Rose

It's 6 am, and the third time I've awakened since the sun began to peek through the morning.  This time, I choose not to fight it, and I roll over.  There, next to me, deep in her own sleep, is Rose.

Today, we take Rose to college.  Today, she completes the journey she began when I gave her to our lives -- now I give her to her own, a new journey that only she can take.

That night she was born, I stared at her for hours.  In the middle of the night, she was brought to me, hungry and mewling, but she fell right back to sleep in my arms.  I propped her on my knees and watched her.  I couldn't take my eyes off her.  It was hours later when I realized I would serve her best by getting some sleep, and I reluctantly called the nurse to take her.  She was just so beautiful, my little girl.  She was healthy -- condition one of my bargain with God; she had her father's long eyelashes -- condition two; and later I would learn that He'd allowed her condition three as well -- she loved to read.  I was blessed.

So much has changed since that night.  Her father and I have parted; her brother's autism revealed itself; family members have been lost to death or to life-changing conditions.  But one thing hasn't changed.  I still watch her as she sleeps.

How many times have I gone into her bedroom to watch her -- hundreds?  thousands?  As I write this, she has been alive for 6,658 days.  How many nights have I quietly gone into her room, to check her breathing, to watch her dream?  I can't begin to count.  I watch her now, certainly not the last time I will do so, but the last time I will watch my little girl -- when I see her next, she will be a different person, a young woman with independence in her stride, with self-awareness in her eyes.

Her heart-shaped face.  Her long eyelashes.  The shy half-smile of sleep.  How did I get so lucky?  How did my genes and her father's combine to create this lovely, intelligent, kind, funny, daring young woman?  It's a marvel of nature, a wonder of God.  I am so proud of who she has become, of her deft wit, her urge toward generosity, the way she folds people into her protection.  

And I will miss her.  I will miss the sound of her voice, calling me from somewhere in the house, making me come to her instead of the other way around, some selfish quirk of teenagerhood that annoyed the hell out of me.  When did that start -- when she was still in diapers?  The call in the middle of the night:  "Apple juice, please!"  

I will miss her singing -- everywhere, singing.  She has been singing since before she could say full sentences.  Remember the ABC's at the grocery store?  Yes, I do.  And the words she put to that same tune, decrying her brother's actions:  "Ian took my toys away, Ian took my books away, Ian took my dolls away, Ian took my toys away."  And the time she climbed up onto the television, and to the same tune:  "I am stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck, I am stuck stuck stuck stuck stuck." 

I will miss her puns.  I will miss her awful jokes, and her splendid ones.  I will miss the way she comforted me in my darkest times, and allowed me to do the same for her.

Of course, there are things I won't miss.  We all have our foibles, and Rose is no exception.  But along the way, we have all learned from those foibles, and she has become a better woman for them.  So have I.

A woman.  How did that happen?  One moment she was refusing to get into the stroller, and the next she was refusing to tell me who was at the movies with her.  How did we go from my knowing every little thing about her life to this woman with secrets, this woman with connections and stories and history that I will never know?

Today, I take my little girl to college.  She will oversee the moving of her life into a dorm room.  She will meet people who will form the basis of her new life.  And she will banish us without so much as a second glance.

But that's later today.  For now, I watch her sleep.  This is my time with my little girl.

Up the Hill, with Profound Determination

This is Reunion Weekend at my alma mater, Colgate University, and last night to celebrate its 70 years, the Colgate 13, Colgate’s male a cappella group, held a concert featuring Colgate 13 members from as far back as the class of ’44.

The class of ’44.  My father was of that age.  My father would have been 89 this year had he lived.  There on stage, streamed live (and available recorded at http://www.livestream.com/colgateuniversity/video?clipId=pla_7e403c48-f53d-4292-9cba-44db326b0ecb&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb ) stood a 90-year-old man.  He needed help climbing the stairs, he could no longer carry a tune with strength, but he proudly stood there as if it was 70 years ago.

As I watched this concert, I remembered the feeling of sitting in the Colgate Chapel – countless times.  I rehearsed there as part of the Colgate University Chorus under Marietta Chang.  I took organ lessons there from Vivian Slater.  I attended orchestra concerts, listened to speakers, attended meetings, shared in services.  I used to pack up my homework – reading, writing, whatever – and sit in the balcony while the orchestra practiced.  The acoustics were incredible, and the music hung in the air, surrounding me and pulling me in and making me feel sacred.

Wasn’t that just a moment ago?  How did so much time pass so quickly?  I imagine those men, the Colgate 13 members of the 1940s and 50s, wondered the same thing.  So much life they had seen in such a fleeting moment.  It brought me to tears.  I couldn’t help asking myself:  how did I get so old?

I never thought I’d be where I am now.  As I sat in the chapel 30(+) years ago, did I think about where I would be now?  How could I have known all that would happen:  that I would marry two years out of college and watch that marriage fall to shreds 27 years later; that I would give birth to a son with a profound disability and spend the rest of my life in despair and frustration; that I would see two other children off to college and envision lives of plenty for them; that I would return to school to achieve a second career as a teacher – and who ever would have thought I’d end up as a special education teacher after all I had experienced personally?

I have to be fair; I can’t leave what I just wrote un-amended.  My marriage fell apart, but there were plenty of happy times.  My son has also brought me great joy and pride.  I don’t regret what I have now; I wouldn’t want to relive those years and make different decisions that would result in the non-existence of my three children.  But I would have done some things differently.

1.  I would have finished my thesis.  That still haunts me.  Which leads to…

2.  I would not have stopped writing.  It was the most intense and self-satisfying part of my life at one time.  I had dreams.  I had talent; other people saw it.  So why did I lose faith in that talent, and in myself, and why did I let it slip through my fingers?

3.  I would have spent money differently.  So much wasted.

4.  I would have become a teacher sooner.

5.  I would have admitted defeat and divorced my husband long before now, painful though it would have been.  But before then, I would have tried to play with him more.

6.  I would have gotten a firmer hand on my health issues at an earlier age.  What I have learned about myself in the past 10 years would have changed my life for the better had I discovered certain things while in my 20s.
7.  I would have figured how who I was before I let myself be who other people wanted, and needed, me to be.  And once I'd figured that out, I would have fought to preserve that person.

No, I won’t continue.  That is sufficient to say:  I could have done this life better.  And looking at those men standing on that stage, I remember that I still have a chunk of time to make it better.  I can’t undo what I’ve done; I can’t remake my life’s history.  But I can steer it the way I want to go now. I won’t declare myself a lost cause – that would be silly.  There’s still time for me to achieve what I think I imagined for myself as I sat in the chapel balcony.  And maybe I’ll just finish that thesis.  

Of Mice and Women

When you put the word “mouse” with the word “woman,” often what comes to mind is a stereotypical picture of a woman, nicely dressed with pearls and apron – clearly a 1950s housewife – shrieking for help.  Down on the floor is a teeny, tiny mouse.  Mouse 1 – Woman 0.

Many yesterdays ago, that would have been me up there on the chair.  I relied on the men in my life – my father, my male friends, my husband – to save me from the big bads out there, even the teeny, tiny mice. 

Several years ago, we shared an apartment in Boston with a teeny, tiny mouse.  He was brazen, that mouse.  He would come out into our living room as we sat watching television, and look at us, daring us to do something about him.  My husband tried all sorts of traps, from the humane to the cruel, and nothing worked.  The one thing that did work?  Steel wool, crammed into the crevices through which that mouse must have entered.  We didn’t see him for several days, and we figured we had locked him out.  Success!  But after those several days, we began to sense an aroma in the apartment.  We couldn’t place it, no matter where we looked.  Until one day, I had a gut feeling, and pulled open the sleeper sofa upon which we’d been sitting day after day, wondering about that smell.  There, beneath the springs, was the mouse.  He’d been locked in, not out, and had probably died after eating the steel wool.

After shrieking a bit, I had my husband remove him.  That was just the way things went.  Through the years, whenever one of our cats made a present of a little critter – birds, mice, chipmunks, baby rabbits – I’d shriek, and my husband would remove them.

A few days ago, my daughter came to me with a complaint – something smelled in my son’s room, where she did most of her school work.  I went to look, to sniff, but it was just a small smell at the time.  It was vaguely familiar to me.  We thought perhaps one of the cats had coughed up a fur ball, or been locked out of the basement where the litter boxes are, and so we had our eyes open for cat puke or poop.  Nothing.

But as the days passed, the smell grew stronger.  Eventually, it wafted out into the foyer, and then into my bedroom.  Something had to be done.  I called my husband – perhaps he could come to take a whiff, perhaps our noses had grown so used to the smell that we couldn’t discern its origin.  No, he said, he’d already told my daughter to clean the room.  Once she did that, we would find the source.

I told her I would help her – we could work together to clean the room and find the culprit.  But that wasn’t going to happen quickly enough, and I started without her.  I grabbed a plastic bag and started throwing garbage into it, picking up her tossed aside socks and making a pile for the laundry.  I’d been at work for only a few minutes when I found it.  No wonder the smell had been familiar – there was a dead mouse lying on its side beneath my son’s poker set.  My first response?  I dropped that poker set back onto the dead mouse, ran out of the room, and screamed.  And screamed.  And screamed.

From downstairs came my daughter’s call – are you okay?  Yes, I told her, but I found the source of the smell.  Do I want to know? she asked.  Will I cry?  You don’t want to know, I said.

What to do?  What to do?  My second instinctual response was to go for my husband.  I picked up the phone and dialed – and then realized what I was doing and put the phone down.  I was a grown woman, I reasoned, living on my own, perfectly capable of dealing with this, no matter how distasteful.

I steeled myself, went back to the room, picked up the poker set and looked at the mouse.  At least it was a clean kill – no guts spilling out the way these gifts were sometimes presented, its head still attached to its body.  I picked up a plastic bag, put my hand into it, and gingerly picked up the mouse.  And I dealt with it.

This may not be a big thing to some people.  To me, it was a giant step in the reinvention of myself.  It was the first time I had handled this kind of situation without reaching for male assistance, the first time in nearly 30 years I hadn’t called upon my husband to do the disgusting thing.  I wasn’t standing on a chair, waiting to be rescued.  Mouse 0 – Woman 1.

A Week at the Knees (part two)

Back for more?

I don’t watch television in real time – not because I’m too snobby to do so, but because we never got cable in our house, and so watching television while the show is actually airing is an exercise in gymnastics.  Instead, I wait for DVD sets to be produced, and then I watch bunches of episodes at a time.  And what a golden opportunity this week presented me!

The first series up was Being Human, the British version, which I had heard about years ago but had never had an opportunity to see.  A couple of months ago, I was at Barnes and Noble during a particularly decent DVD sale and was able to pick this up (along with some other British TV series that are usually too pricey for me to buy).  This is the story of a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost who room together in a town in England.  They are trying to blend in, to be human, but fate (and other otherworldly beings) keeps making it difficult.  There was an Americanized version of the series, but I haven’t heard much about it so I don’t know how it did.  But I went on-line to see if this was still in production, and it is – it’s in its 4^th season, and unfortunately, the picture spread so proudly over the home page gave away way too much of what’s going to happen.  Series two is on its way to me as I write this, but I’m hoping not to wait for my next surgery to see it.

While Being Human was my upstairs TV series, Portlandia was my downstairs series.  Portlandia is a series of short sketches set in Portland, Oregon, and plays with the premise that Portland never made it out of the 1990s.  It’s quirky and funny.  A few misses mixed among the hits – but worth the time.  I will aim to see the second season when I can.

I’d always loved The Big Bang Theory, but because of the whole “don’t watch television in real time” thing, only caught an episode here and there when my daughter had it on.  These are MY people.  I grew up with these men; they were my friends.  Had I been male, I would have been one of them.  Not as smart, for sure, but the same interests – Star Trek and science fiction in general, collecting odd nerd memorabilia, knowledge of useless facts (though not at all as science-driven as these men).  Never got the video game bug, but that’s okay, I can live without it.  The Big Bang Theory, season one, was my next upstairs series.  I love this show.  I can definitely see continuing to watch, and I hear they really didn’t come into their own until the second and third seasons, so it’ll be fun to see how that happens.  While I think Jim Parsons has definitely earned his Emmy nominations, Johnny Galecki carries more than his fair share of the comedy and I think needs his own nomination.

Several years ago, WonderFalls came on the air and was gone within a millisecond.  Of course it was:  if I like a show and can actually watch it, it gets cancelled.  Thirteen episodes were produced, but only 4 of them aired, and of those, I think I saw one or two – but I knew I loved the show.  So when the DVD set was released, of course I picked it up – and then let it sit on my shelf for a few years until first, I gave it to my daughter to watch (and she loved it), and then this week, a friend pointed me in its direction.  I was sad to see the thirteen episodes pass – and angry to see a plot development that I did not like, that didn’t look it could resolve itself by the end of the brief series.  I sent my friend a threatening email, telling her she would come to harm if the situation didn’t get fixed – and it did, thank goodness for her health and safety.  I would love to know if the last episode was made after the series was cancelled and the story resolution done intentionally because it was cancelled.  Everything looked like the plot was heading in another direction and then it swung right around.  Whew.

You see how involved one can get in one’s media entertainment when one is limited in environmental scope?

I actually did read too.  At the end of 2011 as I contemplated my own best of books list, I wondered what YA books had done well, and considered getting them for my classroom collection.  The first of these was Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev.  I have to say up front:  I wasn’t swept into the writing style.  But it was the first of a trilogy, and I’d already purchased the second book, and, well, I felt I needed to make a commitment.  Eyes Like Stars is an interesting story about a theater in which all the players are characters from plays – mostly Shakespeare – and they cannot leave the theater.  Their existence is limited to that particular theater, and what they say happens on stage.  Into this environment is brought a young girl who appears to have an unusual ability to control – to direct – the happenings of the theater.  There’s a love triangle set up (at least it isn’t among a human, a werewolf, and a vampire [see Twilight comments, above] – oh, and Being Human does not set its characters in a love triangle either, thank goodness) and we end the book with an unresolved mystery that should take us into book two.  I’m not overly eager to get there, but I suppose in for the penny, in for the pound.

The other book I finished was David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, a collection of humorous essays that claim to be stories from his life – although Sedaris is the first to tell you how what he writes is in no way factual, but is, instead, truthful.  He has been the subject of several literary explorations into fact versus truth, especially since James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and the confrontation that set up with Oprah Winfrey.  Sedaris has a remarkable voice, and I got used to his storytelling abilities on This American Life, which I used to listen to obsessively while driving back and forth to visit my son at school.  This is why when I read a Sedaris book, I prefer to listen to it.  I’ve spent the last month or so listening to Sedaris reading this book to me in my car (blast that 45-second commute of mine!), and I was able to finish it off while convalescing in my living room.

While I am extolling the wonders of media entertainment, I suppose I should mention that I spent a lot of time playing PathPix on my iPad.  It’s a puzzle that asks you to connect numbers of corresponding colors with one another in lines of spaces that add up to those numbers.  For instance, two red 13s would be connected by a line of 13 spaces – but rarely a straight line.  These puzzles have been getting harder and harder in recent days as I solve through the Advanced levels.  I have only 20 to go before I use up all the puzzles and have to go back and clear them all (which I have promised to do for my daughter, as she is equally taken with the game).

So to tally, that would be 7 movies, 4 TV series (6 1-hour episodes, 6 ½-hour episodes, 13 1-hour episodes, 17 ½-hour episodes), 2 books, 1 just-one-more-till-20-have-been-solved game.  Not bad for a week with my feet up.

I returned to work today, but it was too soon – I regret that decision.  I have decided to take tomorrow off to recover, and I hope to be back to work on the following day.  But that leaves tomorrow completely open…what shall I do?

A Week at the Knees (part one)

I am on the far end of recovering from knee surgery and am planning a return to work tomorrow morning.  I’ve had a lot of down time this week – with my knee up and iced, and my mind on various forms of media.  It may not have been the kind of fun vacation from school most of us think about when we think about February break, but it was certainly restful for me.  I had no choice but to stay still and let others help.

And boy, that was hard – letting others help.  I’m not good at asking for help, first of all, and so when people offer, my initial impulse is to wave them off, to say I am fine and have no needs.  This week, I learned to say thank you with grace, if not complete comfort.  I am grateful for the company, for the food, for the phone calls, for the offered support.  Friends both local and distant rallied to offer me comfort and friendship; I am truly fortunate.

And I am grateful that in our modern times, there are so many ways to divert me from boredom.  I would have gone stir crazy without movies and TV shows and books and iPad games and magazines and email and Facebook at my fingertips.  Shall we see how I amused myself?

Movies
Is it terribly embarrassing to say that I started my recovery by watching the second half of Breaking Dawn Part One?  I needed something simple, something that could pass the time without requiring a great deal of brain energy.  This certainly did fill the need.  I had seen it before in the theater – on Thanksgiving night while I was on the run from a behavioral episode that had taken place earlier in the evening, and hadn’t really paid a whole lot of attention to it then.  I have developed more of a distaste for the Twilight series as the books and movies have progressed – certainly the first book, while not wonderfully written, told an engaging story and held my attention, and the subsequent books deteriorated as they progressed.  Anyone familiar enough with me to discuss the Twilight books has already heard my rant about Stephenie Meyers and her eye rolling so I won’t explore that here – but I do note that the characters in the movies don’t do a whole lot of eye rolling so perhaps someone, somewhere, got the message.  I think at this point, I watch the movies for the same reason I continued to read the books – an impulse to just finish the damn things.

What a difference to move on to the next movie:  The Ides of March.  I like George Clooney, I like Ryan Gosling, what’s not to like in a movie starring both Clooney and Gosling?  Not a whole lot – I thought it was an excellent movie, a wonderful character study of a man (Gosling) at a distinct point in his career when he had to make a choice about where his life was going to go, knowing that the choice was being made and what its repercussions would be.  Many of us make these choices not knowing they will be critical and life-changing until we look back upon them, but this movie dealt with the conscious, intentional choice one man had to make at a specific time, with specific circumstances, and no backpedalling permitted.  I found the story engaging, though surely they could have thrown a few more important and intelligent women into the story.  I do believe women participate in politics these days, don’t they?

I watched Let It Be, not always able to follow the dialogue (heavy accents, no subtitles) but certainly able to recognize the music.  I had seen only small snippets of the concert on the roof and I was pleased to see more of it here.  This was a very Paul-centric exploration of the Beatles, but there was one particular moment – a George moment – that I adored:  Paul and George are discussing how George should play his part in a song, and George says, “Look, tell me what to play, and I’ll play it.  If you don’t want me to play anything, I won’t.  Just tell me and I’ll do what you want.”  One can see the struggle involved with keeping that kind of conversation civil – there’s a lot behind those words that we did not get to see.

Fish Tank was a splendid movie, a Bildungsroman about a young English girl in a poor section of town, trying to find out who she is in the midst of circumstances that don’t make it easy.  She has a relationship of sorts with an older man, her mother’s boyfriend, and though their relationship does culminate in a physical coupling, it’s the development of his influence over her, and hers over him, that informs the bulk of the movie.

I had heard Super 8 was a fun movie, and indeed it was – clearly involving Steven Spielberg (many echoes of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind here).  The story traced the stereotypical hero path of its protagonist, a 12-year-old boy, through his quest – featuring such elements as uncommon family situation (his mother has died), traumatic experience that begins the quest (a train wreck), magical weapon (the camera, the unusual Rubik’s Cube-like pieces spilled at the train wreck), older sage-like guidance (the science teacher), descent into hell (going underground to locate his friend and the monster who took her), and ultimately, reconciliation with father figure (he and his dad ultimately bond and Get Through This Thing Together).  It’s rather fun to see literary constructs in action in popular culture.  Joseph Campbell would be proud.

I’ve been a fan of Kenneth Branagh’s for more than 20 years – going back to his Henry V days – and so when he was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar, I wanted him to win it.  Then I started hearing about this wonderful performance Christopher Plummer gave in Beginners, and I had to see it.  I hate to admit it, but Plummer deserved the award, which he won last night, over Branagh.  Well, Plummer’s 82, and now the oldest winner of an Academy Award ever, and Branagh is a little older than me and still has time, so fair’s fair.  Beginners is the story of a man and his father – Ewan McGregor and Plummer – told in three timelines:  when McGregor’s character was a boy, as he dealt with his father’s illness and death, and months later as he tried to find love with a woman as commitment-phobic as he was.  The complication of this movie lies in Plummer’s character’s decision to come out as a gay man at the age of 75 – knowing he was gay all his life and remaining married and faithful to his wife, it was only when she died that he was able to turn to the lifestyle he’d dreamed of all his life.  There is no judgment involved in this decision – it is supported and welcomed by all characters – it’s not an issue whether or not he was right to stay married as a gay man, or how wholeheartedly to turn to a gay lifestyle once freed to do so.  The issue here is:  what do we owe ourselves in our search for identity and connection?  That’s a tough question we ask ourselves as we come to terms with our limited lifespans when we age away from the delusional immortality of our adolescent and young adult beliefs.

What an abrupt shift, then, from Beginners to Fight Club.  I had read Chuck Palahniuk’s book ages ago, probably when it was first published, and was not terribly impressed with the violence, or even the writing style.  But the movie has attained cultural touchstone status, and I had been meaning to see it for some time.  Here was my chance.  And, bearing in mind I’m not a fan of Brad Pitt’s in most of his movies, I tried to go into the movie as fairly as I could.  I still didn’t like it.  Dark and violent, sometimes confusing – even knowing the “secret” I found it baffling at times – I wasn’t pleased by the way it glorified terrorism.  Check that goal off my to-see list, thank goodness.

That’s it for the movies.  I believe I’ll save the TV series for part two.

Looking for God

I wasn't raised religiously.  We didn't celebrate any holidays with anything other than a special dinner with another family (we took turns going to one another's houses).  We didn't participate in the gift-giving holidays, we didn't attend religious ceremonies, we didn't contribute to religious houses.  And yet I had a feeling that there was God watching over me.  I always felt protected by this unnamed spiritual force.  I remember one night when I was 19 and had inadvertently partaken of an illegal drug (and I do mean inadvertently -- I did not know the drug had been added), I was certain I was going to die by morning.  I lay there in my summer job cabin on a summer job cot, alone, staring into the dark night, convinced I would not wake in the morning.  Suddenly I felt this overwhelming sensation, this awareness that I was being held and comforted.  It was a life-changing feeling.  And of course, I awoke the next morning.


Then college educated the spirituality right out of me.  Was it the classes I took, or the people I hung out with, or the cynicism of the time?  I don't know, but by my mid-twenties, that feeling of protection was gone.  And it wasn't until I came into program in 2002 that I began to experience it again.


But I haven't lost the cynicism.  I still need proof.  And I struggle with envy at the obvious proof experienced by others  -- "I was down to my last $5 and I needed to pay my rent, and I prayed about it and the next day I got a check in mail for cahoozes dollars."  "I couldn't find a job after a year of looking, and I prayed about it, and that day someone called me and offered me a job I hadn't even applied for!"  "I was despondent over my divorce and I prayed about it and within a week I had met a new guy and we're getting married next month!"  None of this kind of stuff ever happens to me.


And, in fairness, I have to add, I don't often "pray about it."


In my heart, I feel the comfort of having a spiritual guide -- call it an angel, or my deceased father, or God himself -- that helps me when the pain is overwhelming.  But my head argues with my heart and looks for the proof, and it's this that defines my struggle to find God..  I would love to give myself completely to the care of a God of my understanding.  I'd just like to have a little chat with him first.

George's Women

I finished the book, Believe the Lie, by Elizabeth George, late last night.  I knew I should go to sleep as I had to teach in the morning, but with so few pages (100 or so), I also knew I wanted to finish and find out how it ended.  At 2:00 am, I closed the book, turned off the light, and put my head back on my pillow, and then I thought.  I thought and I thought about this book, and there was something bothering me about it, something not quite right about it.  All day today, my mind drifted back to the book and I puzzled over what was not quite right.   This afternoon, I realized what it was:  there is not a single female character in this book who can be seen in as positive a light as their male counterparts.

Believe the Lie is a sprawling book of some 600 pages, heavy to lift (especially when a cat demands real estate beneath your chin and across your chest).  It is George’s latest in her Inspector Lynley series, and it is quite good – compelling and well-written, suspenseful and ably crafted.  In it, Lynley travels to the Lake Country at the request of his superior in order to look into the death of the nephew of this superior’s friend.  He travels incognito, and he brings with him my favorite character in the series, Simon St. James, and Simon’s wife, Deborah (whom I have never liked and my opinion did not change in this book).  I would love to read a book devoted entirely to the story of the two men’s friendship; they have a complicated history involving Lynley’s driving accident and St. James’s subsequent crippling.  Oh, and Deborah dated Lynley before she married Simon.  And Simon dated Helen Clyde before she married Lynley and later died and made him a widower.  These things are mentioned, the characters consider them briefly, but then they move on.  They don’t talk about their past; as proper English gentlemen, they refuse to cause pain to one another.  Please, Ms. George, let the two men go somewhere together, just the two of them, just Sherlock and his Watson, and let them talk.

Trying not to give too much away to those of you who have not yet read the book or the series, here are my issues with the female characters.

Barbara Havers 

Havers is Lynley’s subordinate and partner, loyal to him, dependable, willing to sacrifice her needs in order to fulfill his.  Hinted at is the possibility that were he to express interest, she would drop everything to enter into a romantic relationship with him, all the while knowing she was of inferior breeding.  That’s lovely.  But George makes a point of explaining how ordinary she is, how plain and even homely she is.  Do not judge Havers’ looks by the appearance of the actress who plays her on the BBC’s version of these stories, Sharon Small.  Small is a dreamboat compared to the way Havers is depicted in print – she can’t dress right, she cuts her own hair, and she is incapable of coordinating colors.  She is chastised by her superior and ordered to change her look or be terminated.  She is shown to be less than elegant in her speaking and her behavior causes her to stand out in an upper class crowd.  Lynley frequently finds himself apologizing for her.  In Believe the Lie, her reluctance to speak to a close friend results in a terrible tragedy for him.

Deborah St. James

Conversely, it is Deborah’s decision to speak that leads to a tragedy.  George seems to insist that we see Deborah as a free spirited, talented, and artistic soul, someone beloved by Simon (did I mention he’s my favorite character?) and respected by Lynley.  Lynley engages the St. Jameses to help in his undercover mission, and Deborah clearly and obstinately ignores the instructions she has been given, and instead allows her female-driven nature to guide her course.  Deborah, we know by now, has wanted a baby for several books and is unable to carry one to term.  In Believe the Lie, she meets another woman who she believes suffers from the same grief.  She allows that belief to determine her actions – something specifically noted by both Lynley and Simon – and ultimately causes a perfectly avoidable tragedy.  Somehow, George expects us to witness Deborah’s selfish and self-absorbed acts, and then to forgive her because Simon and Lynley love her so.

Isabelle Ardery

I’m not sure even George likes Isabelle, a caustic, career-driven alcoholic who has become Lynley’s lover.  She is also his superior, clearly a no-no.  Isabelle knows just how to aim her barbs, particularly toward Barbara Havers – and if we are meant to side with Havers, we must necessarily despise Isabelle Ardery.  She seems to exist only to torment Havers and cause Lynley extremes of emotion:  pain from the death of his wife, guilt at having moved on (at least sexually), joy at finding someone he can share things with, frustration at having to keep things from her, anger at hearing her drunk over the phone, and sorrow when she makes things other than him her priority.  Isabelle is not a character, she’s a role.

Mignon Fairclough

If there’s a villain in this novel, George wants this to be her.  Mignon fakes a disability in order to live off her parents, blackmails her father, spies on her family, and wreaks havoc with strangers over the internet.  She is not a nice woman, and no one likes her.  There is nothing redeeming about her.  There is nothing here to allow us to see her as a rounded character; she is simply Nasty Woman.

Alatea Fairclough

I do believe we are meant to feel for this woman, especially once we learn her secret and witness her fate.  But she seems cold toward everyone, save her husband, and we know she’s keeping a secret even from him.  She’s not trustworthy.  She’s shrill.  It seems that only her husband likes her; everyone else keeps their distance.

Niamh Cresswell

Before I begin to discuss this bitch, I want to comment on her name.  I had never seen it before – it is an old Irish name, pronounced Nee-ev.  I’d spent the whole book hearing Neye-am in my head.  I think I prefer it my way; it seems to correspond more with the way she is portrayed.  Niamh has reason to be bitter, but she takes this bitterness to sorrowful depths when she rejects her children to pay back her ex-husband.  She is portrayed as a selfish, money-hungry, sex-hungry, revenge-hungry woman.  Absolutely no one in this book likes her – even her children, desperate as they are for her love, learn to turn elsewhere.

Manette Fairclough McGhie

If there is one woman for whom we can feel some pity, some connection, some recognition that we finally have someone with humanity, it is Manette.  She is a woman who has been rejected by her parents in favor of her younger brother, yoked to a bitter and nasty twin sister, and disappointed in marriage.  She alone reaches out to her cousin’s children, is physically beaten in response, and still returns for another try.  She heroically comes to the aid of one of those children, despite contrary instructions from those in authority.  She is a rule-breaker, but with good cause.  And yet she spends most of the book in a passive, back of the room manner.  I think this is the closest I can come to finding a sympathetic character among the women in this book.

Angelina Upman

I saved the worst for last.  Look at her name – the implied angelic behavior (and she certainly plays that part well) in her first name, then balanced by a hard and – once we know what she does – understandably male-hating last name.  Angelina does what Niamh does, just differently.

These are the women who appear throughout the novel – I do not include the women who pop in for expository interludes – and they’re a bleak group, aren’t they?  Contrast them with intelligent, always-doing-the-right-thing-(or-at-least-trying) Lynley; noble, crippled, ever-patient Simon; sadsack Zed, all 6 feet 8 inches of him, with a shock of red hair and the inability to see what’s in front of him but who engages in a romance that surprises even him and Does The Right Thing In The End; and Bernard Fairclough, who, though he has his foibles and peccadilloes, and despite his lower class upbringing, tries to protect his wife from the pains of his past.  George is far gentler on her men than she is on her women.

I love these books.  I read them as soon as they are published, and I recommend them to friends looking for a new series to fall into.  But I do wish George would lighten up on the women.  I suspect that the majority of George’s readers are women – and perhaps as women, we are meant to care more for the men than the women – and it would be nice to have at least one woman (short of the one who had that potential but who died a few books back) with whom to identify.

Quality of Life -- in Whose Eyes?

Today, I read a story about a little girl who needs a kidney transplant, and the doctor who said she couldn’t have one because she is mentally retarded – she has Down syndrome – and her quality of life wasn’t worth saving.  Here is the original story:

 http://www.wolfhirschhorn.org/2012/01/amelia/brick-walls/

I am horrified that now, in 2012, we can still face this kind of prejudice, this kind of hatred – and make no mistake, this is hatred.  This is the belief that unless someone is experiencing the kind of quality of life society understands to be “normal,” he or she is not entitled to the same rights, the same medical treatment, the same respect as the normal people.  This is the kind of thinking that leads to abortion of imperfect babies, and in its extremity, the abandoning of babies on mountain slopes if they are damaged, as was done in ancient Greece.  No one now is, of course, saying we should abandon our children with disabilities on mountaintops, but consider Peter Singer.

Peter Singer is a philosopher from Australia who specializes in ethics.  There was a huge uproar back in 1989, the year Ian was born, when he was criticized for his stated beliefs that a baby born with a disability has a life that is so blighted as to be unworthy of living.  He said that such a baby’s parents would have the right to let the child die – to have medical procedures stopped, even nourishment refused.  This is true – he said these things.  There were protests held wherever he appeared to speak.  Disability advocates published papers and letters to the editor decrying Singer’s beliefs.  I was among those who felt he had no right to recommend such a frightening premise, especially once I was holding my own child in my arms.  What I didn’t know at the time was that he also said that once such a child is born, once the decision is made to keep that child alive, everything possible should be done to improve the quality of this child’s life.  I don’t know if that would have mitigated my fear of this man, and recently I learned that he has also argued in favor of rationing health care, which is a dangerous slope to get near.  It's funny how I once thought his words should be silenced, while now I wish he would talk to the transplant doctor.

It is an awesome power we allow our medical professionals to possess.  And I don’t mean awesome in its teenaged sense – this is awesome as in “inspiring awe,” and what is awe?  It is an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, and fear.  This is the awesome to which I refer.  We have given the power to decide life or death to our doctors and, especially, to our bean-counting insurance companies. 

I don’t know what I would do if Ian faced a life-threatening illness and was refused treatment because of his disability.  The anger and distress I am experiencing now just thinking about these parents and their daughter is overpowering, and this is simply on their behalf.  Thank the internet and its millions of tendrils that this story is making its way across vast numbers of people who are doing whatever they can to overturn this doctor’s judgment about this child’s life.

Punishing Myself Through the Movies (and TV)

    I went to see The Descendants yesterday.  Is it my imagination, or is every movie coming out these days about people finding out that their spouses cheated on them?  If this isn’t a general trend, I must have my self-punishment radar going strong, because I keep ending up at them.  I even bring them into my own home on DVD.

     It started with Stupid Crazy Love, in which Steve Carell’s character learns that his wife of 20some years has had an affair with a co-worker and wants a divorce.  It is a fairly Disneyfied version of a separation, though, with clean and clear borders and a (spoiler alert) reconciliation at the end.  True love conquers all, everything is forgiven and forgotten, and the man and wife even share a laugh over the year’s events together.  I can’t imagine laughing at the deep pain I have experienced this past year.  That will never happen.

     Soon after that came Chess, a wonderful and appreciated birthday present from my daughter.  Josh Groban plays a Russian chess player who leaves his country – and his wife – to flee to the west and into the arms of the former manager of his rival.  We see this relationship from their point of view, this lovely and loving young couple, and all is fair, their lives filled with the awe inspired by their new love.  We don’t see his wife, the mother of his children, left behind the Iron Curtain – until near the end, when she is brought to him to convince him to return.  That’s where I lose it – when we see her pain at having to beg her husband to come back with her.

     That was followed by Walk the Line, which is about Johnny Cash and his developing career as it was helped along by his love for June Carter.  We focus on their relationship, but we don’t spend a lot of time on the person I was focused on:  the wife he left to be with June Carter.  In another life, I might not have paid any attention to the first Mrs. Cash.  Like the rest of the audience, I would have cheered for the Cash/Carter alliance, wished them success as they struggled into their relationship.  But this is my life now.

     Then I started watching the first season of In Treatment, in which a man my age, with children the ages of my children (including two with the same names as my children), learns that his wife has had an affair; he discovers this in the second week of episodes.  The lines that haunt me from that conversation:  “Whatever I did, it was not intentional.  But what you did was deliberate.  You made a choice – a deliberate choice to betray me and our kids.”  This was so close to home, so painfully close to home, and yet I could not stop watching.

      Up until this point, I could claim ignorance of the existence of infidelity in these productions.  I knew very little about any of them before I saw them – I had heard that Stupid Crazy Love was funny, and I adore Ryan Gosling, so I went to see that; I knew nothing about Chess before I saw it; I knew that Johnny Cash and June Carter were married, but I did not know the circumstances of their relationship; and In Treatment took me completely by surprise.  But the next movie – another Ryan Gosling film – I knew going into it that watching was going to be difficult.  Blue Valentine was touted as the hardest, best movie to see last year.  I knew it was about a deteriorating relationship, but the circumstances were so different from my own life that I felt I could handle it.  What I didn’t count on were the universals involved with all deteriorating relationships:  the broken promises, the desperation, the lust and disgust.  It broke my heart to watch it, but I did.

     And yesterday, The Descendants.  I watched George Clooney’s face as his character learned about his wife’s infidelity, and I could feel my face matching his, muscle for muscle.  When he said he had to see the face of the man his wife had slept with, I knew that feeling.  That universal need – as Lara Fabian wrote in her song, “Broken Vow”:  “I need to see her face, I need to understand why you and I came to an end.”  I’ve seen her face, and I still don’t understand.  I don’t think we ever really do.

      I think it may be time to declare a moratorium on movies about the destruction of marriages.  But wait – here comes The Artist.  Three guesses what s

My 10 best reads of 2011

I read 61 books this year, some good, some excellent, some I wished I hadn’t had to read, and others I gave the time despite my usual “50-pages-to-win-me-over-life-is-too-short-to-waste-time-on-a-less-than-great-book” rule.

Here are the best of my 2011 picks, in the order in which I read them.  You will notice one author repeats – once I discover an author’s voice I like, I try to read whatever they have written.  This is the case with Kate Atkinson, who wrote a series of mysteries that I thoroughly enjoyed, but I don’t remember enough of them to let them lay claim to a spot on my top ten list.  In the interest of fairness, however, let me tell you that they are:  Case Histories, One Good Turn, When Will There Be Good News? (which was actually the first of them I read – then I went back to start at the beginning), and Started Early, Took My Dog.  I should mention that when I get started talking about books, well, I do go on.

The Know-It-All, by A.J. Jacobs – Jacobs spent a year reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and wrote about that year as it happened.  I believe he calls this “Stunt Journalism.”  Another stunt journalist you might know of is George Plimpton, who wrote about his experiences joining the Detroit Lions’ 1963 training camp in Paper Lion.  In The Know-It-All, Jacobs writes about trying to share his newfound knowledge with family and friends, only to be shunned or derided.  One very funny sequence depicts Jacobs’ joining of Mensa, the organization for geniuses.  Jacobs’ writing is easy and witty and charming, and I became enamored enough to read his other two books.  I am anxiously awaiting his next, Drop Dead Healthy:  One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection.

A Thousand Cuts, by Simon Lelic – Lelic’s book is by genre a police thriller/mystery, but there is so much more to it.  Lelic’s protagonist, Detective Lucia May, is the sole woman in her department and must suffer the sexist comments and sexual harassment of her fellow police officers, including her supervisor.  To these men, there is no mystery:  a history teacher walked into his London school, took out a gun, and killed some students in front of witnesses.  But to May, there are intricate and complicated relationships at play, and she wants to discover what pushed the teacher to do what he did.  Lelic uses a combination of first-person accounts of the shooting and related events and third-person narrative to present his story, and it is compelling.  As a reader, I felt incensed that May herself was experiencing the very things she was learning about her case; as a woman, I wanted her to fight back but I understood her reluctance to do so.  This is another writer I will be eager to follow to future books.

The Guinea Pig Diaries, by A.J. Jacobs – This is a collection of essays, some of which were published in Esquire magazine, about some experiments taken on by Jacobs in an attempt to learn more about human nature.  In one essay, he writes about Radical Honesty, a movement that encourages not only the suppression of lies but the expression of truths no matter how painful.  In another essay, he writes about outsourcing his life to two companies in India, one to arrange his personal life, the other his professional life.  The former even sends flowers to his wife!  Another essay describes his experience posing as a celebrity at the Academy Awards, and in another, Jacobs decides to agree with everything his wife says and wants.  Again, Jacobs’ writing drew me in and I thoroughly enjoyed reading – and learning about what our human nature compels us to do.

The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs – I remember when this book was published, it seemed to be a bit ridiculed in the press.  I saw images of Jacobs in his Biblically white gowns, his beard grown according to Biblical instructions.  In this year, Jacobs attempted to live according to the moral codes presented in the Old Testament – including rules about eating, celebrating holidays, and how to interact with the world around him.  I found this fascinating.  Some of the moral codes – such as stoning adulterers – are clearly outdated and rightfully illegal, and Jacobs comes as close to following them in spirit as he can without actually committing them.  As in all this books, Jacobs writes about his relationship with his wife and the struggles they endure to become a family, and the result is a satisfying mix.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley – This book has been on my to-read list since I was in high school.  What made me get to it now?  I found an audio version read by Michael York, and I wanted to hear it.  It took me a while to get into the book – given the nature of the presentation, there was no turning back to re-read past sections for clarity and understanding – but after a short time, I found myself thoroughly involved in the lives of the characters and the society they lived in.  I know comparisons are often made between this and George Orwell’s 1984, but I found this book to be fuller and richer than the other.  I was particularly intrigued by the method of creating willing castes – tweaking embryonic development and subsequent brainwashing to encourage members of each caste to consider themselves better off than those in other castes.  It made me contemplate how we mold our own class system.  I do think I’d like to re-read this sometime, in hardcopy form (or perhaps on the Kindle!) to catch the things I might have missed while trying to figure out which way to point my car.

Making Toast, by Roger Rosenblatt – When his 38-year-old daughter died suddenly, Rosenblatt and his wife moved in with their son-in-law and grandchildren to help.  This is the story of that time.   His expression of his deep loss, combined with the humor necessary to raise small children, make this a lovely book.  I found it sad and yet enlightening, and all too familiar in its depiction of grief, surrender, and delusion.

365 Thank Yous, by John Kralik – I don’t remember why I initially wanted to read this – one day I found I had purchased it and loaded it on my Kindle – but I am glad that I did.  Kralik was living a life of negativity; his personal life was a mess, his professional life was no better, and it looked like there was no end to the downward spiral.  Then a friend suggested to him that he might want to change his outlook on life, and his ex-girlfriend wrote him a thank you note – and both of these things inspired him to begin thanking the people in his life.  He vowed to write thank you notes – one a day for a year – and in the process, found that his life was changing for the better.  I would love to do this, just to see what change might be wrought in me – but I also know that I tend to take on New Year commitments that far outweigh my ability to maintain them.  If I can do this on a smaller scale, I will.

A Discovery of Witches, by Deborah Harkness – Okay, I admit it:  I read books about vampires.  I’ve read the Twilight series (good story, terribly written, neglectfully edited), the Sookie Stackhouse series (entertaining if inconsistent), the first of the Vampire Diaries (eh), and lots of other books about vampires, many in connection with a course I developed a few years back called Vampire Literature.  When this book was published and I heard there was a vampire, and that this was a story for adults instead of for teens and tweens, I was interested – but it wasn’t until a colleague of mine plunked it down on my desk and told me I had to read it that I actually gave it serious thought.  Even then, I didn’t get to it for a few months, but when I did, I loved it.  I am frustrated that it is the first in what is proposed to be a trilogy, and that much of what I, as a reader, looked to get out of the first book was delayed to a future book, but I will read the next in the series.

V is for Vendetta, by Sue Grafton – Back in 1988, pregnant with my oldest son and headed out with my husband for our delayed honeymoon on Nova Scotia (I thought we had better have our honeymoon before the baby was born, or we’d end up one of those elderly couples on their overdue honeymoon on Love Boat), I packed four paperbacks I had heard were worth a read:  A is for Alibi, B is for Burglar, C is for Corpse, and D is for Deadbeat.  Because I was sick with a cold for the first few days of our trip, we spent a lot of time in our hotel rooms and I spent a lot of time with my nose in these books.  I loved them, and have continued reading the series since.  There have been great entries in the series, and some not-so-great, but I kept reading because I needed to know what would happen next – and this is the hallmark of great writing.  This latest in the series is one of the best:  fast-paced action, emotional weight, easy accessibility even to those new to Kinsey Milhone.  There are four letters left in the alphabet, and Grafton says that when she finishes those, she will be through.  She is 71 now and with approximately 8 years of writing to go, she figures she’ll be old enough to retire respectably.  What I love about Grafton is her refusal to sell film rights to these books, which leaves Kinsey firmly in our own imaginations.  (She says she will haunt her children if they ever sell those rights after she is dead.)

Fiction Ruined My Family, by Jeanne Darst – The last of my ten best list is a memoir written by the daughter of a would-be writer father who rarely achieved publication and a mother who allowed her alcoholism to take over the family’s emotional and financial stability.  I will always remember this book because of the circumstances of my reading it:  nestled in a cushy chair in front of a fireplace at the home of one of my dearest friends, having been invited for a few days of respite during a particularly difficult time of my life.  With my daughter gleefully entertained by my friend’s daughters, I had the luxury of reading and dozing in the warmth of the firelight.  The book itself is written in an easy, breezy tone, and though it gets a little heavy when Darst begins to deal with her own writing and drinking issues, the humor continues throughout. 

So there you have it:  my chosen ten best of the books I read this year.  Each of them meant something very special to me, and it’s been a wonderful trip back over the year in the remembrance of them.