I just finished reading Home by Marilynne Robinson. It was a closer look at some of the people in Gilead. A bit darker than Gilead (not as dark as Housekeeping, though) but just as insightful. Robinson is an amazing writer.
The kids and I saw footprints in the snow one morning before school. We hadn’t seen any animals around, so it was a mystery how they got there. We’ve had various critters around — deer, skunk, raccoon. It would be interesting to figure out what had wandered around our house in the snow.
After school, we went out to track the prints. They stopped with tire tracks. Did Pappa have an animal in his pickup? We didn’t think so. They went a little ways past the garage but not all the way down the driveway. They stopped before the snow in the yard. We saw them along the side of the house, though, to the door into the garage. I remembered feeling horrible for the delivery guy who had to tromp through the snow I hadn’t had time to clear yet. Aha! The delivery guy. He must have had a dog. Mystery solved.
I don’t get Wanda Sykes.
I’m surprised at how much I enjoy The Deep End.
Who wouldn’t want an Italian villa?
Best thing about watching OL figure skating? Scott Hamilton.
My kids think I’m cool because I once sat next to a real princess on a plane.
Magpie Musing makes me think. She also makes me happy. She’s inspired me (again), this time to think about what makes me happy. Here’s a list.
“Nothing is more human than a book.” ~ Marilynne Robinson, The Paris Review, Issue 186, Fall 2008.
Our next Read a Million Minutes book was Pancakes, Pancakes! by Eric Carle. This is one of my son’s favorite authors.
Our next Read a Million Minutes selection was Snow Day! by Patricia Lakin. Fun read and appropriate for our winter.
Our next Read a Million Minutes book was Dewey: There’s a Cat in the Library! by Vicki Myron and Bret Witter, illustrated by Steve James. This was a SHE WRITES book. It’s also the children’s version of Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World.
And the bench? Was tasty.
*BURP*
I just finished reading Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson. Wow. Could it be any more different than Gilead? I don’t think so. Gilead was about a dying man writing to his son, yet each page was filled with joy and hope. Housekeeping was about two sisters growing up together, and each page was filled with abandonment, separation, growing apart and dark, dark, dark things. It was SO sad and depressing.
No matter what the topic, though, Robinson is a master at putting words together. Just a few quotes that stood out for me.
It was a source of both terror and comfort to me then that I often seemed invisible — incompletely and minimally existent, in fact. It seemed to me that I made no impact on the world, and that in exchange I was privileged to watch it unawares.
Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, ‘Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.’ Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.
I hated waiting. If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectation. I expected — an arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hit in its shadows.
Then there is the matter of my mother’s abandonment of me. Again, this is the common experience. They walk ahead of us, and walk too fast, and forget us, they are so lost in thoughts of their own, and soon or late they disappear. The only mystery is that we expect it to be otherwise.
I’m reading her book Home right now.
