I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me

"When I was first starting to cover stories, I went to the auction of the great horse Nashua, in the main offices of the Hanover Bank, then at 60 Broadway. Nashua's owner, William Woodward Jr., had been shot by his wife, who said she mistook him for a prowler in their Long Island home. The racing stable was put up for auction. Nashua was separate. Nashua was a great champion. They took the returns at the bank."

I Want to Thank My Brain for Remembering Me by Jimmy Breslin

_________________________

April 23, 2009 - Jimmy Breslin's daughter dies.

Richland Memories

I find family histories and area histories are interesting and rich with memories that for some unexplained reason, we can all share.



My husband grew up in Richland Parish, Louisiana and there have been two volumes of "Richland Memories" published that provide fascinating reading.



For copies of this book:

Original Richland Library

Retoration Society, Inc.

P.O. Box 522

Rayville, Louisiana 71269





We go back about every five years or so for husband's high school reunion (there were 33 - maybe 35 in his graduating class).

A grandson's poem

Aurora Quest Academy

Where Trouble Sleeps

Alease Toomey sat at her dresser, putting on lipstick, getting ready to take her son up to see the electric chair for the first time. She blotted her lips on a Kleenex, reached for her comb. Her dresser top held the basics only -- a jar of Pond's cold cream, a bottle of Jergens lotion, Elizabeth Arden rouge and lipstick, hand mirror, hairbrush -- all on a starched white table doily.

She thought about little Terry Daniels, just down the road. Why not take him along, too? Seeing the electric chair might be especially good for him, and certainly his mother wouldn't be taking him up there. And it would be nice for Stephen to have some company.

_____________________________________

Where Trouble Sleeps by Clyde Edgerton

When words collide

published 1984

It is

supposedly

now permissible

to end a sentence

with a preposition

although it

sometimes

seems a little strange.

I can still hear

my grade school

English teacher

admonishing us

not to.

WHEN WORDS COLLIDE

When words collide, they can collide like trucks on a highway, causing chaos and damage. Or they can collide like atoms of uranium, releasing power and force. Grammatical errors cause words to collide with disastrous results. Grammatical mastery -- craftsmanship -- causes words to collide in a creative burst of energy.

Hugo Whittier - the ultimate anti-hero

"After he barged into my chambers, Dennis parked his flat, entitled rear end on the set of my favorite chair, the armchair facing the windows that look out over the river, and proceeded to explain the end of his marriage to me while I sat on my bed in my pajamas, squinting at him with all the hatred I bear him, which is a heavy force, although he's as ignorant of that as he is of everything else about me, including the fact that in a short while I'll be dead. Dennis can be counted on to be a narcissist in every particular until his own end, whenever that may be slated to take place. My one regret in being terminal is that I will never know this, or other things."

There is very little to like about Hugo Whittier in Kate Christensen's novel The Epicure's Lament - however he certainly holds our interest.

A quote from Sam Lipsyte on the book's jacket: "What a wonderfully monstrous voice Kate Christensen has created in Hugo Whittier, trust-fund misanthrope, chain-smoking foodie, confirmed cad. His narration is as rich and textured as his Lobster Newburg, which I can almost taste. May we all simmer in the dark with such humor and gusto."

Book Gluttony!

Book Gluttony! Are your eyes bigger than your book belly? Do you have a habit of buying up books far quicker than you could possibly read them? Have you had to curb your book buying habits until you can catch up with yourself? Or are you a controlled buyer, only purchasing books when you have run out of things to read?

I find television to be very educating.
Every time somebody turns on the set,
I go in the other room and read a book.
~Groucho Marx

We lost thousands and thousands of books in the 1998 flood and admittedly there were some books I had not yet read but knew I would read - some day. Do I still buy books at every opportunity? You bet I do.

So many books - so many unexplored worlds . . .

Book Gluttony? I suppose so.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

Let books be your dining table,

And you shall be full of delights

Let them be your mattress

And you shall sleep restful nights.

~Author Unknown

Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house. ~Henry Ward Beecher

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing. ~Harper Lee

Our Kind of People

One of my first encounters with an early pioneering family in the black upper class was meeting members of the aristocratic Syphax family from Virginia. . . . the history of [this] family can be traced back to Maria Custis, the mulatto child of First Lady Martha Washington's grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. "Custis fathered Maria with Ariana Carter, one of his female house slaves," explained Syphax, a well-to-do, retired real estate broker who lives in Virginia, "and when Maria asked her father, who was also still her owner, for permission to marry Charles Syphax, a black slave who worked for her father, he released both from slavery, gave her a wedding in the mansion, and offered her and her new husband fifteen acres of the Arlington estate...."

Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham, pp 8-9

Handle with Care

Handle with Care by Jodi Picoult

page 119

When Mom called me down to dinner that night, I moved with all the wild and crazy enthusiasm of a death row prisoner heading to an execution. I mean, it didn't take a rocket scientist to know that nobody in this household was happy, and that it had something to do with the lawyer's office we'd gone to. My parents had not done much to mask their voices when they were yelling at each other. In the three hours since Dad had left and returned again, since Mom had cried into the mixing bowl while whipping up her meat loaf, you'd been whimpering. So I did what I always did when you were in pain: I stuck my iPod headphones in my ears and cranked the volume.

The Book of Qualities

Worry

Worry has written the definitive work on nervous habits. She etches lines on people's foreheads when they are not paying attention. She makes lists of everything that could go wrong while she is waiting for the train. She is sure she left the stove on, and the house is going to explode in her absence. When she makes love, her mind is on the failure rates and health hazards of various methods of birth control. The drug companies want Worry to test their new tranquilizers but they don't understand what she knows too well: there is no drug that can ease her pain. She is terrified of the unknown.

by J. Ruth Gendler

Misinformation

"They shall beat their swords into plowshares." This rendering of Isaiah 2:4 contains an anachronism introduced by the translators. The plowshare belonged to the type of plow invented in the seventh century A.D. in order to turn the heavy turf of Europe. It was unknown in the East at the time those words were written.

Far from the Madding Crowd. This is the title of Thomas Hardy's novel as correctly rendered: the word is not maddening, which is often said and which means something else. Madding means "frenzied" and maddening means "annoying." Hardy did not originate the phrase, but borrowed it from Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

"Dear hearts and gentle people." Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, these are not the words found on a scrap of paper in the possession of Stephen Foster when he died. They are, rather from a popular song of the 1950s. What Foster had written was "Dear friends and gentle hearts." Nobody has ever figured out why he wrote it. Some speculate that it was a title or a phrase he meant to use in a song.

bulldog. Not so named because of its appearance, but because bulldogs were especially bred during medieval times in England for the cruel sport of bullbaiting, which continued to be popular until the eighteenth century.

The Selfish Gene

Now, Richard Dawkins is actually writing about Darwin's theory of the 'selfish gene.' I admit that although I've had the book for ages, I've forgotten much of what I read. Now and then, I go back to it to read something that has 'popped up' in my memory bank and I want to learn a little more - or refresh my memory of what I DID read.

In the Endnotes of The Selfish Gene, Dawkins states that he is not advocating selfishness as a principle by which we should live. He writes that "perhaps because they [the reader] read the book by title only or never made it past the first two pages, have thought that I was saying that, whether we like it or not, selfishness and other nasty ways are an inescapable part of our nature." He is not advocating that at all.

"In fact genes 'determine' behaviour only in a statistical sense. A good analogy is the widely conceded generalization that 'A red sky at night is the shepherd's delight'. It may be a statistical fact that a good red sunset portends a fine day on the morrow, but we would not bet a large sum on it. . . . It is a statistical forecast only. We don't see red sunsets as irrevocably determining fine weather the next day, and no more should we think of genes as irrevocably determining anything. There is no reason why the influence of genes cannot easily be reversed by other influences."

This brings to mind a situation a dear niece and her husband are facing. They will (hopefully) be adopting a newborn baby girl who was born to a mother who has seen a World of Trouble and has not had many advantages at all. Now, this baby is in an orphanage. However, if my niece and her husband adopt and raise the child, she will be raised in a loving, nurturing, intellectually stimulating environment. The circumstances of her birth will not determine her future.

God bless these caring folks in our midst who adopt children who otherwise would (in all likelihood) have a life with no promise at all.

___________________

Postscript: am I bothered by the fact that Richard Dawkins is an atheist? I wouldn't say that I am bothered by it; I am actually more puzzled by his atheism, I suppose.

It baffles me that there are some who do not believe in God; it is so far from my known world. I see God in everything. I 'feel' God in everything. He is everpresent.

Just Walk Across the Room

This month each of the Sunday School classes in our church is studying Bill Hybels' book Just Walk Across The Room and the pastors' messages center on this same theme.

Sunday's lesson keyed on some very common sense observations that should (in my opinion) really be daily habits. Four DON'Ts:

1. Don't talk on and on (and on!) about yourself or your interests. Learn a little about the person with whom you are talking.
2. Don't (again - talk and and on at length) with incoherence. Make your point so someone can understand what you are saying.
3. Don't use 'insider' religious jargon (not only can this be boring - not everyone is knowledgeable about your particular religious catch-phrases).
4. DO NOT act superior.

Now, to me - whether one is sharing one's particular faith beliefs or just talking generally: these are very good rules. These habits are conducive to building friendships and making life much more interesting.

Several years ago someone shared with me his particular "One Minute Rule." He promised himself that he would not talk about himself more than one minute. Rather, he would learn about others and encourage others to share their stories. He said that even though this was a bit difficult at first (because like all of us: selfishness is sometimes present), he found that his life was really enriched and he made some good and fast friends who are much more interesting than he (I think he was being modest, though).

As for the next items on the above list, I think that is just Good Manners and Being Considerate.

William Carlos Williams

This is just to say . . .

This Is Just To Say
by
William Carlos Williams


I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

loving God

Frederick Buechner writes

Loving God means rejoicing in him. it means trusting him when you can think of a hundred reasons not to trust anything. It means praying to him even when you don't feel like it. It means watching for him in the beauty and sadness and gladness and mystery of your own life and of life around you. Loving each other doesn't mean loving each other in some sentimental, unrealistic, greeting-card kind of way but the way families love each other even though they may fight tooth and nail and get fed to the teeth with each other and drive each other crazy yet all the time know deep down in their hearts that they belong to each other and need each other and can't imagine what life would be without each other--even the ones they often wish had never been born.

some thoughts on faith

Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you're secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain? Can you imagine how discouraging it was for me to live in fear of weather, of drizzle or downpour? Because Christianity is about water: "Everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters." It's about baptism, for God's sake. It's about full immersion, about falling into something elementary and wet. Most of what we do in worldly life is geared toward our staying dry, looking good, not going under. But in baptism, in lakes and rain and tanks and fonts, you agree to do something that's a little sloppy because at the same time it's also holy, and absurd. It's about surrender, giving in to all those things we can't control; it's a willingness to let go of balance and decorum and get drenched.

David Foster Wallace

Chapter E Unibus Pluram
television and U.S. fiction

Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare. They are born watchers. They are viewers. They are the ones on the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses.


But fiction writers tend at the same time to be terribly self-conscious. Devoting lots of productive time to studying closely how people come across to them, fiction writers also spend lots of less productive time wondering nervously how they come across to other people. How they appear, how they seem, whether their shirttail might be hanging out of their fly, whether there's maybe lipstick on their teeth, whether the people they're ogling can maybe size them up as somehow creepy, as lurkers and starers.


The result is that a majority of fiction writers, born watchers, tend to dislike being objects of people's attention. Dislike being watched. The exceptions to this rule -- Mailer, McInerney -- sometimes create the impression that most belletristic types covet people's attention. Most don't. The few who like attention just naturally get more attention. The rest of us watch.

Music

"...something special happens when a group starts to sing togther--something extraordinary from a cognitive (and dynamic complex systems) perspective, something you've probably experienced yourself in any place where people come together to sing: football games, church, campfires, or political rallies."

_____________________________

"Confucius reportedly said, 'Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without.'"

"Music and health are intimately related in human history, from shamanic healing to 'witch doctors,' from the Hebrews to current-day programs of music therapy. King David played the harp to relieve the stress of King Saul (Samuel I, 16:1-23), and the ancient Greeks (in particular Zenocrates, Sarpander, and Arien) used harp music to ease the outbursts of people with mental illnesses."

________________________________

"The six types of songs that shaped human nature

--friendship, joy, comfort,

knowledge, religion,

and love songs--

I've come to think are obvious..."

_____________________________

The Worst Hard Time

I initially borrowed this book from our excellent library. At that time Timothy Egan had not yet received the National Book Award. Of course, I had to have the book for my personal library. Believe me, this is an excellent book!

This week Timothy Egan will receive the Evil Companions Literary Award 2009 at the Oxford Hotel in Denver (wish I could be there!). The Oxford Hotel by the way is such a beautiful historic hotel in LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver). Our daughter and son-in-law's wedding reception was held in that marvelous hotel.
I digress!

The Evil Companions Literary Award is presented annually to a poet or writer who embodies the spirit of the West. The award pays homage to a group of Denver writers who met in the 1950s and '60s to drink and discuss writing, and dubbed themselves the Evil Companions.

Working to preserve the memory of the original Evil Companions are Joyce Meskis, owner of the Tattered Cover Book Store, Dana Crawford, owner of the Oxford Hotel and Colorado State University Professor of English, David Milofsky. The trio created the literary award and its accompanying event to promote and build upon Denver’s deserved reputation as a center for writing and literature. The Evil Companions event is quickly becoming a local favorite. Proceeds from the event benefit the Denver Public Library. {Wonder if the Seguin Friends of the Library could have such an event, honoring local writers ??? A thought . . .}

Excerpt from The Worst Hard Time:

At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres. Dusters swept over the northern prairie as well, but the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in ruin and on the run. More than a quarter-million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. Looking around now, it may seem that most people just hurried through the southern plains or left in horror. Not true. John Steinbeck told part of the story, about getting out, moving somewhere green. Those were the Exodusters. But Steinbeck's exiles were from eastern Oklahoma, near Arkansas -- mostly tenant farmers ruined by the collapse of the economy. The families in the heart of the black blizzards were further west, in towns like Guymon and Boise City in Oklahoma, or Dalhart and Follett in Texas, or Rolla and Kismet in Kansas. Not much was heard about the people who stayed behind, for lack of money or lack of sense, the people who hunkered down out of loyalty or stubbornness, who believed in tomorrow because it was all they had in the bank. Yet most people living in the center of the Dust Bowl, about two thirds of the population in 1930, never left during that hard decade.

...For now, the narrative of those times is not just buried among the fence posts and mummified homesteads. People who lived through the whole thing -- the great town-building, farm-fattening, family establishing prosperity of the 1920s, followed by the back hand of nature in the next decade, when all of life played out as if filmed in grainy black-and-white -- are with us still, shelters of living memory. But before the last witnesses fade away, they have a story to tell.

The Loveliest Woman in America

Blurb from the book jacket:

In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, Rosamond Pinchot was hailed as "The Loveliest Woman in America." At thirty-three, in a sudden, shocking, and highly public act, Rosamond took her own life, setting in motion generations of confusion in the family she left behind.

Nearly seventy years after her demise, her granddaughter Bibi received a box of more than 1,500 pages of Rosamond's diaries and embarked on a seven-year journey to make sense of the silence that surrounded Rosamond's death and to discover the grandmother she never knew.

_______________________________________________

The scrapbooks weren't small and colorful flipbooks people leave around the house so friends can take a peek at the kids; they were huge and heavy, embossed with her name, Rosamond Pinchot Gaston, in gold leaf across forest green covers. The letters are faded now, but through the scrapbooks, I came to know Rosamond like a character in a silent movie. The visuals were spectacular but the silence was deafening.