Sleeping With Bookmarks

 I woke up one morning, rolled over, and found a bookmark stuck to my back.  I had finished a book, probably in the wee hours of the morning because I just had "one more chapter" put the book down and shut off the light. If someone asks me what my hobbies are I say, "reading".  I read everyday, and I'm not talking about what I have to read for work.  Whatever book I'm reading, and I read anywhere from 5 to 10  books a month, if I can count audiobooks, which I do, I read every day.  Why is an audiobook considered "cheating?"  Now if it were abridged, maybe.  Someone is reading you the whole thing while you drive.  Or while you are sitting in the driveway because it's almost done.  A book is a book.

The very first book I remember reading, or having read to me, was Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  My third grade teacher read some of it to the class every day and I loved it.  When we moved to another state I loved it so much, I borrowed it from my fourth grade teacher's classroom library and never brought it back.  I essentially stole it.  Sorry, Mrs. Bruce!  Back then it was Mrs. and Miss.  Ms. wasn't in general use yet.  This is the cover.  Except not with the 50th anniversary edition.  [Stop counting on your fingers, yes, I was born before it was published.]

A friend of the family gave us a set of the old blue cover Nancy Drew books by Carolyn Keene.  My sister and I used to play Nancy Drew on rainy days.  She, being older, was Nancy and I was usually George.  Imagine my dismay when I grew up and found out Carolyn Keene is a collective.  The ones in the blue covers, set in the 1930's to 1950's gave way to the yellow covers in the revamp from 1959-1979.  When I read some of one from the later period, Nancy was wearing platform shoes.  And slacks!  How shocking.  Evidently, there were more than one "blue cover" Nancy Drew books.  The ones my sister and I had were the 1947-1951 publications.

I was always reading.  Under the covers with a flashlight past my bedtime.  Novels hidden behind my math book after I finished the work and was waiting for the remainder of the class to finish.  I wonder what the kids who could really do math well did while they waited.  What is it with teachers? When I finished early, I wasn't supposed to read my book while I was waiting.  My son had the same problem.  He'd finish and start playing on his gameboy.  What did the teacher want him to do if he finished early?  More work.  What kind of incentive is that?  Your reward for doing well is getting more work to do?

My sister was reading the Outsiders by S.E. Hinton when I was nine, so I read it also and tried to lend it to my best friend.  Her parents wouldn't let her read it because it had gang stuff in it.  What a strange concept.  My parents never took a book away from me and said I couldn't read it.  Well, except when I took a medical book for show and tell in the 4th grade called something like, "Communicable Diseases" with illustrations.  That's the same book my mom used to find out more about why my sister's immunization shot starting spreading out in a large round circle.  Bad mistake.  Those cases pictured are the most extreme examples of what could happen.  I read the Outsiders so many times that I had the first paragraph memorized.  But I must not have been paying attention because I was very surprised when I saw the 1983 movie and they had Southern accents.  Outsiders is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma!  I thought gangs were in LA and New York and the ones in New York could sing and dance.  Oklahoma is wind, wide open spaces and also has people who can sing and dance.  Perhaps I should get out more.

Stories have stayed with me for years and, like smells that can spark a memory, things in the real world can bring back a story.  Oatmeal, for instance.  Whenever I eat oatmeal, I always think of the story from the Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books about the pig who taught children table manners.  Let me give you some background.  Mrs. Piggle Wiggle was the Dr. Spock of the neighborhood, helping parents cure their children of bad habits such as lying, being selfish, wanting to stay up all night using a variety of peculiar gumdrops, sets of dishes that got smaller and smaller, a set of marking pens and labels.  You get the idea.

Well, the young man who had hideous table manners was taught by a small pink (anthropomorphized) pig named Lester.  They had oatmeal for breakfast in the morning and Christopher does his usual; he pours all the cream on his oatmeal, puts on a ton of sugar and proceeds to stir it like he's mixing cement.  Christopher has bad table manners, but is a really thoughtful kid.  He beats Lester to the breakfast table and his mom was frying bacon.  "My gosh, Mother, don't you have any heart at all? Last night you had spareribs for dinner and Lester almost got sick, and now this morning you are cooking bacon."  Mrs. Brown said, "Why, Chris, I thought I had a delicious dinner last night.  Spareribs have always been one of your favorite foods."  Chris said, "But, Mother, spareribs are pork.  The come from dead pigs!"  Which is why they ended up with oatmeal for breakfast.

If you read my previous post, the Little House on the Prairie series has been one of my constant friends, too.  The amazing thing about them is the growth.  In the first book Laura is five years old and the print and point of view is from someone that age.  As the books progress, the tone and voice get older along with the characters.  I think reading the series stirred my interest in history.  I even made a pinafore in sewing class and wore it to school with a long dress my mom made.  Shows you what a geek I was.  It connected me to others things in my life as well, or my life gave me more of a connection to the stories.  I played the violin when I was young, and when Pa played the fiddle, I had some background.  In a later book, autograph books were all the rage when Laura was a teenager.  When some family papers came my way, I recognized my great-grandmother's autograph book for what it was.  Now, 140 years later, some adults are trying to get her books removed from the hands of children because of the racial insensitivity depicted.  Should those sections be removed?  Or perhaps instead of censoring what offends us, we should discuss with our children why this attitude existed and how it has changed over the years.  Or how it hasn't changed.  Sanitizing literature is like cleaning so your house is germ-free or not letting your child do anything because they might be hurt or come across something you don't approve of.  Once they go out in the world, they have no immunity to germs and no knowledge to judge what is bad behavior and no tolerance for anyone different.  At the worst, they apply their own sensibilities to people who they look down on for being "less enlightened" or "savages".  Does that sound familiar?  It should.

If you don't want to learn about people who think differently than you, or countries and civilizations that are not like your own, don't read.  Just don't stop anyone else from reading or ask for something to be censored or removed because it's not "politically correct" now.  Erasing it doesn't mean it didn't happen.  So, tell me a story.  Tell me what it's like to be you and live where you do, or did.  Tell me what you love about it.  Tell me what's wrong with it and what you would change.  I'll do the same.

Right now, I'm still working and can't (or shouldn't) stay up until 2 or 3 in the morning to finish a book, because I can't prop my textbook up in front of my face and sleep on the desk behind it.  But retirement looms like a distant beacon with a stack of books I haven't read yet.  Fun fact, if my library branch has 70,000 books and I read 20 books a month it would take me 292 years to read them all.  I probably should have started sooner.

EM

PS.  Items found in library books used as bookmarks: Leaves, flowers, grass, dandelions.  Money, paystubs, movie or theater tickets, bills, postcards, letters.  Personal products, photographs, court documents, plane tickets.  trips of bacon.  I myself have used paperclips, grocery lists, envelops, other books, post-its, bobby pins, receipts and, of course, actual bookmarks.  I have a collection.  One is even scratch and sniff.

Weather Whining

 

It's been snowing this week and I'm already tired of scraping off my car and driving carefully over potential car accidents in the guise of frozen slush.  My daughter and I spent an hour digging out the driveway and her car so we could get it unstuck from the side of the road.  As the guys in pickup trucks left for work and easily cleared the foot or so in the street, my daughter's more low-slung car got stuck three times just getting out of the driveway.  Anyone in the southern United States want to take in a northerner sick of the snow?  I do laundry and dishes and make mediocre and repetitive dinners?  

Truely, between the heat and humidity in the summer and the colossal bugs that also like warmer weather, I couldn't make it in the South.  My family went to San Antonio to visit relatives and it was 90 degrees with 90% humidity.  We thought we were going to die.  And we were living in Arizona at the time.  It's a dry heat. Yeah, like getting into your car when it's 110 and seeing the insulation has melted out below the dashboard in the passenger side is o.k. because, "It's a dry heat."  My parents were stationed in Texas and in Hawaii, both memorable for the humidity and the size of the insects.  I understand Western Canada has the same thing in the summer.  And you get to freeze in the winter, so there's no getting away from it.

Each section of the United States has ample reasons for Weather Whining.  When the Southern U.S. received an unprecedented amount of snow and cold over last winter, the Northern U.S. teased them about declaring an emergency just because of a little snow.  "We have 10 inches and it doesn't slow us down!"  It's like a "who has the biggest snow dick" contest.  They must have pickup trucks.  What the South doesn't have, and doesn't need to have, are snow-plows, below-zero grade outerwear and methods to take care of 10 inches of snow and ice.  It just isn't cost effective.  We don't have storm cellars here, but we do have snow plows.  But if I lived in Tennessee or Oklahoma and had to choose one, I'd definitely go for the storm cellar.  You'd think Kansas would have the most tornadoes, but you'd be wrong.  I think it's the whole Wizard of Oz thing.  I looked it up and Texas has the most tornadoes in the U.S. followed by Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida and Nebraska.  A list from 2020 has Mississippi first, then Texas.  

It seems unfair that Nebraska has the potential for both tornadoes and blizzards.  I read (and can recommend) a book about the Children's Blizzard of 1888 by David Laskin.  A unique and devastating weather phenomenon, like a snow storm version of "The perfect storm", this blizzard worked it's way south from North and South Dakota and Minnesota to Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.  It was particularly devastating for the people in Nebraska because the brunt of the storm hit in the afternoon when the children were dismissed from school.  In three minutes the temperature dropped 18 degrees. Lost in the blizzard with zero visibility they were subjected to an overnight wind chill of 40 below zero.

My experience with tornadoes comes from the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, set in South Dakota.  The two things I remember are her description of the sky turning green and how random and vicious the tornado was, touching down in one location and stripping the very clothes off the people caught in the storm and leaving other things untouched.  Although the people are driving in cars rather than in a horse drawn buggy, the tornados were as eternal and mindless last year as they were in 1884.  Laura's blizzard four years before this, and 8 years before the Children's Blizzard, had a similar randomness.  One person wandering in the whiteout of the blizzard froze to death in his own farmyard.  The students at Laura's school walked together in a line from their schoolhouse, hardly able to see each other, to get to their homes in town.  A chance contact of one of the children in line bumping into the corner of the last building at the other end of town before the prairie opened up saved them from the blizzard swallowed them whole.

There have been floods this year as well.  Tennessee was hit very hard after heavy rains and 28 people were killed in the flood that followed.  Floods in New York and New Jersey as well as Alabama were also from flash flooding due to record rainfall.  Other floods are caused by hurricanes or other intense storms.  Floods are one of the major causes of death, an average of 85 people per year in the United States.  The Johnstown flood in 1889 was caused by a combination of very heavy rain and the failure of the South Fork Dam.  There is a story in my own family of relatives in Texas, two boys who waited out their flood by climbing a tree and staying there for several days.

Because I am familiar with or even know people in the various states of America, I listen more intently and grieve more intensely about these than in other countries.  Almost 200 people in Germany died in a flood just a month before the flood in Tennessee.  It always annoyed me when the news reports a disaster outside the United States and says, "130 people died in the plane crash, 4 were Americans" as if we only care about deaths if they are American deaths.  Well, here I am worrying about the people in Tennessee when Germany was hit harder than that and I hadn't even heard about it.  Are we all so egocentric or is it just me?  I don't think we as humans mean to be ignorant of people and places outside ourselves.  But in an emergency, the closer we are to the eye of the storm, as it were, the more it joggs us out of our complacency.  If my child is sick, if my neighbor's child is sick, if a mother across the world's child is sick, they are all equally important.  But to each mother, the concern centers on the child that is theirs.  It doesn't dilute my concern if it spreads to other people, other states and other countries.  But, I can only feel so much across space and time before I can't bear it and I retreat back to my own.  When we lived in Los Angeles, my mom would call and ask if we were o.k. because she was worried about the earthquake.  "Earthquake? What earthquake?" I would answer.  Somewhere in the area, but not my area, evidently.

Blizzards, tornadoes and floods are as impersonal as a mountain or the ocean.  They just are and they don't care about us one way or the other.  It's fine to help people prepare and give them ways to obviate the risk, such as not driving into a flooded street just because the water doesn't look all that deep.  Or shelter in your basement or storm cellar during a tornado.  It's not fine to "Monday morning quarterback" someone else's disaster.  "Well they should have..." "I wouldn't have..."  Yeah, whatever.  You don't know unless you experience it yourself.  I myself after years of earthquake training at work, duck and cover, stood by my sink directly in front of my kitchen window during an earthquake, wondering what was happening for several seconds before I froze in fear, gripping onto the sink until it was over.  Not so good in an emergency, am I?

People do what they can do.  They make the decisions they make and sometimes die from a bad choice.  But sometimes they die even if they do everything perfectly.  Or they live despite themselves.  The funnel cloud touches down on your house and not the house next to yours.  You don't prepare for snow because it never snows where you live.  And then it does.  People may not be prepared because they never needed to be.  Until their own "perfect storm" happens and catches them unaware.

Two weeks later and the snow has all melted and our high is approaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  And yet.  A town in Western Australia also had 50 degrees just two days ago.  50.7 to be exact, except they measure in Celsius and converted back to Fahrenheit, it was a record 123 degrees.  I wonder if the United States sticks with Fahrenheit, because hot weather in Celsius just doesn't sound all that hot.  No, I'm not accepting comments for how dumb that last sentence is.  Give me an inch and I'll take a ... kilometer!