thisnewday

Today, at my grandson's invitation, I went with him to the Barnes & Noble bookstore over on the southeast side of The 'Cuse. I think he suggested it as a way to get me out of the house for a bit. It was fun and I did appreciate the effort and insight on his part.

It reminded me of those years when he lived with us in the old Eastwood area of the city and the two of us would go to B&N at least once a week to buy the next book in whatever series we were reading at the time.

You know, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, the Who Was [fill in a name] or What Was [fill in a place or thing] series, or any of a half-dozen others that made up our nightly reading when he was between pre-school and 5th grade or so.

(I had recently come across a printed copy of a journal entry from 12 years ago, called "Necessary Things," which described the day when he and his dad moved out of the house and thus threatened to bring our shared reading to an end.

The printed copy was in a manilla envelope and looked like it had been prepared for one of the writer's groups I belonged to at the time, and I mentioned it to him, today, as a way of assuring him that I was actively considering ways in which I could begin to re-engage with my own life.)

Anyway, jumping back to present time, I've also been re-engaging as a reader through Dave Grohl's Storyteller memoir and from there into the lives and music of Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and Taylor Hawkins and the Foo Fighters. Wending my way, once again, through all the chaos and tragedy and creative genius which those players and their respective storylines represent. 

And so, off we went to B&N where I picked up Bleach--the Nirvana album, not the laundry product--and Nevermind, as well as ordering In Utero, Nirvana's 3rd album along with two books--which I know I've previously read but have no hope of finding after my move out of the city--Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana by Michael Azerrad and Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain by Charles R. Cross.

So, yeah, some reading and listening as a way of re-engaging. Reading about other lives, I guess, as a way of rediscovering and appreciating the value of my own...

LPK
Dreamwidth
3.9.2023

In little more than a week, I have to read a 500 page novel, called Swing Time, by Zadie Smith. Anything with a deadline, these days, usually has to do with one of the two book clubs I belong to although, these days, that seems to be narrowing towards just one, the Thursday AM Book Klatch in Liverpool.

After the last one, though, I thought I might take some time off. We'd just read and discussed Atul Gawande's Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, and I was emotionally exhausted.

That meeting had taken place about a week after the first anniversary of my wife's passing and we had just attended the one-year service which is an Orthodox tradition. Which was almost more than I could handle, in addition to the all too vivid memories of her decline and passing.

To be fair, I guess the religious services might've been a comfort to someone who was a "true believer," unlike what it was for me: just one more thing to focus and intensify the sadness that I was already feeling.

On the other hand, my book club experiences, at either venue, hadn't been much to write home about. Either as a distraction from grief or as something to share with my astute online friends who at least understood the reasons for my disappointment.

Even so, I'd still been considering it. It was, after all, one of the few things in my life that put me in touch with other adults, in anything resembling a social setting. And so, this afternoon, I drove across town to the B&N to pick up the book.

Very briefly, it's about two girls of color who are living different lives in the same disadvantaged neighborhood in London and only meet and become friends because their mothers, for very different reasons, have enrolled them in the Saturday dance classes being held at a local church.

Suddenly, as I began reading, it occurred to me that this was very like the circumstances, many years ago, when my two oldest daughters were enrolled in dance classes at the neighborhood parochial school they were attending. An event which, oddly enough, led to some of the happier moments of my entire life.

Because, from those classes, the girls eventually moved to the performing arts studio where I would later become the technical director and, along with them, experience a legitimate, small-town version of, well, show business.

But that, like so many others, is a story for another time. Because, you know, I've got 500 pages to read in a little more than a week.

Just, maybe, wish me luck. And not the traditional broken leg, because I'm no longer in "the business..."

LPK
Dreamwidth
2.12.2018 

Just finished Fredrik Backman's Britt-Marie Was Here.

It's a good enough book, the third one of his that I've read in recent weeks, months.

It's a good enough book, but not the kind of story that I need...

LPK
Dreamwidth
8.18.2017

As the summer winds down, and thoughts of school loom larger ahead instead of shrinking farther and farther behind us, as they once did earlier in the season, my grandson and I have renewed our custom of shared, late summer reading. It's something that I wasn't sure we'd do this year, given the school's relentless promotion of hands-off parenting and sink-or-swim method of teaching, during the past school year.

But then, one day, just "out of the blue," the subject came up and we decided to go ahead with it. And I think it's still a good strategy, a conscious turning toward what lies ahead, a timely exercise, perhaps, in preparing for the coming seasons of a year and of a life.

So, shortly after this "meeting of minds," we made a trip to Barnes & Noble, walked to the kids' section all the way in the back, and perused the familiar volumes of history and biography long since left, it turns out, in the dust of now-surpassed reading levels. Still, in an apparent homage to those seasons of the past, Jason finally picked out a thin little volume on the life of Marie Curie which then spent the weeks that followed on the dining room table, unopened and unread.

Well, not completely so, since I did pick it up and read a few pages and wondered that we'd come so far that its text seemed so absurdly thin and childish and its narrative of an exemplary life so incomplete.

So we went back, a few weeks later, with a summer reading list from the Fairfax County (VA) Schools which I'd found on line. And found that none of the titles, which had seemed of interest, were available in the store. And so, returning home, we bought the online version of one of them, Candace Fleming's Amelia Lost: The Life and Disappearance of Amelia Earhart.

We have it on both the Kindle, for portability, and on the computer, for ease of reading when we sit down together. And it's truly been an education for him, and a vivid reminder to me, in terms of what it says about the role of women at the turn of the last century.

So much so that I said to him, at one point, you know this is not so much about a plane lost at sea or even a female aviation pioneer but about a woman who defied every conventional belief, concerning what a woman was supposed to do and be, so that, even in the aftermath of tragedy, she endures as a role model for young women.

And thinking back to how things had been, in Earhart's time and my parents' time and my own, I thought about my mother and a childhood scrapbook she'd kept of the heros and heroines of the day, and about her own life burdened by convention. And how, at mid-life, she'd finally found an open space, drew a momentary breath of freedom, and sighted a possible landing place, before she and her vision of it suddenly, and completely, disappeared...

LPK
LiveJournal
7.31.2015 (a)

The most profound and precious legacy that my grandmother left me, aside from my earliest memory of unconditional love, was that she provided the foundation for my own love of language, of reading and of writing. On any occasion when I would be spending time at my grandparents' house, I remember being read to, a practice which my mother continued after she and my father had established their own household.

Of course there were others who also encouraged and supported this during my early childhood and later life. My great grandmother, Anna Patterson, who also lived with my maternal grandparents during most of my childhood and young adulthood, was always a willing reader of favorite stories when asked.

Also my paternal grandmother, Ruth Compton Knickerbocker, who had been a four-year college graduate and country school teacher before marrying and raising her own large family during the Great Depression, always gave books to her many grandchildren for birthdays and Christmas. And, in later years, she promptly dispersed a sizeable inheritance, from the estate of an uncle who had made his fortune as a supplier to Roosevelt's TVA, in the form of educational endowments to those same grandchildren.

(As an aside, I'm obviously afflicted with that wordsmith's tendancy to notice patterns, derivations, and usages of words which other people would either dismiss as trivial or simply find annoying. Not surprisingly, the most interesting of all words are those by which we identify ourselves to others, a use through which they become both label and definition.

And what I've recently discovered is that the names by which I knew both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were not their given first names. In both cases, I made this discovery while mining the various obituary and genealogy sites for information that I might not have learned through casual conversations with other family members.

Also, in both cases, a disfavored first name had been discarded for a better-liked middle name by which they were exclusively known over the course of their lifetimes. What I haven't learned, in either case, is why the given name was so disfavored as to have been virtually unknown to family members of succeeding generations.)

There have been times, over the course of my own seven decades, when I've stopped to marvel at what a privileged life I've had. And much of that has been due to the efforts of a generation for which there were few social safety nets, aside from family, and few prospects beyond a lifetime of hard work and the ever-present threats to individual and family survival.

Sadly, even as I write this, I realize that few besides those raised by the offspring of the Great Depression (later called "The Greatest Generation") will truly appreciate that expressions like "hard work" and "family survival" are anything more than literary hyperbole. Which, in fact, points to another aspect of my own privilege: that of being raised by those whose experience of that life was real and personal and whose recounting of it was vivid, heartfelt, and direct.

Which is not to say that they didn't experience the same human failings that we see and experience today. The difference seems to be that, given the circumstances under which they lived, the consequences to individuals and families were often immediate and substantial whereas today individuals and families suffer less but the consequences of living irresponsible lives are driving an alarming deterioration of the schools and other institutions which have assumed responsibility for them.

Still, I'm not about to close with yet another old timer's lament about the "good old days," because, in fact, those days were sometimes not so good. The 1950s and '60s, the era in which I grew up, were marked by racial violence, gender discrimination, and political assassinations. Not to mention a brutal war waged on foreign soil, for debatable ends, at the cost of 60,000 American lives. At the same time, this country was experiencing its own version of China's "cultural revolution," years when some of us were so alienated from familial roots that, to paraphrase that rebel of another generation, Thomas Wolfe, we really couldn't go home again.

Today, I consider myself most fortunate to have experienced all of that and lived to write about it, to have come full circle with a perspective and appreciation I might not have had were it not for the risks taken and the dangers survived. If I have a single regret, it's that I haven't the means to tell my grandmother, and those of her generation, of my respect and admiration for what they accomplished and endured for all of us who have come after.

And so, for what it's worth, I offer this modest return on the legacy of love and literacy which my grandparents made mine, those many years ago, in the white-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.18.2013 (a)

There are two sayings that've come out of helping my grandson with his school work. One of them, it will be obvious, relates to math and the other to his outside reading.

The one for math is a sendup of Tom Hank's surly manager in A League of Their Own. In our version, the surly grandfather, irritated by his grandson's resistance to learning addition and multiplication fact families, makes the grandson recite, "There's no crying in baseball and no guessing in math."

The one for the similarly-resisted outside reading says, "If you've got the time to do it now, now's the time to do it."

And it's that second one that's sort of leaning over my shoulder tonight. Little J and I have been working for weeks on a series of book reports which, I guess, are supposed to elicit a variety of creative responses to his outside reading.

But if the point of this reading program is to get kids to read, these book reports have done just the opposite. They've taken time away from the actual reading and placed a huge disincentive at the end of each completed book.

Now, I can look at each one of them and say, yeah, I see what this one is intended to do in terms of sharing the experience and interesting others in a given book.

But right now, I don't really have the time or resources to promote anyone's interest in reading except my grandson's. And the best way to do that is to just do that.

Read broadly, to find out what he likes, and then read. Read, read, read.

LPK
LiveJournal
1.13.2012 (c)