What have I been doing?

What have I been doing since January 2, 2012? What have I been doing? Hell, I don’t know.

I’ve been working [here], and [here]. Both volunteering and  working [here]. I’ve been living [here].

Moved to a new (much-improved) apartment [here]. Walking the riverfront.

portland riverfront spring walking home
This is what my walk home from work looked like recently. Now it’s much sunnier.

Walking the close-in East side of Portland and loving every minute of it. Met all kinds of cool and interesting people.

portland kerns springtime flowering trees
I live in a neighborhood that looks like this in the spring.

Traveled to Montana (more than four times, less than ten). Took day trips around Oregon looking at rocks. Flew to Arizona for sun and softball and Sista-time. Went camping in Eastern Oregon. Went to Las Vegas for a weekend with high school friends. Crocheted a few bags, a few scarves, a belt and some wristers. Sort-of loved and didn’t really lose. Lived through my first (business) IRS audit. Had a lot of deeply crazy dreams. Saw Amanda Palmer and Alanis Morissette and Sugarland in concert. Figured out what was causing the pain in my shoulder/back and made it (mostly) go away. Had an old friend come visit me for a whole weekend. Paid off my credit cards (all of them). Threw myself a birthday party for the first time in a decade or more.

Met Cheryl Strayed (Dear Sugar) twice and Lidia Yuknavitch once. Saw Glen Duncan and William Gibson (again) at Powell’s.  Read innumerable words on the internet. Proofed two books. Wrote six book reviews.

And read 156 books in 477 days. That works out to be one book every 3.06 days.

Good books. Great books. Decent books. The last book in the Wheel of Time series (finally. And also sadly). New (great) books by long-time favorite authors (Kingsolver, Erdrich, Bharati Mukherjee). Fantastic books by new-favorite authors (Glen Duncan, Lidia Yuknavitch, Tupelo Hassman). Books that blew my mind (Debt by Graeber), broke my heart (The Fault of Our Stars – Green), make me laugh (Redshirts – Scalzi), made me angry (Z – Fowler), and made me happy to be alive (well, all of them).

Seems like a good use of one and one-third years. But maybe I could spend just a bit more time writing for this blog in the 15 months coming up.

What have you been doing?

Alone in a Crowd – The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall

The Lonely Polygamist is a strange sort of book. And I mean that in a good way. A man with four wives, part of a Mormon-offshoot sect, who is ineffectual and bumbling. And falling in love with a woman who is not (one of) his wives. Oh yeah, and lonely. Udall treats this “alternative lifestyle” with delicacy and respect (ha! am loving the opportunity to lump this old-style Mormon cult in w/the LGBT community!).  In the end, we are all just humans, shaped and damaged by our upbringing and trying to find peace and happiness in our lives.

I liked a lot of things about this book, and I really liked the way it ended. I did think it went on a bit longer than necessary in some sections.  I loved that we got to know the title character, Golden, as well as one wife, and one child (not of that wife) closely, to give a well-rounded picture of the family dynamics, and some of the many ways you can be lonely in a family w/more than 30 people in it. Because, as we’ve all heard before, it is sometimes lonelier to be with people than it is to be alone.

The Lonely Polygamist also has something to say about the rewards (and possible risks) of taking initiative, owning your responsibilities and pursuing your dreams (not your impulses). The picture of a chaotic family home (whether you have one mom or four) rings true and brings humor to the sometimes-depressing narrative of a man who (of course) must hit bottom before he can see his way clear to make a better choice.

The book made me bawl like a baby at one point (near the end, I won’t spoil it for ya) though in my defense, it was 2 am. If it had been earlier, I may have just bawled like a woman in her 40s.

This book includes a lot of info about nuclear bomb testing in the Utah/New Mexico area for a decade in the 50s/early 60s.  I admit I’d heard of these tests but knew very little about the details. This book shocked me with some of the (google-search verified) historically accurate details regarding the fall-out of above-ground nuclear (!) testing near populated areas. (I was going to say ‘on U.S. soil’, but exactly who’s soil would it be ‘ok’ to test this stuff on?!). Golden’s father made it big by finding uranium in Utah, and several of the main characters were injured in one big test gone bad.

I should probably add – I was thrilled to finish the book, because I’d picked up Absolute Sandman #1 by Neil Gaiman at the library and COULD NOT WAIT to read it.  And it was awesome, and too short (only 20 issues? 9 of which I’d read before? Where is Absolute Sandman #2 already!?).

Extremely Sad & Incredibly Wonderful

I read Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer again this week and fell in love with it all over again.

I heard about the book from a fellow student in my Studies in Fiction class.  I never did thank her for that, or tell her how much I loved the book.  We were reading Pattern Recognition by William Gibson and Falling Man by Don DeLillo in class – two books that deal with the aftermath of 9/11 in New York.  Emily did not like either of them (both of which I loved) and recommended EL&IC.

EL&IC is probably the most powerful, stunning, achingly sad book I’ve ever read – and I’m a fan of beautifully sad books.  Some are more lyrical (The God of Small Things by Arundhati  Roy comes to mind), and some more profound (such as The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje)  but this book allows you to experience the sadness of an 9-year-old boy who’s lost his father in the Twin Towers.   It also touches on the losses his family experienced in WWII that are not so far removed from the present as you’d imagine.  It is a map of heartbreak and guilt and loss that seemed abundantly human and intimately personal. I cried hard, more than once, and it helps me believe that personal redemption is possible and I can survive almost anything if this young boy can find a way to survive what happened to him.  Everyone in the world should read it.

Ain’t she a beauty…

I think the best literature is that which attempts to bring the basic human experience to light.  I know that there is a different story for every individual person on this big ball of dirt, but the inner workings of all 6.5 million of them are not terribly different – only the circumstances.  We all love, hate, cry, laugh, eat, sleep and struggle.  The best writers can tell you things about yourself and your fellow human beings that you didn’t know you already knew.  On Beauty by Zadie Smith is one of those.

On Beauty is the story of a family.   There are lots of details about this family I could tell you – the mother is a black Americanwoman from the south and the father is a white Englishman.  The husband is a professor of Art Criticism who is very cerebral, the wife is a hospital administrator who is very emotional. They have three children who are smart and funny and very, very different.  They live in the Boston area.  The children are all in their late teens-early 20s.  The marriage is going through a rough patch.

But those are just facts.  They are sharply depicted but merely the backdrop on which this novel is painted.  The title is On Beauty, and that beauty comes in lots of flavors here, but they ultimately lead back to the central beauty – love.  Not sappy romantic love – real-life, hard-core, everyday all day love.  Husbands, wives, children, siblings, parents, family, friends.  The love that ties them together, causes them pain and heals their wounds.  It wrenches the heart and makes it new.  Smith shows us how love looks – how it cannot exist without pain and forgiveness and clarity and commitment.

In case I’ve been unclear up to this point, let me just state for the record – I love this book. I love it for a dozen reasons – the writing is fabulous, the family dynamics are powerfully and painfully accurate in detail and texture.  It takes place on a college campus full of over-educated brainiacs who use the ‘cancer of their intellect’ to avoid facing their emotions (as I did for much of my life).  All its characters are beautifully flawed human beings.  But the reason this book will remain on my shelf forever (now that I finally own it) is because of one passage.

I read this book several years ago (it was published in 2005) and wrote this passages down in a journal I have for quotes that resonate powerfully within me.  This one is a favorite out of those – one that, while I can’t quote it word-for-word, I never forget is in there.

The three siblings in the book (aged 16 to 22) have just bumped into each other serendipitously on a street corner, and to celebrate they go have coffee together.  The oldest brother, Jerome – just back from college for the holidays – is basking in the happy glow of being with his siblings:

Before the world existed, before it was populated, and before there were wars and jobs and colleges and movies and clothes and opinions and foreign travel – before all of these things there had been only one person, Zora, and only one place: a tent in the living room made from chairs and bed-sheets.  After a few years, Levi arrived: space was made for him; it was as if he had always been.  Looking at them both now, Jerome found himself in their finger joints and neat conch ears, in their long legs and wild curls. He heard himself in their partial lisps caused by puffy tongues vibrating against slightly noticeable buckteeth.  He did not consider if or how or why he loved them. They were just love: they were the first evidence he ever had of love, and they would be the last confirmation of love when everything else fell away.

Makes me tear up every time I read it.  This passage made me feel guilty for not giving my son siblings.  It makes me want to pick up the phone and call my sisters and tell them I love them.  I’ve never read anything that comes close to portraying how being a sibling feels to me.  And I want to thank Zadie Smith for that gift, and share it with all of you.

Population: fantastic

I have lately become a fan of memoirs – recently popularized by writers such as Augusten Burroughs and David SedarisBarbara Kingsolver wrote a kind of garden memoir in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I loved, and Rebecca Walker wrote a powerful childhood memoir titled Black White Jewish.  So I have been paying more attention to this kind of book, and when I heard about Population: 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, I put in on hold at the library. (I try not to buy every book that looks half-way interesting, keeps me from running out of gas money every week).  I have know a few people who are volunteer fire and rescue folk – and most of them live in small towns – so I thought a writer’s view of the experience might be interesting.  And since the blurb says he had recently moved back to his hometown before joining its volunteer crew, there seemed to be all kinds of potential for great story-telling.  And this book did indeed deliver.

Being a person prone to introspection, the memoir genre allows me to watch others ruminate about their own thoughts and reactions to the events in their lives.  Not all memoirs are created equal, of course, and different lives result in very different books.  Population: 485 is less navel-gazing that the average memoir, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.  Michael Perry is from Wisconsin and spent some time ‘cowboying’ in Wyoming (says the blurb on the book), so this is not the story of an urban man and his neuroses, but a small-town boy returning to that small town after seeing the world – and happy to be doing so.

Perry does a great job of connecting himself and the folks around him to the landscape – in a way that resonates on a very basic level – and reminds me of my own trips back to the small town I grew up in.  When he goes running, he relives the myriad events of his childhood that occurred on each particular street and corner, overlaid by the fire and rescue calls of adulthood.  So one street may be where he received a scar as a young, rough-playing boy, the next a house where he wasn’t able to save an elderly man after a heart attack.  Each is treated with vivid detail and adept delicacy.  These are not the essays of a hero in his own mind, but a man humbled by the trust placed in him by his community.  And someone who knows that laughing at your own screw-ups is the only way to keep your sanity when life throws you a curve.

As I hurry to finish this book before I need to return it to the library (thinking phrases like ‘the writing isn’t great but is good, author really gives you a sense of what the experience of fire and rescue is like for him’), I had almost decide that it was a decent book but nothing outstanding.  But that was before it made me cry, and then made me bawl like a baby.  I’m sure it won’t have that effect on everyone.  But Perry clearly understand grief and has the chops to make you feel it if you have any inclination towards visceral empathy.

When he describes the quiet grief of a man – a stranger to him – who has lost a child, I teared up.  I have a child, and Perry’s gentle descriptions were heartbreaking without a hint of being over-wrought.  But it was the passages regarding the loss of his young sister-in-law that make it impossible for me to see the words on the page (both his as I read and these as I attempt to write them).

My sister lost her husband to a drunk-driving accident 3 and ½ years ago, and the picture this man paints – of a husband who responds to an accident scene where his new wife has been hit, how his mother is there performing CPR as his brother blows air into his own wife’s injured lungs, how they are surrounded by the friends and family who make up the volunteer crew, and later the professionals arrive and pronounce her dead there on the soil they both spent their lives on – these are some of the most heart-breaking and emotionally charged sentences I’ve ever read. I admit, my situation makes them more personal to me, but this is a book that brings life – and death – remarkably up close and personal.

I would not characterize this book as a tear-jerker (though it made me cry) or a comic story (though it made me laugh).  This book does what the best stories – whether so-called non-fiction or the truly fictitious – do so well, put all the experiences of one life into words that allow us to recognize our own. I wouldn’t call him a favorite author after only one book, but I will certainly be checking out his other books to see if they measure up to this one.