks left in the school year? We've been so busy, and I've written many a post -- in my head. But I'm here now. Since I last checked in, I've been to Laguna Beach twice in the same week -- the first time was to spend the night in a too-cute-to-live 50s-era cottage overlooking the Pacific, a girls getaway to an insanely darling house, belonging to the father of a local friend. The second time, some days later, was to attend a reading and celebrate the publication of the first book by a writer-acquaintance. These were both fun and very different getaways. The first fed my need to soak in the sun, away from the kids for more than just two or three hours at a time. The second fed my need to soak up the presence of other writer-types, and be able to revel in the fact that I could refer to a book as a memoir, and not need to stop to explain that yes, "memoir" means it's a true story. (And yes, I AM a snooty, snotty book-bitch.)

Finally also refers to another recent event -- finally, finally, I found a book which fed my soul and was "that book" that I needed to read right now. I'm a firm believer in literary kismet, that sometimes the right book lands in your hands at just the right time and nourishes and enriches, and for me, also makes me learn something and prick up my little eager writer-ears as I take in both the language and the insight.

That book, pictured above, was, The Florist's Daughter, by Patricia Hampl. A quiet, nothing-much-happens kind of memoir, about Hampl's life in her role as a dutiful daughter to her much-beloved Midwestern parents. Beginning as Hampl sits holding her dying mother's hand in a hospital late at night with one hand (and writing the obituary on a yellow legal pad with the other, drawing judgmental looks from the nurse), it traces her parent's life stories, which, because of their very "smallness" and modesty, are just as rich and full of deep feelings as any life can be.

I don't think I would have appreciated the jewel-like words and images of Hampl's book quite as much if I hadn't first read The Glass Castle a couple of weeks earlier. Where The Florist's Daughter is full of much mulling and dwelling on motive and the interior life, Jeannette Walls' memoir is....action-packed, to say the least. It's the kind of shocking, tabloid sort of reveal that usually gets picked to be on Oprah, or made into a movie, or both. It's not that I didn't like the book....it was definitely a page-turner, if only to see what those wacky, outrageously self-centered parents of hers would do or say next. It's the kind of book that you can describe to a friend like this: and then THIS happened, and then THIS happened, and oh my god, can you stand it...then they did THIS and said THAT, but she lived to tell it all and now is just dandy and very happily married and wrote this mega-bestseller and even got to be on The Colbert Report. The End. Whew. To be fair, I should note that, like Hampl's book, The Glass Castle also received a starred review from Publisher's Weekly. It's a good read -- just not "that" read, that I needed at this point in my life.

It's late and I'm getting tired and I can never find that happy balance between describing a book "in general" vs. doing a grad-studentesque literary review. So I'll let these 2 reviews for the Patricia Hampl book speak for me:

Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad:

"In this age of tabloid tell-alls and sloppy hyperbole, The Florist''s Daughter is a cool tonic: a memoir that sings the quiet anthem of good daughters everywhere. In Patricia Hampl's hands, supposedly ordinary people in allegedly ordinary lives are rendered with luminous grace and quiet beauty."

Kristin Ohlson, author of Stalking the Divine: "All of us eventually become orphans and lose not only our parents' physical presence but also the opportunity to keep asking, over and over, for their stories. Patricia Hampl''s lovely bruising book takes us to that final rupture between mother and daughter. Hampl offers the bloom of meditation on the mysteries between parents and children, between the past and the present, and between those old adversaries, beauty and truth."

Yeah. That's just what I was gonna say. Or, to quote Hampl herself: "Nothing is harder to grasp than the relentlessly modest life."

For me, this was THAT book that I was needing, longing for and I'm so glad it finally fell into my hands. I have a big interest in the memoir these days -- and am looking with great interest upon those books that tell a life the way I hope to (someday) tell my own -- quietly, thoughtfully, artfully sketching a life as a daughter, a person who has for the most part stayed in the same geography & landscape that shaped her, as someone hoping to tap into the mysteries of all those untold stories.

There is another book that's come my way recently which is also one of "those" special books. This one is so special I can hardly stand to turn the pages and is so remarkable that I can't bring myself to finish it yet. More on THAT very soon, I hope.

Just Wondering...

When the hell did pirates come along and co-opt renaissance faires? Aren't they in the wrong century, by like, a lot? This was the first renaissance faire I've been to since well before Lily was born. Back in my day (read: the early to mid '90s), the attendees in costume provided great people watching and musings (just who ARE these people? And what do the insides of their houses look like?), but now -- I dunno. I still enjoyed the people (freak) watching & musings, but if I want to see grown men & women dressed up like Captain Jack, I thought I just had to go to Disneyland.

Reading this over, I sound very anti-pirate. Totally, I'm so not. I just miss the bawdy costumes and vibe of the "real" Renaissance Faire, the one they used to hold up in Glen Helen in San Bernardino, and this year is in Irwindale. The faire we went to on Sunday down in Escondido was a smaller deal by a lot, but the kids, especially Lily, had a good time getting an eyeful of non-suburban fun & weirdness.

And by the way, the (literal) band of pirates above? They FELT it, man. Or should I say, these were some hearty damn hearties. My favorite part was when this dude whipped out a fake gun and demanded tips in his big pirate hat. But still -- knights, jousting, jesters, the Virgin Queen -- and pirates? It ain't right, I'm tellin' ya.

I'm not sure whether to blame Johnny Depp, Disney, or...Keith Richards.

First Meme Ever: Fours

So I've always wanted to do a meme, but sadly nobody has ever tagged me -- I suppose I'd actually require a reader with a blog for that. I know I've been free all along to tag myself with any interesting meme I've stumbled upon in the past, but the fact is that sometimes they seem to require an awful lot of thought and insight and energy that I typically just don't have in the evenings.

But this meme I found tonight on the blog of jewelry designer Lisa Leonard seems perfect. Fun, fast, not too hard, and yet revealing, too. I found Lisa's site many months ago and have been so fond of her personalized jewelry. I kept meaning to send Myk a link to her site as a hint for Christmas, but I never got around to it, and could never quite decide which design is my favorite. (Heads up, honey: I want one of these for Mother's Day. I'll let you know which one...maybe the Featured Design for April?) A friend of mine directed her husband there for Christmas, and her necklace turned out just lovely. Normally I'm decidedly not a fan of personalized, monogrammed, mom-specific jewelry, but these are really nice.

Besides which, Lisa seems like a very dear and funny and brave woman and mom, and also I have to hate her just a little bit for having my kind of hair: curly, thick, impossible: and yet she's able to wear it cut short and still look cute and perky --- not bloated and old, as I always seem to look with short hair.

Anyhoo --

Here's my foray into the meme:

Four jobs I have had in my life:
1. Music/Video store cashier (Remember The Warehouse?)
2. Assistant Bookkeeper for an old-money Pasadena family
3. Editorial Assistant at an automotive interest magazine house
4. English writing instructor at a four-year university

Four movies I've watched more than once:
1. Meet Me in St. Louis
2. Moonstruck
3. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
4. The Big Easy (Oh, Dennis Quaid...)

Four places I've lived:
1. Bakersfield, CA
2. Oxford, Mississippi
3. Orange, CA
4. Pico Rivera, CA

Four TV shows I watch:
1. House Hunters
2. Divine Design
3. Law & Order SVU (even though the creepy ones make it hard to sleep. But Christopher Meloni is pretty cute.)
4. Yo Gabba Gabba! ("There's a party in my tummy! So yummy, so yummy!")

Four places I have been:
1. Kona, Hawaii
2. New Orleans, LA
3. Kowloon, Hong Kong
4. Mt. Saint Helen's, WA

Four favorite foods:
1. Toast with peanut butter and bananas
2. Starbuck's Maple Oat Scones
3. Chicken Piccata with Pasta
4. Medium Rare steak with sautéed mushrooms, like only my dad could make

Four places I'd rather be right now:
1. In Palm Springs alone with Myk
2. Driving alone on a scenic backroad with the windows down, listening to Neko Case
3. Living in a neighborhood or city with 200% more charm and culture than my current one.
4. Then again, life with the kids here in the outer 'burbs is still pretty damn good.

Four things I'm looking forward to this year:
1. Palm Springs alone with Myk in the July heat
2. Working on our much-delayed, much-discussed Ikea kitchen
3. The summer, with Lily out of school: the park, the pool, friends, and hours to kill.
4. Lily starting 1st grade at the end of August and staying at school until 3:15!

Four places I love to shop:
1. Target
2. Macy's
3. Ebay
4. Gymboree

tag, you're it!!

Overheard Today (Or, Why We Refrain From Beating Them):

Lily (sounding exasperated): What are you trying to say, Tucker???

Tucker: Um, I love you.

Lily: Oh. I love you too, Tucker.

(Hello! Remember me? I had a blog here once, many many moon ago. I've been doing lots of reading. I've been doing some heavy feathering of the nest. So much of both, that somewhere along the way I got overwhelmed on where to start or how to remember it all. Plus, I've been a slacker on taking pictures of the changes and additions. But I'm back. Really. No, for reals. I pinky swear it.)

Almost, But --

Almost, but not quite. I finished The Almost Moon last week, and can't really say if I liked it or not. I'm leaning toward not, but I should point out that once the book hooked me, I found it (almost) compulsively readable. And I'm not saying "almost" parenthetically to be cute, but honestly -- I wanted to read it, and yet didn't, too.

I was hoping that I'd have a more clear-cut reaction to this book than I did to Sebold's blockbuster The Lovely Bones, another book that I whipped right through, yet also had pretty mixed feelings about (especially the end). The Lovely Bones is sort of my go-to book that I use as an example of why I don't join up with my MOMS book club: yes, it's dark, yes it's about a young girl who was murdered and who narrates the story from Up There, but really, is it that hard to take, or that hard a read? Yet time and again I hear murmurings from women I know who found it so bleak so disturbing, so hard to take, etc.

Please. And yeah, maybe it's my snobby bookworm with an MFA self coming through loud and clear here, but....puh-leeze. You want dark and disturbing, go read Denis Johnson's Angels and get back to me on whatcha think. Or how about some of that pervy drunkard Bukowski served up with the chardonnay and brie?

The Almost Moon is dark, too (much darker) and also has a death at the center of it's story. In this book, the first-person narrator, Helen Knightly, murders her elderly and infirm mother at the end of the first chapter, and the rest of the book is comprised of her actions over the next 24 hours, with lots of flashbacks so that the reader can piece together the past relationship between the disturbed, mentally ill mother and her only child.

The fact that Helen, and by extension the book itself, is brutal and dark and driven isn't really my gripe here, although, yes, it's hard to call Helen likable by any stretch, especially after she sleeps with her best friend's grown son (not even counting the actual murder and hauling of her mom's carcass down the basement steps to the meat freezer). Helen's voice is just so flat and without affect, it makes the book tough going. And I suppose this voice is supposed to reflect how she was beaten down and hurt by her mother's problems and rages over the years, but still, it did not make for a sympathetic heroine. Not that a a heroine necessarily must be sympathetic to make a novel work, but still -- eh. What I did relate to was Helen's sense of being an outsider, an Other, in the world at large, compared to the insanity and dysfunction (and the slick and smiling hiding of it from the neighbors) that lurked each day behind her parent's front door.

I'd like (hope) to write a post soon about a book that I'm just wild about, but I'm not sure when that will happen. I could go back to the very end of last year, and tell you how much I enjoyed Case Histories and the odd yet very appealing Origin, by Diane Abu-Jaber. (Now there was a page turner.) (And come to find out, the author was RIGHT here in town reading and discussing this novel at the our new library late last year, and I missed it! Damn. I need to take advantage of what little culture we get in this town.)

You Gotta Have Friends....

Sometimes I think I could write a whole book on the subject of friendship. I think about it a lot. More than the average person, I'm pretty sure. On the other hand -- what I don't know or understand about friendship could easily fill a book.

I felt a little bad today, thinking about my snarky "friends vs. acquaintances" comments in yesterday's post. First, I realized that one of my friends actually did call me when we were all sick. (I guess now isn't the time to bring up the fact that she just needed to pick up an item at my house and unwittingly got sucked into listening to me whine about how terrible and blah we all felt.) Second, while I could blather on for a lot more words here weighing the semantics of "friends" vs. "neighbors" vs. "thrown into this mess of motherhood together," the fact remains that right now, I have more "friends" that I've had in my entire adult life. Or, actually, in my whole life, ever. Huh. That makes me feel a little weird.

Let's change the subject. Sorta.

So the picture of Bette Midler is up there because often when I find myself ruminating on the subject of friendship, I end up singing her song, "You Got to Have Friends" in my head. That album (or was it an 8-track?) that this song is on was played a whole lot in my house growing up. Both of my parents were big Bette Midler fans, back when she was a raunchy showgirl with a big voice, and not the woman known for starring in Beaches and singing that groaner, "Wind Beneath My Wings."

"Standing at the end of the road, boys
Waiting for my new friends to come,
Oh, I don't care if I'm hungry or freezin' cold
I gotta get me some of them!
Cuz you gotta have frieeeeennnds....!"

This was one of the many, many songs that formed the soundtrack of my childhood. The funny thing is, my parents, or my mom specifically, never did, and never has, had any friends. Oh, she had plenty of work pals, or gals I should say (that's her word, and it still sorta makes me cringe with embarrassment to use it, just like I did when said it back then). When I was fifteen or sixteen, my mom had quite a few gals from her office that she would have drinks with on Fridays after work, and often during the middle of the week, too. None of these women were the type of friends that she could call upon the phone just to shoot the shit with, and none were ever invited to our house, unless you count a handful of quick potty breaks. As far I can recall, she never visited at their homes, either.

What I'm trying to say here is that I grew up in a household where it was perfectly normal to me that a grown woman did not have a single friend to call her own, outside of her two sisters, my aunts. My grandmother, my mom's mother, didn't have any friends either. And that was the way it should be. What my grandma did have was three daughters, my mother and two aunts, and the four of them seemed to (and still do) spend significant amounts of their lives calling each other on the phone and bitching about the other three. Bitch, bitch, bitch, gossip, gossip, gossip. This is all I've ever known, all I ever had to pattern myself after. Is it any wonder that I often feel so conflicted and confused about my own friendships, both past and present? For so many years growing up, I literally sat at my mother's feet of a Saturday morning and listened to endless variations on, "Oh really? I didn't know that! She didn't tell ME....Well you KNOW how she is. She'll never change." Etc., etc.

Holy crap. Really, I'm pretty lucky that anyone will talk to me at all, now that I think about it.

Like I said, I think about this stuff a lot. And I could go on and on and tell some pretty awful tales on myself and my friends, of past behaviors and lies told and trusts betrayed. However.

It's just about 11 o'clock at night -- time to go to bed and read more of the novel I'll write about soon. And it's another busy day tomorrow: after dropping Lily at school and coming home to clear the breakfast dishes, Tucker and I have a playgroup to attend, where I'll get to sit and share some hot coffee and conversation with some of my
(spit it out, spit it out...)

friends.