Sue me. I love Peyton Place.

Our friend Leila often spends holidays with us and brings interesting videos when she comes. On Christmas day this year, after the Big Dinner with my folks, we came back and watched an episode of David Halberstam's documentary series, The 'Fifties.

Specifically, we watched the episode about Grace Metalious and her phenomenal bestseller, Peyton Place.

I'd never before felt any interest in Metalious or her book, but her personal story grabbed me. Her complete lack of emotional or educational background for writing, and her determination to do it anyway, drew me in. And then, she didn't just do what her soul longed to do, she did it successfully, at least in terms of sales and celebrity. And never had more than a moment's happiness from it.

Possibly because of the endless TV series, which seemed to be on nearly every night when I was a kid and bored me then, I'd also never had any desire to read the novel. My assumption was that it was both trashy and tame, an artifact of its time that may have been an "adult book" in 1956, but had neither the wickedness nor the literary merit to make it interesting reading now.


I was wrong.

Not entirely. The book is amazing and often awful. It's a crazy-quilt of the lurid, the overly campy, and the insightful. Some of the vignettes in it delighted me, and the best of those are the smallest, not big plot points.

In an early one, two friends, twelve-year-old girls, spend an afternoon together. That's it. Allison is from an (outwardly, but with secrets) proper home. Selena is from an abusive home in a tarpaper shack on the wrong side of the tracks. Their friendship depends on their shared dream of a someday in which each can control her own destiny. But on this occasion, Allison wants to share with Selena a previously hidden aspect of her inner life. She wants them to take, not the usual walk downtown where they buy Silver Screen magazine and dream of pretty dresses in store windows, but one to the wooded glen where Allison goes to daydream about a bohemian literary future. Allison and Selena both feel like outsiders. The glen, outside of and above the town, is Allison's symbol of how outsider status can be superiority, a breaking away. Selena wants to achieve insider status, and can't relate at all to this place or its meaning for Allison.

The afternoon is a disaster. They wander back downtown. In a little chapter in which the pacing is crucial to the depiction of these two mending their friendship by reentering the part of their lives that they can meet in, Metalious nails it. Through ordinary window shopping and ice cream, they gradually find common ground again and part as friends, but as friends who have grown up a small notch by confronting their separateness.

This isn't the only passage in the novel that Metalious handles with intelligence and delicacy. Sometimes she takes you through a character's thought processes, as he or she wrestles with a big inner conflict. The town doctor, a good man, has to help the completely innocent Selena, who has been raped by her stepfather, and faces the ugliness of both of his choices. The nurse he enlists to help him has a little chapter of her own, the only few pages she gets in the book, but the whole interplay of her religious faith, her professionalism, her admiration for the doctor, her astute perception of his conflict, her knowledge that she's made a decision herself and can't pin it on anyone else -- all this makes her real.

This isn't a book review, in the sense of my trying to be Fair and Balanced. I'm neglecting the novel's flaws. It's intentional, because they are well-known, its reputation bad and its merits neglected.

So. I love Metalious's affection for her main character, Allison, yet her willingness to make gentle fun of Allison's earnestness, immaturity and melodrama.

I love the dialog between Allison and the repressed, pale, poetic boy she likes, on a picnic, where their conversation is about beliefs, plans, picnic garbage, sex information from a secretly-purchased mail-order book, all braided together with skilful naturalness.

The violent and awful passages can range from so-so to ghastly, but Metalious did know how to weave such passages over and then under again, with a quiet aftermath. Selena has worked hard to make their poor little shack into a home, and places a fresh log on the fire one winter night -- then gets attacked by, and kills, her stepfather. As she comes out of that trauma-induced altered state, she notices that "the fire made a crisp, crackling, friendly sound as the log she had placed across the andirons began to burn," and that this was all the time that had passed.

There aren't a whole lot of such nifty little passages. She was no Harper Lee, and the weird and grotesque in this little town don't come off with anything like the insight or compassion that a better novelist could have brought to it.

The deck was stacked against Grace Metalious from an early age and still she fought to become a real writer, and had the brains to do it. She set out to be sensational, and succeeded, but she also set out to write well, and did in places. She understood both description and dialog, and how to flesh out character and event using both. I read this thing and it nearly breaks my heart, the "if onlys" of her life and her achievement. With the support and direction that guide and train a writer, she could have been absolutely fantastic, and it shows in her awful-yet-wonderful, rather amazing novel.

So maybe I don't love Peyton Place so much as I love its author for her determination to be who she wanted to be against all odds, and for her even succeeding at it, not in fame but in the novel's Yes! moments.


OK, maybe I really do love Peyton Place.

Because they can.

In 2002 I had an abdominal cat scan. It cost 900.00.

In 2006 I had the exact same scan. (I'm fine. The conclusion is arthritis in my hip joint.) This time it cost 3600.

Why? Because they can. Pricing is not based on what the market will bear. No, wait, it is, actually, but when you are faced with a threat to your life, what price, exactly, will you not "bear"?

And that's if they let you go into debt to pay it.

Our older daughter, who has Crohn's disease, needs 16 pills a day to keep her stable and able to lead a fairly normal life. Because she has been on low hourly wages, and in fact is currently unemployed, we pay the 500 or so per month to keep her on them. Without that medication her colon will ulcerate. She will become infected, anemic, dehydrated, malnourished. Untreated, she will die.

Ulceration happens within days of interrupting the meds. Once the disease flares up, that does not simply end when she resumes meds. Instead, a course of steroids is needed to transition her back onto the regular meds, and a lengthy healing of the damage must be accommodated with more medication and nutritional help. And that's if the ulceration does not require hospitalization.

A year ago, her medication refills ran out and she phoned her doctor. His appointment staff informed her that he could not renew her prescriptions unless she came in for an office visit. This is the responsible practice of medicine -- the patient should be seen so that adjustments to treatment can be made. The right regimen last year may need tweaking this year. She asked to make an appointment.

No, she was told. She had an outstanding balance of about 500.00, and he would not see her until it was paid. No one knew better than he that this would put her in crisis within days.

She was paying Long Island rent of 1200 a month on an hourly-wage job. She did not have 500.00. She had visited the office several times for lab work, which she paid each time, and had never been told of this balance or given a chance to pay it over time. Now, unless she made a single full payment, she could not make the appointment. Without the appointment, she could not have the meds.

Without the meds she would become dangerously ill quite fast. We took it out of our account, along with the Overnight Express fee.

So do I want some silly government that can't even make its own form fit into its own return envelope running my health care system?

Such questions are an outrage. Lose your insurance, and then have a serious illness or an accident. Watch the doors slam: Medicaid, no; partner's employer, no; Disability, no. Watch your provider refuse care. Does National Health look a whole lot better now?

Like many things, it would be better than our daughter's situation, and worse than the situation that the people who still have good plans are in. If we were a sane nation, we'd be finding a good solution under which nobody would get lousy care or no care at all. Waiting until crisis mode creates emotion-fueled, hasty implementation of flawed cures. Didn't we learn squat about the dangers of that in the past? But again we're keeping the status quo on life support, again we're delaying.

And conservative bloggers are helping that happen with their affectedly precious garbage about how government can't do anything but screw up folding questionnaires and build Bridges To Nowhere.

Those of us for whom health care horror stories aren't just newspaper feature articles but living realities will be, I think, forgiven by humorous bloggers for not having much sense of humor about it, but mocking extremes is a time-honored humor tradition and even I really do understand that.

My problem is that I know, and am surprised that more people do not know, that it's not just benign humor. It's unpaid labor on behalf of BigProfitHealth.

BigProfitHealth needs for the status quo to go on as long as possible. They make sure that only the extreme scenarios of health care reform get talked about. If you want a particular answer, then make sure you control the question:

Do you want no-choice totalitarianism? Delays while tumors grow? Forced abortions? Politicians will set your leg, bureaucrats will cut you open, pharmacists will no longer know the difference between benedryl and belladonna!

Am I being just as silly and over-the-top as the conservatives? Sure, paper-pushers will create a bureaucratic mess, but no one has explained why doctors won't know medicine as well, or why pharmacists will be more likely to make mistakes.

Does anybody really have such a naïve lollipops-and-gumdrops view of for-profit health care as to think it doesn't exert plenty of pressure for fewer people to do more work on longer shifts, to pander to the Sacred Bottom Line? Causing nasty mistakes? Could anyone not know what a blind-maze runaround of bureaucracy people get thrown into right now, to get into programs for which they're technically eligible?

But sincere, good people become convinced that Big Socialism is coming and is a danger to their loved ones. And then those sincere, good people work for BigProfitHealth for free, circulating the cute memes for them, which helps keep the general public wary of change and slows reasoned reform to a crawl.

The other thing they don't know is that BigProfitHealth does not give a tinker's damn about them. A simple change in life circumstances is all it takes. BigProfitHealth will pulp its beloved blogger supporters into Soylent Green the day they can't get any more pecuniary benefit out of them. Seriously, lose your job. Sit in that miserable desert with your sick child and strike that goddamned rock till you're blue in the face, and see if BigProfitHealth issues you one crapping drop of water from it. You've defended BigProfitHealth, even if you thought you were only questioning total socialism, and now they. do. not. care.

The world is particularly scary right now, with jobs evaporating and the possibility of losing everything far too much on the minds of people who should be secure, whose hard work and responsible living should pay off in a decent well-earned life.

In a scary world we get overwhelmed and focus on the bad-enough problems on our own plates. We want to make easy choices between either/or scenarios.

The reality on the ground is that those of us who watch suffering and death happen at the hands of medical price gougers don't want stupidity, inefficiency, "rationing" or any other alternative that will merely hurt different people. And believe it or not, we know that to oppose universal or government subsidized care doesn't mean someone wants us and our children harmed either.

The free market is a good thing. It works pretty well for almost any commodity that gives consumers choices. They can choose among competitors, they can say no. And the value of a commodity or a service can find its level that way.

Health care may be the one and the only commodity that can't be free-marketed. How do you value health care?

The question is, how do you value your own, or your child's life? Because THAT is the "commodity" that they are selling to you. Is there any amount that they cannot ask? They price it all the way they can. Because they can.

What exactly are the choices? In a case in which you must have the money in a lump sum, do you even have a choice?

If you have the choice and can get treated with a resulting debt that will bankrupt you, should you "choose" to say no and die?

Do. not. ever. tell me that there's anything remotely humane or decent, much less "Christian" about the idea that any provider is entitled to immense wealth -- I'm not talking fair profit, I'm talking obscene riches -- and to let someone who can't fork over die when that provider has the knowledge to save them. If anything besides Big Government can stop the price-gouging, let's hear about it, but don't tell me that health care pricing right now is one whit different from selling disaster victims 50 dollar gallons of water.

No excitement here

News of 16,000 acres lost to a wildfire just north of us has friends emailing and ringing the phone to see if we're OK, and in case you've seen it in the news, the answer is yes - we're fine!

The fire is about 30 minutes' drive north of us, plus it's on the other side of the Inland Waterway, and has little effect on us, except to create anxiety among all the animals when the wind shifts and blows smoke this way. There's some serious devastation up there though, some people losing everything. The fire seems to have spared a posh, tree-denuded, pseudo-Mediterranean horror of a development, and swept through wild areas and middle-income housing instead, which bites. This is a nasty one.

In the unlikely event that it should come anywhere near here -- or that a similar fire should start nearby -- we're ready with hoses and packing lists and cat carriers.

Hope they're getting the thing under control.

It's Helen Forrest's birthday

I looked up Helen Forrest's birth date (April 12, 1917 - July 11, 1999) quite awhile ago, so I could do a blog post for it, and didn't realize at the time that it coincides with Easter this year. Well, a happy and blessed Easter to all, and if you like the Big Band sound, consider this a holiday treat that has no sugar or calories. If you're not into Big Band then go listen to something else. 8~)

Helen sang with three of the greatest bands. She found Benny Goodman rather a pill to work for, as did quite a few others. She thought Artie Shaw was a terrific boss, and she was in love with Harry James, though she lost him to Betty Grable. Her bio is here.

In honor of her birthday, here's my Helen Forrest YouTube playlist of some of the best that they have. There's not much to see in most of these, just music to listen to. Several use the same slideshow for their visuals, or have no visuals at all, though a couple have nice footage.

These are old recordings. SOUND QUALITY VARIES from track to track, and I'm sorry for it, because it would be nice to be able to just "play all" without the volume variations, or the scratches and pops.

Because some of the rougher tracks have pops, scratches and hum that some listeners might find painful, I've made a second "short list" that leaves off the ones with the poorer sound quality.

I found that starting with the volume control at about 75% makes the rougher tracks listenable, and allows the low-volume "You Made Me Love You" to sound clear enough -- but that one is better if it's jacked up a bit. I couldn't resist putting it in.

Here's the full playlist, 11 tracks. The red asterisks indicate tracks with quality problems that have been left off the 7-item "short list."

Perfidia - with Benny Goodman

I've Heard that Song Before - with Harry James

All the Things You Are - with Artie Shaw

You Made Me Love You - with James

Then a two-fer, 2 songs in one Goodman/Forrest clip:
* Taking a Chance on Love (SCRATCHY, but I like it so much!) and
* Cabin in the Sky (equally scratchy)

I Don't Want to Walk Without You - with James.

*Deep Purple - a Shaw/Forrest standard. This choppy clip leaves something to be desired, but I thought it was the better choice. The only other complete version I could find on YouTube is a 78rpm that has such a jarring skip that I couldn't stand it. So I used this very good but truncated version from the film Symphony of Swing (with a silly bit of film drama. That lady would have to be 100 years old in 1939, to clothe her reminiscence in that antebellum dress, but Gone with the Wind imagery was the big thing that year.)

Comes Love - with Shaw. I love this song! "See your dentist right away."

Skylark - with James

*I Had the Craziest Dream - with James. Terribly scratchy, but with some great "G. I. Jive" broadcast material. I wanted to close with this one because Forrest used it as the title of her autobiography.

--

If you have time or desire to listen to only one, I'd say, make it Skylark. A less perceptive singer would have overdone that plaintive quality, but she uses a subtle hint of it, and I find it kind of haunting. And she makes it sound easy, which it ain't!

Hey, if it worked once...

"Only" a weed

No matter how hard I try to be grouchy in the morning, it's difficult when Larry starts my day by handing me a pretty bouquet.


Linaria canadensis, AKA: Toadflax.

This common, beautiful "weed" is all over the yard and on days like this, I crave a camera that would do really good closeups. Each flower is perfection, yet smaller than a baby lima.

Here's my artificially enhanced, and still lousy, closeup:

but for a good look, go here.

A ramble

A friend gave me a copy of Eat, Pray, Love and I thought I'd give it a shot. Gilbert has a nice witty writing style, but I kept thinking, "This woman is infantile, self-centered and nuts!"

Then I realized that during the time she's writing about, she is exactly the age I was when I was infantile, self-centered and nuts. 34. The early part of such a journey will, has to, seem that way. When you start with practically no inner life, you can easily strike out at your outer life, get selfish, hurt people. What's good about her story is not her initial lunacy, but her decision not to get stuck there. Progress is what matters, and progress takes a
l-o-o-o-ng blasted time.

This photo is from around March 1988. I'm 34 years old, about 3 months sober, and have that new-to-the-program stare: "How did I get here? What in the world do I do now?"


At the time I thought (oh so wrongly!) that nothing had changed. Relationships were an emotional puzzlement. My need to feel capable and confident was still unfulfilled but I no longer even believed that substances could meet that need.

In 1988 I am in emotional kindergarten and I want to be Graduated and have a new life right now.

I went to meetings and looked around me. One who really seemed to have her act together was "Meg."

I've been thinking about her lately. "Meg" and "Jim" were relative newlyweds in their late 30's. Each had 3 kids from failed former marriages. They got into the program, found each other, and formed a family. They had a baby, and I confess I watched the progression of her pregnancy with a mixture of envy and horror. Seven children! She joked about her lousy childhood and how The Sound of Music had been her unattainable fantasy of home and family, and now here she was, probably trying to act out the film. They had a lovely sunny house and the cutest von Trapp Family-style Christmas card you ever saw, and she still had emotional problems. But she went to meetings and talked about them and faced them. She acknowledged her need for real therapy, and found a shrink with strong medical credentials. That's what you do. Pretend everything's hunky-dory, quit your support network, and that's when you get into trouble. She seemed to be doing it right.

I went to lunch with her one day, and unloaded about my then-boyfriend. "He is cute, isn't he?" she said to me with a wry grin, and I found myself reading this statement as a smart assessment that I needed to put my brain in charge and judge whether it really could become what I was looking for.

This might have been her meaning, or it very well might have been early stirrings of my own mind coming back to life. Maybe both. Meg's life deteriorated later, but if I've learned anything, I've learned that that in no way means she lacked smarts and insight. We're a patchwork of sanity and craziness, all of us who are getting our marbles back.

If my own smarts and good judgment were indeed stirring to life, the stirrings were very early because I put a lot more years into trying to hammer bad fits -- friends, lovers, career -- into what I wanted them to be. There are still days when a nice toxic dose of regret will reactivate in my mind, like a mental malaria, but with decreasing frequency. Other days, I breathe deeply and tell myself that I took the time I needed to take in order to learn what I absolutely had to learn.

The photo is a moment in time. A few years later things were radically different. I was getting my marbles back. Meg began to have dissociative episodes, a schizophrenia-like hallucinatory illness, or some deeply buried memories of some serious childhood trauma. She disappeared from the group and rumors were vague as to diagnosis or prognosis. She and Jim split and she was at one point found wandering the streets hundreds of miles away. But no moment-in-time situation is the end of the story. My last news of her is at least 16 years old. It may sound batty to hope that she's found her way back to herself and to a happy life but I have, honest-to-God, seen it happen, and several times. I know people who have overcome wreckage the likes of which I've never had to crawl out of. It's a matter of willingness to take time, time, time to grow up, and not feel too lousy about starting so blasted late.

Meanwhile, back at the book, I keep thinking of an earlier book of poetry, by a poet I've written about before. Like Gilbert's book, it's about both travel and an inner journey, about food and beauty and inner longing and a joyous embrace of life, and it seems better centred and less immature. Gilbert is OK, she has something to say, but I think Miller did it a little better.

So much great stuff to read online!

And me with burning, watering eyes from pollen allergies. The stuff is bad this year. My eyes reject the glare of the computer screen after a few minutes.

So I'm on a program of "environmental formula" eye drops (Moisturizing only. Not the redness removal kind. Very unhealthy, those!) and drifting away under the headphones with my eyes closed for substantial stretches of time. I'm ready for the pollen to Go Away.

Mini-autumn

It's time for our annual lowcountry mini-autumn. Live Oak trees -- mature trees, but not the young ones -- shed their leaves and grow them back within a couple weeks. Each has its own schedule. This one's early, most others around are still green or just getting started. On Wednesday, it was green. Thursday morning, it was golden and shedding everywhere. If I'd known that today would be cloudy, I'd have photographed it yesterday when the sun on the gold leaves was quite beautiful!

The names have been changed

Thanks to a link on mojo's blog, I've seen a commercial that I just love, but that song! O, that song. Not only does it refuse to leave my head, but it takes me back to summer camp.

I've sometimes encountered songs I ought to know, and people who give me puzzled looks. "But didn't you go to summer camp?" they ask, when I say that the song is unfamiliar.

Oh, I did. Boy did I. Let's call it, oh, Camp Gethsemane. No reason. I just need a fake name that starts with "G" for reasons that will become clear. It was unique, it was intense, and it lasted 7 weeks, so the impressions it made got ground in good.

We did not sing universal camp songs. We almost exclusively sang Camp Gethsemane
songs. Each year, all the cabins would participate in a song contest and 3 winning songs would get added to the repertoire, all set to popular tunes, but with lyrics rewritten to sing the praises of Camp Gethsemane. Its exquisite patch of mountain land, given by God to His Elect, as a place to nurture our wisdom and strength for the crass world we spent the rest of the year in. Its values. The lifelong sisterhood we'd entered. The song in the video, "Boom-de-yada" is familiar to me but in melody only. Our version had a Gethsemane lyric that I've mercifully forgotten.

"Normal" songs weren't forbidden, as long as they weren't irreverent. If your cabin went on a campout or picnic, you'd sing a few standards around the campfire, "Michael Row Your Boat Ashore," etc. But few. Gethsemane-specific songs simply dominated to the point of killing most opportunities to sing secular songs.

That's kind of a joke, that word "secular," like we were in some kind of religious cult. But I have to admit, Camp Gethsemane was the place where the Christian Living teacher informed us that almost everybody was destined for Hell except certain correct-thinking Protestants, and the Jews, who deserved to go just as much as the Catholics did, but who were God's Chosen People and therefore had a free pass. This is a unique view I've never run into elsewhere. I won't say he was speaking for the camp leaders but I've never heard that they objected.

Every moment of every day was regimented. We took classes all day long, normal stuff. Canoeing, tennis, swimming, art. Evenings were programmed. We could each have a free period during the day, but with the time it took to walk from your last class, and allowing time to get your next one, time to sit and think and goof off was short. Behavior was regulated every minute. One night a large group of us from several cabins had a big happy pillow fight out on the tennis court. The director heard it (it was hard to miss) and descended on us, white-faced and enraged, as though she'd caught us doing drugs.

On Sundays we wore dresses to "chapel" in the assembly pavilion, and white all day long. We had a morning service, then broke up into smaller Sunday School classes, then reassembled in the pavilion for a church service wrap-up. Then in the evening we attended vespers.

The ceremonial aspect of Camp Gethsemane was spectacular. A final-Sunday vespers tradition involved carrying candles in a line down the hill to circle a large area of the campus, a shimmering circle in the dark, the ceremony capped by floating the candles on little square wood platforms out onto the lake.

It was breathtakingly beautiful, but even better was the Honor Circle Ceremony. It would have wowed Leni Riefenstahl.

Honor Circle Ceremonies were unannounced until the evening on which they'd take place. As night fell, we'd all line up by cabins and, when given the signal, march up the mountain behind the camp in one long line, to the mysterious shrine called, as was the special group of girls chosen there, the Honor Circle.

It was far enough away to keep us mere plebeians from wandering up there during ordinary daylight hours and profaning the sacred ground by ambling about, slouching on the seats and chitchatting, or God forbid, sitting in the Honor Seat (reserved for the Director, "Mrs. D," who as daughter of the camp's founder had been inducted into The Circle decades earlier). Though obviously a manageable walk away, one had to plan and think twice about violating its boundary, and few did. We saw the place only in the primevally forested darkness, illuminated at first by the counselors' flashlights as they led us up, and then by a huge bonfire.

The Honor Circle (the place) consisted of positively Druidical rows of primitive stone seats, just concrete blocks, really, in a half-circle, to accommodate most of the 300-ish campers. These rows embraced a stone fire pit. Behind the fire, in a facing semicircle was a single row of fancier benches with backs. These were for The Elite, the Honor Circle members, and the upper echelon of camp directors.

We assembled in awed silence. The littlest girls got the front row, not just because they were the shortest, but undoubtedly because they were also the most impressionable and the best recipients of Mrs. D's eye contact. Mrs. D stood at her seat with the blazing torch she'd carried up the hill. When the shuffling and jostling had died down and we stood in proper hushed attitudes, she gestured and we all sat.

Mrs. D. lit the bonfire which had magically been built sometime that day without general camper knowledge, possibly by Honor Circle members. They had various secret duties like this and had been selected for their devotion to Camp and willingness to keep their society's secrets, rather than being tempted to reveal them and impress younger girls. They had meetings so secret that their absence was never noticed and no one knew where or when the meetings took place.

The fire caught and climbed till a massive inferno flailed the air, and the director began her speech. It was always about how Gethsemane Girls were the select, simply by virtue of spending our summer in that rarefied atmosphere. We were finer, wiser, more self-sacrificing, and the burden we had to bear for God and Truth was tremendous. Mrs. D. was a hot flickering orange color as she marched back and forth around the fire and mesmerized us with her declaration of all we had to live up to, and of how Gethsemane would forge us for this Great Commission.

It was nicely timed and the fire would be just noticeably past its peak, as she wrapped up the speech and the next phase of the ceremony began. Honor Circle members silently rose and passed among the campers' ranks, tapping a few. If you were "tapped" you might just have a tearful fluttery sobfest, and you certainly gasped, because it meant you were considered so special, so pure of quality, thought, and deed, that you were Honor Circle material yourself. Your status was temporary. You were only an Honor Circle Member for this summer, though from your ranks the Permanent were chosen at year's end. Only 12 Permanent members sit as active members, though, as in a sorority, Permanent Honor Circle membership is for life. If you happen to visit camp on Honor Circle Ceremony Night when you're 30 ... or 80 ... you'd be expected to sit with the teens in the Circle that night as the fire blazes.

By the end we felt rather weak and burned clean as we filed back down the hill.

No group can win hearts without some more ordinary and achievable awards, so on the last day of camp, a great many campers received a more mundane pat-on-the-back award, called the "Gethsemane G." Dispensing these G's was prefaced by another speech about how Gethsemane and many positive attributes all began with "G." Girl, Godly, good, great, generous, genuine.

I never got a G, much less an Honor Circle Seat. I was not Gethsemane material, though it did hurt. The G was ubiquitous enough for getting passed over to be a real, yet vague, "You're just not our type" statement. Well, I can't really fuss about that because the place wasn't my type either.

But I always thought I was a pretty damned good person and some years later, I saw an initial charm that looked somewhat like the G I never received and bought it for myself.

Ship cheaper.

To think -- we used to pay for shipping envelopes and boxes!

We still have to, on some occasions, but clean, dry boxes left from cereal, cookies, and other edibles make good shipping containers for books, magazines and sturdy items, though they're too flimsy for more fragile things.

I just turn them inside out.



MY RECOMMENDATION : SKIP the ones that contained peanut products. Toss 'em out.

I was about to assemble for reuse this box that had held peanut butter cookies, when it occurred to me that an eBay buyer with severe enough peanut allergies might actually react to the trace amounts in the cardboard. This one goes to recycling instead.


And that was today's project.

Buds!

Transplanted tree update: we were pretty sure it would survive the transplant, even before this, since, though it did thin out a bit, it did not fade away over the winter.

But heartwarming confirmation of its health is now evident. Buds are starting to pop out:

Consolation

During my net surfing for a censorship entry awhile back, I ran across a NY Times article entitled, "A Good Book Should Make You Cry." It concerns the "problem novels" that teachers, often following book awards, think kids "should" appreciate.

The author rightly perceives that matching the reader to the book is important and difficult, and she touches on the attraction of bleak stories, but she doesn't really tackle the issue of why a story that puts its main character through serious emotional trauma can be well-loved, and how it differs from the ones kids avoid. The key is there, though, in her comment that the problem novels left her "unconsoled."

I tackled the issue when I got the whole set of Little House books for my 9th birthday. I'd already polished off 2 or 3 of them thanks to the school library, and had begged to own them.


(Shameless digression: There they are on my emergency evacuation shelf. On top of the stack is a paperback Little House on the Prairie in French. Next to the Wilder books is the first, and therefore dearest to me, of my Victorian schoolbook collection, which I wanted because they were the kind of books Laura had. I bought that one, Lippincott's Sixth Reader, in an antique store when I was 11. Not that I was really, like, into this or anything.)

When I got to By the Shores of Silver Lake I got the shock of my reading life:

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary's eyes and Mary was blind. She was able to sit up now, wrapped in quilts in Ma's old hickory rocking chair. All that long time, week after week, when she could still see a little but less every day, she had never cried.

By the end of chapter 2, when Laura's beloved dog, Jack, died, I felt suckerpunched.

I never hesitated to skip ahead (still don't), so I pushed pages aside looking for the cure. Surely Mary would be cured by the end of the book.

She wasn't cured. I cheated outrageously and spot-checked the rest of the books as well, only to discover that Mary never regains her sight.

This is, i guess, a transition every kid has to make if s/he's an avid reader. I noticed that the above-article's author, writing in 2004, praised the cheerful Harry Potter books. They sure got darker later.

I was mulling all this over for my blog (I mull at length) when Mike Peterson -- for a treat, visit the classic stories on his Weekly Storybook site -- passed on to me a related article, "Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?" It was published in School Library Journal, which I was glad to see. SLJ is right where the librarians who review and who sit on the many ALA award committees will see it.

Library school, among many other things, set out to train us to join the reviewer pool. We were urged to get on board with the library journals once we were degreed and employed. It's entry-level professional publishing, and one can get into heavier publishing, organization and presentation work, editorial work, networking, and, for some, places on award committees. In a Booklist, Library Journal or SLJ review, somebody with the same training I have can say "Highly recommended" and generate serious sales of the title. Then libraries expose some readers to nifty books they would not ordinarily run into.

In a way it's good for prestigious awards to be given by practicing librarians. Or it used to be. Or it ought to be. We supposedly strike a good balance between literary knowledge and life in the real world with real readers.

The decisions that we look back on -- passing up Charlotte's Web is pretty cringe-worthy ‑‑ aren't as clear at the time we make them. It's good to publicize a cool but more obscure book. But how do you factor popular appeal and outside-the-box writing/subject matter, to craft an equation you can call "excellence"?? I can tell you one thing, though:

Kids can spot a book chosen to Improve them a mile away, and that goes not only for moral lessons, but for straight-out Learning Opportunities about history or other cultures. Those things are all great if the story is strong, but if the story is the packaging and a Lesson the contents, instead of vice versa, expect kids to Just Say No.

Charlotte's Web is great precisely because it entertains so marvelously, and yet does not shy away from depicting the full emotional power of death and loss. Neither do Frances Hodgson Burnett's books.

Neither did By the Shores of Silver Lake, which we're back to because it was my watershed book. Once I'd grudgingly accepted Mary's permanent situation, I was ready to sit down and read the book and let Wilder take me where she would. There would be new rules. A character could suffer harm or loss, but I trusted that the author would help her, and me, find our way back from it. This served me well because Roller Skates, The Secret Garden and A Little Princess would be in my hands shortly.

A child and a kids' book author have a relationship, and it's based on trust. Wilder did not let me down. OK, Laura's life has changed forever and she needs to become her sister's "eyes." Her new need to observe and describe is the beginning of Laura's training as a writer.

It's also the first stirring of her psychological independence, joyously symbolized by a hair-raising pony ride out in the prairie with her wild tomboy cousin, away from her nuclear family and its sorrows and responsibilities for one wonderful afternoon. The book is a terrific depiction of a girl's emotional growth, but that's where a good story has its real power: when it's a depiction, not a lesson.

And especially, when it's hopeful. A source of psychological tools for the reader.

That would make such a nice, neat closing sentence, but some of the grim-reality "problem novels" are a 3rd category, neither the cheerful story of fun and adventure, nor the classic tale of adversity overcome. The books that send librarians into ecstasies are often lesson-free, stories of stark and often horrible realism. Librarians, bless their good intentions, embraced this as kind of a rebellion against didacticism, and they promoted authors like Robert Cormier. Well-written grim reality speaks to an important readership that includes kids with life hardships who need their experience acknowledged and validated.

Cormier's The Chocolate War is one powerhouse of a book about a kid who tries to buck the system and gets crushed, but it's a mistake to decide that the uncompromising realism per se is what makes it excellent, and then start loading the shelves with lots of death-and-despair titles. What made The Chocolate War excellent was a factor that's one of the most difficult things to articulate and train into a reviewer. A story can depict failure, all attempts to fight for truth and justice can turn to ash, but the reader can see a spark of hope and the possibility of a different path.

At some point a reader becomes aware enough to see that the very existence of the book in her hand means that the corruption has been exposed. People who value truth, justice and mercy may not triumph in the book, but they grow up and write the books. This is a new type of consolation, at a remove from the story itself, but it's there.

Cormier got it in that novel. Barely. He even got it in After The First Death, a grueling terrorism novel for teens in which he lets you fully engage with and root for various young characters and then lets the terrorist kill them anyway. I haven't read all his books. The Bumblebee Flies Anyway -- a hopeless, pointless and hideous children's cancer clinic story -- was my farewell to Cormier. I'm pretty good at achieving the detachment that lets me see the merit in a book I don't like, but I had trouble finding a purpose for this book. Just my opinion, but: "Not recommended."

The excellence of the best examples can fool less insightful reviewers, and award-givers, into thinking everything ugly must be good. Both these articles provide what I think is an important wake-up call.

You think you got Problems

There's a whole genre of kids' fiction -- mostly aimed at pre-teens and teens -- called "problem novels." It's a relatively recent genre, novels in which kids face realistic modern problems: death, crime, drugs. This was kind of revolutionary and was rightly applauded, engaging some readers who insist on acknowledgment that Dick/Jane/Sally suburbs and families just are not everyone's experience.

Publishing and awards have gone overboard with these books, though, and that's a whole post by itself, but before I offer that one I'm going to serve dessert first and tell you about the ultimate Problem Novel.

I got a "newsletter" (read: ad) from abebooks a couple days ago, which mentioned a list voted by British readers as the 10 funniest books of all time. No way does this one belong with that largely modern classic group, but it popped into my head immediately. The Grounding of Group 6 is one of my guilty pleasures, ridiculous but funny as all get-out and seems (judging by its amazon reviews) to have a little cult following, enough to have gotten it reprinted at least once. That's notable since, with some exceptions, hot teen novels have short self-lives.

In The Grounding of Group 6, a new school year opens at hip, elite Coldbrook boarding school. Orientation consists of a wilderness hike for all the new students, who are divided into small groups and sent out, each with a faculty advisor, for bonding, trust-forming, resource-testing, yadda yadda.

Only... this school offers parents a special service. If you have problem teens, you can arrange to have them assigned to Group Six. This is the group that ... does not come back. Ever. Part of the quite black humor here derives from the implication that unwanted-child disposal -- no, I mean real disposal -- is one of the raisons d'être of boarding schools:

Arn had said that there'd been lots of Coldbrook-sorts-of-schools, for years and years and years. "Whatever happened to so-and-so?" How many times had someone said that to a friend? And gotten back the answer "Oh she or he went away to school and I lost track of her or him." Oh, yeah.

To present these kids, with the various ways in which they've teed off or disappointed their utterly coldhearted parents, to make it a biting comedy and still touch on the heartbreak at least some of them would feel, is hard. Thompson is remarkably successful at balancing the reality and the campiness. The evil adults pretty much are caricatures, and that works, since it reduces the painful-reality problem a reader might have, and lets the humor be nice and dark, while the more believable kids of Group 6 made me genuinely care. It skewers preppie culture nicely, and has some sharp things to say about education, fads, and conformity.

It's got flaws. To make the plot work, these kids have to get over this emotional trauma way too quickly, though black comedy allows some license. The romantic pairups among them work out too neatly. And the pairing-up of the 22-year-old leader with one of the girls, an impossibly wise and mature 16-year-old, is probably why it's gone out of print, though they resist unprotected sex. And the circumstances under which they manage that make it not terribly plausible. The resolution is idealistic, though I can be over-tolerant of happy endings because, blast it, I like them. The absence of cell phones and computers (it was published in 1983) is conspicuous, but, heck, just set it in 1983 instead of in "the present."

Basically, the story tells how the group -- including their leader, who was hired to off them -- faces the truth and turns the tables on the school, taking it over. They form a real Family Of Choice, and make a plan. The scene in which they go through the items in the evil headmaster's office was what sent me into a fit of laughter. He's a Mary Worth fan and that's all I'm sayin'.

Thompson wrote other books that were maybe less flawed, but just didn't have the bite that this one has.

Another tedious butterfly post

I was amazed to spot this butterfly today. Shocked, actually, enough to scare Larry, since I was pointing through the car window and babbling incoherently. It doesn't take much to make me speechless, actually, but he thought I'd seen dead bodies in the roadside weeds or something, till he saw it too.

It also got me to email my biologist brother, who says he even saw one up there in NC during the past few days, 5 hours' drive north of here. The long season of seeing last year's crop, which went on into January, was pretty spectacular, but it seems that early sightings of this year's generation aren't as weird as I thought.

According to my bro, they experience "cold shock," which is a good thing. Very cold temperatures actually give the chrysalis a bigger and better burst of hormones as soon as it warms up, and the butterfly can metamorphose and emerge pretty fast. I'll say. We've had only a couple warm days after a short but exceptional cold spell.

Me and my shadow

Three photos - two scans, one digital shot:

1976

Stephens College campus, March. The 2 under the tree were each my roommate at different times. We all had single rooms in the same wonderful little 1929 house (since, torn down! Hate that.) by the time of this photo. I'm standing on the overpass to the Commons building, and my shadow is cast down there on the sidewalk.

--


1988

Beach, Hilton Head Island.

--


2008

December 15th - stalking butterflies for my blog.

Hot summer day

Sparky, Jake and Sally, 1971, probably August. One nice spot of good shade. That's not photo damage or aging -- i took it through the kitchen window and got a gash of sun glare from the window glass, right through it - would've been such a great picture. If I ever can spring for photo restoration technology I might be able to artificially correct it.

"Sally"??

Sally is the tree. I grew up in a family that named things. I come honestly by my weirdness. "Sally" was a tree with personality. For such a small tree, it leaf-ed like crazy. For some reason, its great enthusiasm I guess, this reminded my mother of Sally Brown in Peanuts.

~~
Things have been ... um ... piling up around here, but the scanner is uncovered now!

I. Hate. Crafts.

All I wanted was a scarf, okay? I know myself well enough not to attempt an afghan or a complicated thing with sleeves and necks and yadda yadda, I just wanted a scarf.

And I wanted one that was wide enough, that felt soft and nice, that was not in some weird trendy color ... and that was not acrylic, or even wool. This last requirement was the most important one, because I hate getting zapped by static electricity. I wanted a scarf of nice cotton yarn that would NOT crackle and make my hair stand on end.

So there are, like, THREE WALLS of yarns in the craft store. And all are acrylic or wool or blends, except two bins of cottons.

The first bin was baby yarn, for very thin, fine, tight-weave work. It would take me 90 years to make something out of that fine gauge yarn. OK, it would only seem like 90 years. I am not craftsy. Anything involving needles and thread makes me want to run screaming out into the night. This project is a means to an end, not about finding enjoyment in the process.

But despite the slim choices, I liked the stuff in the tiny second bin. Organic. Made in USA. Soft, nubby, earthy colors. Pricey, but I thought a couple skeins would... um...

Two hours of work later, you see the result. The book is there (why, of course I chose it at random...) to show just how few inches one skein makes. I've used over half of a skein and barely started. Each skein costs SIX BUCKS. This project will cost as much as buying some cashmere thing from Neiman Marcus.

Yes, I can dismantle this and make it narrower. And I will do exactly that, but one of the reasons I wanted to make my own was to get a wide one, since the current fashion trend is toward skinny things that will not provide much warmth.

So i'll compromise on width, save a skein or two, pay more than I meant to, and wish that the helpful information on the label --which happily explains what needles to buy-- would tell the buyer something like "This skein will make a one-foot square, crocheted."

I really hate crafts.

The last crochet project I completed.