The Blueness continues. It is a combination of this winter we are having, which started out with lots of lovely snow (which doesn't make me blue), but then turned into freezing temps (it is rare for Utah to be this cold, single degrees and lower) which turned into an inversion. The painful cold is one thing but the smog eating away at the mountains and dirtying lungs...it makes me a little bit crazy. Plus, I've only run outside once this month, on January 10 when, just before a little storm, a wind kicked up and cleaned out the air. I've done some treadmill running (kill me now) and some miles on the track at the Rec (6 1/5 laps per mile there, which is frustratingly hard to keep track of), but entirely not enough exercising.

I can't wait to run outside.

My friend Karen had a post on her blog yesterday about celebrating, so in an effort to pinken up, here are some things I am celebrating:

1.  This is the view from my office window:

Trees with fresh snow and more coming down. Big white flakes falling hard and fast. It seems like everyone is complaing about more snow, but I am, officially, not complaining. I've never in my life made it to my personal snow threshold (when one cries out "enough snow!!!"). Even if I have to drive somewhere.

2. It's Wednesday and I don't have to work again until the weekend.

3. I have a few layouts to make for my Saturday post on WCS. I love sitting down to scrap!

4. Kaleb's dinosaur quilt is just about ready to be quilted. All of the pieces for Jake's quilt are cut. And I know what I am going to do for Haley's graduation quilt. (All of which makes me think I should also sew something quilty for Nathan!)

5. Hot chocolate in the Eeyore cup I bought in Disneyland. The dark, good Starbucks hot chocolate (which no one but me likes, so the can is lasting forever!), with a splash of half-and-half. And marshmallows.

6.  Our anniversary is coming up next month. Trying to decide how to properly celebrate it in February. ("Let's go somewhere tropical, with perhaps a jungle hike and some ruins to explore" is my real answer, but, alas, that money will be spent on a new roof in the spring. WHEEEEE.)

7.  Everyone getting straight As on their report cards!

8. Haley's upcoming choir concert. While I am annoyed at some of the choices her teacher has made, I'm excited to listen to her sing.

9. My kitchen is clean. Also, I found a startling but altogether effective consequence for yesterday's messy basement. No yelling or long discussions or cheese-throwing involved.

10. The cold sensitivity in the crown I had a few weeks ago is starting to go away. And my bite seems to be returning to normal.

11.  Gloves, scarves, boots, sweaters. I'm not tired of any of them yet.

12. When the snow slows down I'm going to go outside. Outside! No running but I am going to shovel the driveway. Kendell usually beats me to it, but I enjoy shoveling snow.

What are you celebrating right now?

I once went to someone's house, and before I could sit down on her couch she had to brush aside a few pieces of dried cat poop off the cushions. In that moment I tried really, really hard not to judge her, even as my inner voice was thinking I've finally found a house that's really, truly too messy for even me to stand. I fought the judgment because I have this philosophy that tidy houses aren't the external proof of tidy souls. Despite the proverb "cleanliness is next to Godliness."

Can I tell you how much I hate that phrase?

But I've been thinking a lot, lately, about cleaning. I think that phrase refers to being spiritually clean: trying to be honest and sincere, trying to do good to others, trying to not be selfish. But somehow it's accumulated a whole bunch of other baggage, that proverb. It's easily tossed around by some in reference to housework, as if a person with a clean house is somehow morally superior to the rest of us with our slovenly ways. Or, perhaps it seems that having a clean house is proof that she (the cleaner-of-the-house, who let's face it, usually is the woman) is closer to God.

To which I say: really???

Does God really, really care that right now, my bookshelves are cluttery, I haven't wiped off my kitchen counter yet, and the front room really needs to be vacuumed? Or does he care more that on Sunday I got so mad at one of my kids that I threw a chunk of Velveeta at him?

I reject utterly the idea that there is a connection between a clean house and a clean spirit.

No, to my mind, cleaning isn't spiritual. I clearly remember the utter bafflement I felt when I first started spending a lot of time with Kendell and his family. They are cleaners, my married-into family. And they notice when other people aren't clean. I would listen to them talk about someone's dusty corners or dirty bathroom and it was a sort of revelation, as I had no idea that people noticed the cleanliness (or lack of) of other people's houses. I had no idea that people actually swept their cement laundry room floors! It was as if there were this entire race of people I had never noticed. They look like regular human beings but in reality they are the Tribe of the Clean Women, individuals with the genetic inclination of household cleanliness. It made me self conscious because I am definitely not of that gene pool and, frankly, it bugged me for a long time. I failed to understand why it really, really matters if your house is clean every day of your life.

Cleaning the house isn't spiritual; it's political. It was in my house growing up, especially when things got bad after Dad was laid off. If we came home from school to find Dad vacuuming or cleaning the kitchen, we knew there'd been a big argument that day, and we walked with careful toes through the sparkling clean house. I promised myself, when I got married, that cleaning wouldn't work that way in my family. My kids would be able to see their father sweeping the floor or wiping the counter without having an adrenaline spike.

But I was almost twenty and completely naive and I didn't understand that maybe you can only achieve that lack of tension over who cleans the house if you both have identical cleaning personalities. As Kendell has the "clean" personality in our relationship and I have the—well, there's not an easy word that succinctly describes my relationship to housecleaning, but it's decidedly not like Kendell's—opposite, let's say, we've had quite a few "discussions" in our day about cleaning the house (and the car, too). My kids probably do get anxious when they see Kendell cleaning, even though they see him doing it far more than I ever saw my dad. I don't know how to make it any other way than it is: his vision and mine don't always line up, and the tension makes sparks. Cleaning the house doesn't make me feel closer to God; sometimes it makes me feel closer to subservient. Sometimes it makes me feel, if not entirely happy, at least proud of myself for not being a sloth in that moment. But it always makes me feel that it isn't about vacuumed floors or scrubbed toilets; it's about family dynamics and trying to be a good example and the simple fact that someone has to do it.

And in that sense it is also about power.

While I worked through the being-bothered part of my revelation about Clean Women (they feel morally superior about their cleanliness, while I get snooty about correct grammar; we all have our dumb ways of using our emotional energy), it continues to impact how I feel about myself as a woman. I'm just not the kind of person who gets bothered by clutter. If a drawer is messy I am wont to just keep it closed until I get a burst of cleaning energy, and then I take care of it. I can sleep just fine if my kitchen isn't clean and I can walk right out of my house without being bugged all day by that smudge on the wall.

But what if I wasn't that way? What if I was also a Clean Woman? I've been friends with several of them so I know they exist. Drawers of color-coordinated kitchen towels. Garbage can cleaned and scrubbed every garbage day. Sinks always scoured, bathroom corners always free of dirt, no cluttery piles. And it's not just that she keeps her house clean. It's that she wants to. It's that "clean the house" is always on the top of the Most Important Things To Do list.

Think of all the arguments with my husband I could have avoided!

Think of how many people I would've impressed with my clean house!

Think of the hours I wouldn't have spent feeling like I am faulty, somehow, as a woman!

Think of all the hours I would've spent teaching my kids the art of moral superiority via mopped floors!

Ahh—there's the rub. Because the reason I've been thinking so much, lately, about cleaning the house and the division of chores and what is fair and right and good is that my teenagers are, lately, being teenagers. Just this morning I collected eleven glasses, two plates, three bowls, 11 little empty bags of chips, three empty boxes (granola bars, Ritz crackers, fruit snacks), two empty water bottles, and three crushed-in soda cans from the TV room downstairs—and that's just stuff from the food department. There are also blankets, sleeping bags, a tent that no one took to last weekend's campout, socks,  clothes, and probably other stuff, strewn everywhere.

And while I hate that it bothers me (at this point, being so thoroughly rejected by the Clean Women tribe, I don't want to have any of their defining characteristics), it bothers me. Not because the stuff on the floor bothers me, but for what it signifies: that their time is more important than mine.

And even deeper is this: It's obviously my fault that they think this is OK. Because trying to teach your children that there is no moral superiority to be gained in a clean house is a double edge sword. On the one hand, if you ever have my kids over to visit and your house happens to be messy, they won't be silently thinking "holy cow this house is messy." They won't be judging you. On the other hand (here's the edge that cuts me), if their own space is messy they won't think "I should take my cups upstairs so Mom doesn't have to." Instead they'll think "I should watch TV!" and it's no one else's fault but mine.

They didn't learn to ignore clutter from their father.

How can I get mad at them for taking to the extreme a philosophy they learned from me? I can't, really. I guess we need to work on finding a balance, somehow. Because honestly, I don't want them to grow up and have immaculate houses and feel superior to those who don't. I don't want my sons' future wives to think badly of themselves if they, too, aren't Clean Women. Or to be completely frustrated by a husband who refuses to pick up his own damn soda cup. I don't want Haley to be a slave to her house, which is another reason I can't fit into the tribe: I will always want to do other things before I want to clean the house, and I want her to know that her interests and desires are important. But I also don't want them to have cat poop on their couches.

What I haven't managed to teach them (and perhaps I never will) is the proper place of household chores. It's not up there right next to God. A clean house doesn't say much about your spirit. But it also matters because you can't be completely uninvolved. Part of being alive is doing the work that's required, and putting your clothes in the hamper is part of that work. Being able to work (even and perhaps even especially) when you don't want to perhaps does say something about your spirit: that you are willing to sacrifice for other people, and isn't that what it takes to be a successful adult?

So here I am, standing in the middle of my basement TV room, surrounded by the clutter of three teenagers. I'm trying to breath. I'm trying not to throw anything, or to judge them, or to lose perspective on the importance of the moment. The kids aren't even home—they're all in school. And I have to decide. I have to figure it out: how can I do this better? How can I teach them to balance it out? How can I help them stay right in the middle, with fairly clean (but never perfectly, never obsessively) personal spaces and no emotional baggage? I'm not sure. Maybe the Tribe of the Clean Women knows.

Maybe no one does.

I just know this: I still have work to do.

I have a file on my computer called "answers from the universe." In it, I keep little bits and pieces of personal truths that I needed to read or hear or see somehow, anything from scriptures to poems to sentences to entire paragraphs. This is because I believe truth is scattered, pieces are everywhere, and you find what you need to know only if you are looking. Looking, and gathering.

Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu tells the story of something else that was broken and scattered, a magic mirror that makes beautiful things look ugly and ugly things look beautiful. When the imps try to fly it up to heaven to tease the angels, they drop it. It shatters and some of its shards fly into the hearts of unfortunate people, one of whom is Jack, Hazel's best friend. Jack changes; he no longer wants to hang out with Hazel in the abandoned house they found (and call the Shrieking Shack), talking about stories, drawing imaginary characters, and playing super hero baseball. Instead, he's cruel to Hazel, and then he ignores her, which is hard since she's already struggling through fifth grade in the new school she had to go to when her parents divorced. Aside from Jack, she doesn't have any real friends, and she feels she doesn't fit in anywhere, except inside books. Fantasy and science fiction are her favorites, and they're Jack's favorites, too, so bits of Harry and Lyra and Meg and Lucy work themselves into their adventures. But they are in fifth grade, and things are changing, and maybe a boy and a girl can't really be friends, and then the bit of mirror—which only looks like glass to the doctor—falls into Jack's eye and everything changes.

This is a middle-grade book, and I confess: it's been awhile since I've read from this age group's books and enjoyed myself. Usually I am far too conscious of how the story is being told and of how I would've reacted to it when I was a middle-grade reader myself to actually lose myself in the book. Which is an odd point, as I was thoroughly aware of how my middle-grade self would've felt about Breadcrumbs: she would have loved it. In this retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's The Snow Queen, the first part is set mostly in contemporary America, with contemporary fifth-grade issues. Hazel, who was adopted from India and doesn't know anything about her birth parents, is one of those dreamy, artsy kids who thinks about fairy tales much more (and much more highly) than things like math and science and spelling. She watches the girls in her fifth grade class, and she tries fitting in, but she can't quite do it. She doesn't want to give up her fantasies and stories, her escapes into imagination, and she doesn't quite see the point of the games the other girls play (mostly of the friend/not-friend variety.)

My fifth-grade issues weren't the same as Hazel's, but they were similar: I didn't ever feel like I fit in, and I was shy and bookish and awkward in conversations. I wasn't artsy but I was dreamy, and I didn't just think about fairy tales, I watched for portals. I wanted to find the way out of here and into there; into the place where magic was, because magic (I never could have explained) was the only thing that might make me make sense of the world. Fifth grade was especially tough for me, because for the first time in my elementary experience, new people moved into our school. Two sets of twins, in fact, and suddenly there were all sorts of friendship competitions going on in Mr. Strong's class. The reality of being a girl, I guess, and that sort of battle wasn't my forte. (Still isn't.) So I thoroughly related to Hazel, even though my adult self was thinking come on Hazel, don't be sullen and shy, respond to that mean girl with a little bit of backbone and right in the middle of that thought is when it hit me: how I have changed since I was in Hazel's shoes.

I mean, of course, there are a myriad ways I've changed since I was ten, obviously. But the biggest thing, the thing this book made me want to get back, was the believing. The looking for portals because you were certain there had to be one somewhere. Part of growing up was hardening myself to the reality of this world: there are no portals. We are firmly here whether here makes sense or not. Believing in fairy tales or being certain that at any time I could be swept up in a time machine so I could go and live with Laura or be Anne's other bosom friend offered me no knowledge for dealing with girls who had sort-of been my friends since kindergarten (but sort-of really not) and the influx of new possibilities.

And of course, you can't believe forever. "This is what it is to live in the world," Hazel realizes. "You have to give yourself over to the cold, at least a little bit." Like Hazel, what made me let the cold in was the way that friendships didn't work. But as I pushed on with Hazel's adventures—she does find a portal, sort of, and it takes her to the place where the snow queen has taken Jack, and there she meets bits and pieces of other fairy tales and has to decide what is motivating her and how she really feels about their friendship and what kind of daughter she wants to be and, in all of those things, the kind of person she will chose to become in the real world—and I watched her learn in the fantasy world how to be strong enough to be herself in the real one, I felt that belief tugging at me. There was a threshold and a magical woods. Your father left you. You left your mother. There was a boy, and he was your best friend. Come, the cold said, and I will blow you away. That is what the cold whispered to Hazel, but the belief was the thing whispering to me. Come on, it hinted. Come back. There were the friends who weren't friends, there was all that hurt, there was wanting and not having and not knowing why. Come back and then you'll see.

And that was the little piece of truth I found in this book, which I can't even be objective enough to tell you critically whether or not I liked it. (The transition between real and fantasy was too abrupt, I think, and the ending too vague; but the pieces of faerie bumping up against the real world were delightful, and the Snow Queen a sort of anorexic evil, and how could I not love a book that references A Wrinkle in Time?) There's not an exact quote I can put down in my "answers from the universe" file, because in a sense the entire book—no, the experience of reading the book as I am now—was an answer. I put my belief in magic away and in doing so I put away some of my chances at finding the necessary magic to make things happen.

In other words, the answer from the universe I found in Breadcrumbs is to start looking for portals again.

I think much has been written about a commonly disliked word, moist. People seem to have visceral responses to it, perhaps because it is so ickily onomatopoeic. I can see the dislike, but the word that makes me feel naseous is  lorazapam. I can't explain why, other than it should end with an N instead of an M, and when I hear (or read) that word, it sounds in my head like it's said by a dehydrated person (usually my mother, oddly enough) who has those white crusties on her lips.

Hey. I never claimed I was normal.

Another term I don't really like is "fussy cut." It sounds so...nasal. Precise and uptight and old fashioned. But, alas, despite my disaffection for the term itself, it is a useful one. It originated in quilting and refers to the process of cutting fabrics (usually with large or remarkable patterns or images) in a specific way so as to show off as much of the image/pattern as possible, rather than just randomly cutting it as it falls under your ruler. Sometimes this means you try to fit an entire motif within a square, or that you make sure that, say, one specific leaf always falls in the same corner.

You can do the same thing in scrapbooking.

But instead of where the pattern/image/motif falls in a square or a triangle as with quilting, in scrapbooking, to "fussy cut" means to cut around the shape/image/motif. It is an awesome (albeit a little time-consuming) way to use papers with large patterns or shapes, because you get the feel of the patterned paper (the texture, colors, and design) added with flexibility (you can toss the cut-out shapes where ever you want instead of being constrained by how they are printed on the paper).

The most important thing to remember about fussy cutting: use a sharp and small pair of scissors. I have a tiny pair of Gingher spring scissors which are supposed to be used for snipping threads but which I use for fussy cutting. (I know: those of you who sew or who had moms who sewed are right now thinking "don't you ever, ever cut paper using my good sewing scissors," quite possibly in your mother's voice, but it's OK because the cool thing about good sewing scissors is that you can have them sharpened!)

And, another secret for smooth cuts: keep the tension consistent. That means that the hand holding your patterned paper should pull on the paper a little bit, away from the scissors.

Also! If you want to use the back of the paper you're fussy cutting (for, say, printing your journaling, or some other kind of embellishment, or for a card, or for, well, whatever), try cutting the images on the outer edges of the paper.

(Funny story: I used to love cutting into my mom's fabric stash when I was a kid. I'd cut a chunk out of something pretty and use it as a blanket for my baby doll or maybe a skirt for a Barbie if I was playing with Becky, or I'd just cut it because it was pretty and I wanted to look at it. I imagine I frustrated her quite often when she retrieved her fabric to start working on the intended project and found an ameba-shaped hole in the middle. Finally she taught me that if I wanted to cut off some fabric I could only do it from the edge, which was hardly as much fun.)

Oh, and one more: if you are going to be putting your fussy-cut pieces underneath other things, you can use the shapes on the edges of the paper by tucking the missing part under. (You don't, in other words, always have to have an entire image; you can just use part of it.) Or, you can cut one larger piece in half with a similar outcome.

So! Today's challenge is a simple one:

Create a layout using some patterned paper you can fussy cut.

Here's what I mean:

I confess: this wasn't the speediest layout to make. It took awhile to cut out all those flowers. But I love the way it turned out!

Tell me: are you a fan of fussy cutting, whether in quilting or in scrapbooking?

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Use Your Stuff #4: Patterned Paper

The calendar I picked out in 1994 was something that changed my life.

I know: odd statement. But true, nevertheless: it was a random choice, based on the fact that the Mary Englebreit calendar I usually buy was sold out, and there on the shelf was a Georgia O'Keeffe calendar, and she'd always intrigued me, and it was on clearance, so I bought it. Then I flipped through it as soon as I got back to my car (my favorite car we ever owned, a 1993 Honda Accord; I still miss it), which is my habit with new calendars, looking to see what images will hang on my kitchen wall throughout the year. (My grandma Elsie also had A Thing for Calendars, but hers was quite different from mine.)

I got to this image and I stopped looking:

And then I changed. Because there in an image was the place I'd walked in my heart so many times. The black place, the deep canyon nearly void of light, and the thing that looks like a path is really lightning and it burns rather than leads. Don't be fooled by the peaks nor the glimmer of color because that is the irony of dark places, you can tell how dark they are only by judging how far away the beauty is.

This painting changed me for several reasons. Most powerfully, it taught me what art can do. It isn't just about color and shape (or word choice and sentence structure and metaphor), but about expressing the human condition. It is a standard my little skill will probably never manage but one I hold dear all the same, to write things that might toss a sort of rope across the chasm to someone else. Equally, it gave me an image, something I could see to make sense of what I had felt. Continued to feel, will continue to feel. I had read poems that had done that, too, and novels, but this was the first piece of art. When something dark and complicated and hard like depression is given a shape it becomes less complicated because there is now, at least and blessedly, a form, a color, a texture, a thing to point to: here. And if the work of an artist from the American southwest, a person whom I'd never met, could represent what I had felt, the next bit of knowledge was that I wasn't ever wandering my black places alone. Others had been there. Were there, even though I never saw them. Black Place II is, for me, an expression of why art (and by "art" I mean the things we create) will always be the truest expression of humanity.

I wrote a poem about it for one of my writing classes. I clung to the image when things were rough. I learned about O'Keeffe and came to love her work, but not like this painting. This one has become a metaphor for what my life feels like: sometimes I am down in the canyon, sometimes tumbling toward it, sometimes climbing out. Sometimes, even, on those white hills.

Usually, I manage to stay out of the darkest of the black place.

But not this past Monday, which someone told me was Blue Monday: the most depressing day of the year. A cross word, a short but bitter tirade which cut across a few layers of hope, an overheard comment: these things on Sunday night pushed me right over the edge, and sleep didn't help. On Monday I was right down in the dark, head full of meanness, heart hard as anything. I was full of self-doubt and -deprecation. I tried all the usual things that are supposed to help: exercise, and cleaning, and music. I tried pretending to be happy. I took the kids to lunch. I even made cookies, even though food isn't supposed to make you feel better, sugar cookies which we frosted with blue frosting.

Slowly, a little light filtered in: Kaleb's happiness at cutting hearts from dough, Haley laughing at Kendell's exuberant fingerful of dough straight out of the bowl, the kind way that Nathan taught Kaleb how to get the cookies onto the sheets. Jake's declaration that sugar cookies are the best thing ever. Look at that: it was the cookies that made me start to climb. Not the eating of them, but the making, the process, the sharing of time.

And I remembered again: acts of creation are what lift. None of my cookies were works of art, but they were each an act of creation, small circles like steps to climb out of the darkest of black places.

1. Haley started doing her internship for her pharm tech certification this week. (She took a night class last semester for the coursework.) She has to do 180 (unpaid!) hours at a pharmacy, and she got a spot at Ridley's. (We went to every pharmacy we could think of, and they all either already had an intern, didn't take under-21-interns, or didn't do internships at all.) She wanted Target but she's really liking Ridley's. It is a strange experience, watching my daughter moving forward. Bittersweet but rewarding all at once. I am so proud of her!
2. Yesterday my mom called to see if I could come help her clean out a room in her house because the painter is going to come this weekend. (She wants to sell her house and move closer to the rest of us, to something smaller, but she has a lot of stuff to sift through before that happens!) Then she told me her furnace wasn't working. I helped her with a reliable heating & air guy (the people she called told her she'd need a new furnace; my awesome & amazing neighbor was able to repair a part for less than $200) and then Kendell & I went out in the late afternoon to help her with the room. While we were decluttering I found some old school photos of me that I hadn't seen in years, the nativity from my childhood which my mom thought Dad had thrown away, and my Swatch. I'm ridiculously excited for all of them, but I have a half-formed blog post in my head about the Swatch and how rooms hold the ghosts of memories.
3. We are totally socked in here: the air pollution is thick. It makes me anxious on so many levels, but here is something I can't understand: all the high school track coaches sending their track teams out to run. It seems thoroughly irresponsible to me.
4. Today was a textile day. As all five of my family members had mentioned something to me about laundry over the past 48 hours, I decided it was time to get some done. So today I didn't ever even get out of my pajamas. I just sorted clothes, folded clothes, sorted socks, cleaned out Kaleb's dresser, and babysat the washing machine. In between laundry I worked on Kaleb's dinosaur quilt. (Yes! the very one I started working on in June---of 2010. I know!) I had all the blocks sewn into strips, so today I sewed the strips together and added the border. When I finish this blog post I'm going to put the last piece onto the (pieced) back and then hopefully I'll get it pinned together this weekend so I can quilt it on Monday. Only...I'm not certain I've decided how to quilt it, or what color of thread to use. At any rate, even though I didn't balance the checkbook or investigate flights to Miami or finally figure out which laser printer to buy, I did feel like I was productive today.
5. Which is a marked change from the rest of the week. Between the air pollution, the cold (it's been in the single digits and the negatives here, which is COLD for us), and not sleeping well (I've been taking Trazadone for awhile to help my sleep, but I'm trying to not take it for awhile to see if it's making my brain fuzz worse), all I've wanted to do was sit around drinking hot chocolate. Like...cups of it, every day. And very little exercise. Maybe next week I'll find some motivation somewhere.

How was your week?

Sometimes when I see teenage girls come to the library, I get a little bit lonesome for that long-ago version of myself. They always come to the library in pairs, of course, and one of the pair is obviously the bookworm. I remember that—coming with a friend who liked to read (like nearly all of my friends did) but didn't love it like I did, didn't find solace in the library and know where the obscure volumes were on the shelves and which librarian was the nicest to check out with. I don't think any of my friends knew that the library was where I vanished sometimes, and having one of them with me there created a sort of tension: I wanted her there to know that I fit in somewhere, but it was my place, not hers. None of my friends defined themselves with books like I did: which is to say, books were the main things that kept me working, kept me going, kept me from dissolving into the puddle I wanted to dissolve into and in which, I imagine, most teenage girls sometimes want to dissolve. I simply wouldn't be myself without books, then and now, but then I had books in a way I might never have them again: I read all. the. time. I had the luxury of a busy mother who indulged my reading habits; I filled every spare second with books. "Let's go," Jen would say on the phone to me, and I would say "OK, come get me" but my heart was usually saying "leave me alone and let me read."

 

Now, when I accept a new friend request on Facebook or see someone from high school I haven't seen in awhile, the most common thing people say is "I'm not surprised you're a librarian." Seems they, too, couldn't separate my association with books from my very identity.

But here's a secret: I'm not the same as I was when I was 17. And that is the self who I miss when I see those pairs of teenage girls, one book worm, one along for the ride. I miss being in that place in my life when all I did was read, when reading was perhaps the only healthy way I kept myself together. I have other ways now, most of them healthier, and while I still read, while I will never stop reading, I miss that absolute dedication to a novel in my hand. Aside from that phone call from a friend, I never felt anything tugging me out of a book, no compunction or guilt or I should be doing ____________ instead.

I also miss it when I read a deliciously long personal saga. You know the kind of book that tells not just a story about an adventure or a mystery or an experience, but the entire breadth of a person's life? That kind of book makes me miss the freedom to read that only teenagers have. A book like The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. It tells the story of Andras Levi, who travels at the beginning of the book in 1937 from his small town in Hungary to Paris, where he has won a scholarship to study architecture at the Ecole Speciale. He had to work especially hard for this scholarship, as not only is he poor, he is also Jewish, and there are new laws spreading throughout the continent about what Jews can do; there are limits to how many Jewish people can attend a school, or receive a scholarship.

Still, he settles in to his small apartment and his classes, learning about architecture, creating work that wins prizes. He writes letters often to his brothers Tibor (who wants to go to medical school but cannot yet, because of the restrictions against Jews) and Matyas (who wants to leave his schooling to become a dancer). Through a strange set of circumstances—a letter he mailed for another Hungarian, a job at a theater when his scholarship is taken away, a socially-contrived sort of blind date—he meets the lovely Clara Morgenstern, with whom he promptly falls in love despite their 15-year age difference.

Why this long book made me lonesome for my long-ago readerly self is just that: it is long. It is the sort of book that traces the arc of a life; not the entirety of Andras's life, but the most challenging parts: his relationship with Clara and his experiences at school; his abrupt (and forced) return to Hungary when Jews are no longer allowed to renew their student visas; his life in the Munkaszolgalat (the Hungarian military forced labor service) which is full of suffering, hunger, cruelty, and the constant threat of death; his attempts to sneak out of Hungary with his family; his eventual experiences at an Austrian work camp; his return to Budapest.

It took me the entire month of November to read.

I loved it, though. The WWII time period is endlessly, if horrifically, fascinating to me, if only because the are so many stories to be told. I didn't know, for example, that the Hungarian Jews were perhaps the luckiest in Europe. They had two leaders, Nagy and Kallay, who tried to fight against Hitler's anti-Semitic edicts in subtle ways that, though they kept them in the Munkaszolgalat, they kept them out (for the most part, until the end) of concentration camps. I also didn't know that the build up to the war happened so much earlier, in the 1930's, and just how effortlessly it could build based on the anti-Semitic policies that already existed in so many European countries.

Built on the author's family history, The Invisible Bridge tells one small story out of the millions possible. "One and a half million Jewish men and women and children: How was anyone to understand a number like that?" Andras wonders, "each of them with desires and fears, a mother and a father, a birthplace, a bed, a first love, a web of memories, a cache of secrets, a skin, a heart, an infinitely complicated brain—to imagine them that way, and then to imagine them dead, extinguished for all time—how could anyone begin to grasp it?" I think we start to grasp it by reading their stories, even though our silent and anachronic witness does nothing to save them, and we cannot save them, at least we can know more of what happened and so, in that way, keep something of them alive.

A library patron once told me that she doesn't read books about the Holocaust. "I feel sorry for what happened to those people," she explained, "but reading about it only makes me sad, and it's not like it changes any of what happened." I could only respond with a "hmmmmm," because my reading philosophy runs so differently from that idea. For me, reading about the Holocaust is something I do both as a way of revisiting the stories of the dead and as a way of learning. Of course it doesn't change history, a novel about the Holocaust. But it does change me a little bit. It forces me to think what would I do? and why did that happen and what small thing can I do to help it to never happen again? And it reminds me that my own heartaches, even the ones that go all the way back to that book-obsessed teenager, are so much smaller than the world's at large.

All of which is worth the time I parceled out to read this story. If you have the reading temperament for a long historical novel that is not only about the Holocaust but also marriage, family, personal history, ambition, love, and determination, I think you will like The Invisible Bridge.

 

This afternoon Kendell and I drove out to my mom's house so we could take her Christmas lights down for her. Hers is the only house that Kendell will deign putting icicle lights on, as he hates hanging them, the tangling and the shorting out, but when we pulled into her driveway I was enchanted for a moment: her icicle lights were spiked through with real icicles.

As Kendell likes to remind me when I complain, our usual lack of icicles is simply proof that our gutters work like they are supposed to. We almost never have icicles on our house, except for a tiny one every now and then during extra-cold winters. This year, however, has been extremely cold. And we received 12" of snow on the day after Christmas, and then an icicle grew, on the corner of my house where the garage meets the front porch. It grew longer, and thicker; it grew a few spurs and became a tentacled, twisted glorious thing, and when I would admire the icicles on other houses, my own made me feel less winsome.

They spark a sort of delicious shiveriness for me, icicles. I see them hanging and the urge to knock them off is nearly irresistible, and yet I want them to stay and grow. They are beautiful, violent things, temporary and vulnerable to sun and yet glitter so appealingly in its light.

Mine stayed, and grew; it stayed despite my boys’ repeated beggings to knock it down; it stayed until a warm day last week, when the sky got blue again (real, smog-free blue) and the cold broke a little, and it fell when no one was around to witness it.

But my mom’s icicles hadn’t fallen. They lined the line of her roof, thick and sturdy, delicate and fragile, an entire gallery of ice artwork.

But to take down her icicles we had to knock down her icicles.

I stood under the eaves, roping the lengths of icicle lights as Kendell unhooked them, looking at the icicles before he knocked them down. Dad would love these, I couldn’t help thinking, and then his brother, who lives a mile or so up the road, drove past in the car that was Dad’s, back when he could still drive without getting lost, and he waved and I thought Roe would like them, too, and I caught myself up in the mythology of the Allman heritage, how we are, because our father’s father was an artist, the kind of people who notice things like the shape of an icicle, how it is ridged or carved or fantastical, how that is a part of who we are and so maybe because I noticed the icicles and Dad would’ve noticed the icicles, would've noted their form and the way their color changes depending on where the sun is, and the perfect image one can find, standing behind a veil of icicles, with naked trees still holding snow and the blue sky beyond—because he would’ve seen his own version of that image, it was a sort of solace; it didn’t bring him back but it made him come back to me there, anyway, listening to the icicles fall. It makes a sort of music, cracking from the eave, a beautiful protest, each icicle before it impales itself through snow into frozen soil, an arpeggio that is remarkably like grief, like loneliness, like the shadow of a person passing through you.

I love when words have several meanings that work together. Take the word "resolution," for example. It can mean a long-term goal. But it can also mean the solution to a problem. The meanings work together because the goal can solve a problem---if you follow through.

I'm working at being better on the follow-through.

I have some year-long goals for 2013. I need to revist my 2012 goals, to see how I did. And I've had my kids sit down to write some 2013 goals for themselves.

But I'm also trying to think smaller, in monthly goals that are pieces to the larger yearly goals. Here are my January 2013 goals:

• Finish and submit my "You Aren't Having a Baby" essay (it is the submit part that I've failed at recently)
• Get on top of these medical issues: Kendell's oral surgery, echos for the three Bigs, and a mammogram for me. (Did it yesterday, are you proud?)
• Finish this cryptic project. (Again: yesterday. Notarized and mailed.)
• Read the Ensign.
• Renew my Writer's Digest and Poets and Writers subscriptions.
• Write a December-2012-in-review blog post.
• Scrapbook Christmas 2013 and 2009.
• Finish Kaleb's and Jake's quilts.

What are your January goals?

Here's the headline: Completely Unknown Blogger Dislikes one of 2012's Literary Darlings.  

Yeah, I'm with you. It probably won't draw much press.

But before I tell you why I didn't love Gone Girl, despite the fact that everyone else in the literary world loved it, I must tell this story.

Over the holidays, Kendell and I went to the mall with Kaleb. While I was in the scrapbook store, Kaleb played at the play place while Kendell watched him, and then when I was done at Archiver's we swapped so that Kendell could run out to the van to get the bag of returns I'd left there even though I needed it (the entire point of the trip to the mall as he pointed out). Our mall's play place, which has a hollow tree with different floors for climbing on, a hollow log for crawling through, a dinosaur skeleton and a slide, has been known to stress me out, as there isn't anywhere you can sit and see every single place. Plus there are bathrooms right next to it. It seems rife with potential for pedophiles or kidnappers.

We don't go there very often.

But Kaleb needed to get out some energy, and as it was -2 degrees outside and the air was loaded with pollution, I decided to take my chances. While he was playing, my phone rang. I looked right at him, then answered my phone. Then thirty seconds later I couldn't find him. Kendell came in and we both started looking and neither one of us could find him. Three or four minutes passed while I scoured the play place and Kendell went to search the bathrooms. My panic wasn't helped by the book I'd been reading over the break, Gone Girl, which is about a wife who simply disappeared, and maybe her husband killed her, maybe not. It's set in a town where the once-thriving mall (which employed more than half the town) has closed and is now the place where the junkies (some of them ex-mall-employees) hang out and the homeless people live. My heart was racing and my hands starting to shake and I felt like I was trapped in some sort of Gone Girl alternative universe only it wasn't just literary fun and games, it was my kid. I was seriously thinking OK, it's time to call the police when I found Kaleb. I'd actually walked right past him and not noticed in my panic; he was trapped between two little girls underneath the staircase in a game of hide-and-go-seek.

Then I almost had to throw up with relief.

That palpable sense of tension is why I can't say I hated Gone Girl. It is really well-written and manipulates your emotions so well. I experienced annoyance, disgust, dread, fear, anger, suspicion, and several moments of I have totally felt like that in my marriage, too. It includes these two quotes which I sticky-noted:

"I didn't say this out loud, though; I often don't say things out loud, even when I should. I contain and compartmentalize to a disturbing degree: in my belly-basement are hundreds of bottles of rage, despair, fear, but you'd never guess from looking at me." (Hello, Internets: My name is Amy and I contain and compartmentalize.)

"We are the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the pyramids, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show or commercial. . . I've literally see it all, and the worst thing is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script."

(Oh how I love it when writers put into words something I've felt but not yet articulated. (Except I wish I had articulated it before they did.) This made me think...what do I experience first hand? Without seeing somewhere else first? It's easier for me, being a small-town girl; the things I experience aren't often widely viewed. But if I ever do get to see some of the things I want to see—gravestones and castles in Ireland, the craggy shores of Wales, London and France and the Swiss Alps—how will they compare without the choreography of contemporary life? And if they are better on a screen (of which I am not convinced), why bother going to see them anyway?)

Stuff like that made me not hate it. And I know why everyone loves it. It has things you totally do not expect. It turns and then it turns again. It is very, very clever. It grabs you and you don't want to put it down because you want to know how it turns out.

But here: let me tell you the premise. Nick and Amy are married for five years, exactly, on the day she disappears. They'd had a seemingly-sweet and good wooing and dating and early marriage, but then Nick lost his job as a writer for a magazine, and then Amy lost her job as a quiz writer for a different magazine, and then Amy's parents, who've made their living by writing the Amazing Amy series of books for young readers, lose all their money and have to take most of the money out of Amy's trust fund. Then Nick's mother gets breast cancer and his dad is already deteriorating with Alzheimer's, so they leave their happy apartment in New York and move to a big, new rental on the shores of the Mississippi in Carthage, Missouri. Nick comes home from work (he's running a bar with his twin sister, Go) to find the door open, the iron still on, and signs of a fight—and Amy gone.

It's a mystery, in other words. And maybe that's the whole problem: I don't really love mysteries. Except, the mysteries I don't really love are the ones where there's some sort of detective who's __________ (bumbling, brilliant, alcoholic, damaged, crazy in some way, hopelessly funny, or whatever), who figures out case after case. If it's not about the detective or the crime-solving process but about real stuff like relationships or people or experiences, then I can usually deal with a mystery.

What's odd about that is I like watching mystery-esque TV shows. Like...I like CSI New York. I like Castle. (My literary roots are blushing. I would hate the book.) I even like Law & Order: SVU, except I feel like I have PTSD after watching one so I try to spread them out. I'm not immune to the charms of figuring stuff out. Who did it? and How? and, even better, Why? It's not the mystery itself I didn't like. For two-thirds of the book I wasn't sure who to believe—the story is told in alternating chapters, Amy's and Nick's. I didn't quite trust the clues and the evidence pointing to Nick, but I was also inside of his head in a way the detectives weren't. At one point I actually thought I watch CSI. I know something's fishy here but then Nick would picture something about Amy and how mad he was at her, all the time, and I went back to thinking maybe he really did kill her. Then it took a turn I didn't expect.

I'm all for unexpected turns. I like them. But I still didn't love this book. Here's why:

I hate every single character in this book except Go. The detectives and the assumptions they make. Nick's horrible father. Nick, who might be a psychopath who killed his wife, but is definitely and without question a selfish bastard. Amy, who is perfectionism taken to its extreme and might be, if she's alive, equally psycho. Plus, she is way too Emma-esque: she is certain that her knowledge is the only right knowledge and everyone else is simply wrong, and she doesn't have the inner whatever it takes to stop and think maybe someone else's perspective could be valid. I also hated her parents, who seem exploitive and falsely gooey & lovey-dovey in their relationship.

(Plus there's this: even with a minor character, no one gets Alzheimer's right in novels. If your father has Alzheimer's and he tends to wander away from the care center where you are paying for him to live, if he gets lost the care center doesn't get to threaten you with kicking him out, as he is their responsibility. That is why you pay them.)

And listen, you know me: I don't need happy endings. I don't need falsely happy & optimistic characters. I don't need all ends tied up or even major resolutions or unicorns pooping rainbows to love a book. I don't need feel-good. I don't even like feel-good; I actually like dark and twisty books. But there has to be some redemption, some bright spot, something good. However small. And for me, this book lacked that. Without any sort of redemption, and hope of some small bit of hope, the book was just simply frustrating.

Ever since I finished it, I've been trying to decide what my dislike of and discomfort with this book says about me. Does it mean I am turning into a shallow and judgy reader? Is my literary taste changing and am I heading down a doomed path toward gentle novels and fluffy LDS fiction? Does it mean I have lost the ability to let the literary quality outweigh my discomfort? Gah. I hope not. Maybe it means I am just old enough to say: you know, even though everyone else loved this, I didn't and to let the outcome shake out as it will.