Dear friends, it's been a hectic week at Chez PTMYB, what with the out-of-office day trips, and the in-office LuthorCorp-based hilarity, and the upcoming trip to Scotland, and the sooner-but-less-dramatic trip to Philadelphia this weekend to visit the 'rents, and a night out tomorrow to see these fine young men. Regular food-based hilarity will continue soon -- trust me, good things are being cooked up, in all senses of the phrase -- but in the meantime, I've been recharging my batteries by reading. Here, for your unending edification and amusement -- you may stop laughing hysterically now. No, really. Guys. -- are excerpts from five things I've read or reread this week: two are from novels, two are from essay collections, one is from a play, but all of them curl my toes, dilate my pupils, just make me wriggle with pure pleasure. Run, don't walk, to your bookstore, or, if you are strapped for cash and/or space, run (don't walk) to your library.
Lightning sought our mother out, when she was a young girl in Brown County, Indiana. Licked her body up and down, so she said, with a long scratchy cat tongue. She smelled the ozone, which she described as indescribable. "Not a smell at all, really, but a new and horrible sensation of the nose." We used to beg her to elaborate. She said it didn't smell like animal, vegetable or mineral, or anything else in the world. Then how did you know? we asked. "It had," she tried again, "a tactile pungency. Every hair on my body stood out straight and vibrated. I wanted to drop flat on the ground but I couldn't move. It licked me like a big cat! Girls, I was an idea in the mind of a charged cloud!"
Then the lightning dismissed her, and demolished a dying elm across the street. "You always look so disappointed," she'd tell us, when she came to the end of the story. "You wouldn't be here, you know, if it hadn't let me go." But both of us truly were a little sorry she wasn't struck. It reflected badly on our mother, that she was tasted and found wanting. Fate had jilted her. "Where would we be?" Abigail always asked, and Mother would answer, variously, In heaven, In deep space, Nowhere, Who knows? A twinkle in your father's eye. When I was twelve, one of the last times we talked about it, I said, "Maybe we'd be an idea in the mind of a charged cloud." Mother was terribly pleased.
As it turns out, I have never been an idea in the mind of a charged cloud. I have never, with the one grotesque exception, been an idea in the mind of anybody at all. I'm earthbound, of course, but not grounded. My sister is the family lightning rod.
-- from Winner of the National Book Award by Jincy Willett (Picador, 2003).
Following her capture, Tiffany was put in juvenile detention and then sent away to a school my mother had heard about on one of the afternoon talk shows. Punishment consisted of lying bellydown on the floor while a counselor putted golf balls into your open mouth. "Tough love" this was called. Basically the place just restrained you until you were eighteen and allowed to run away legally.
After her release Tiffany became interested in baking. She attended a culinary institute in Boston and worked for many years in the sort of restaurant that thought it amusing to flavor brownies with tarragon and black pepper. It was cooking for people who read rather than ate, but it paid well and there were benefits. From midnight to dawn, Tiffany stood in the kitchen, sifting flour and listening to AM talk radio, which is either funny or spooky, depending on your ability to distance yourself from the callers. Tommy from Revere, Carol from Fall River: they are lonely and crazy. You are not. But the line blurs at four A.M. and disappears completely when you find yourself alone in a tall paper hat, adding fresh chives to buttercream icing.
-- from "Put a Lid on It," Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris (Little, Brown, 2004).
Mirabell: Oh, you should hate with prudence.
Mrs. Fainall: Yes, for I have loved with indiscretion.
Mirabell: You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to make you relish your lover.
Mrs. Fainall: You have been the cause that I have loved without bounds, and would you set limits to the aversion of which you have been the occasion? Why did you make me marry this man?
Mirabell: Why do we daily commit disagreeable and dangerous actions? To save that idol, reputation. If the familiarities of our loves had produced that consequence of which you were apprehensive, where could you have fixed a father's name with credit, but on a husband? I knew Fainall to be a man lavish of his morals, an interested and professing friend, a false and designing lover; yet one whose wit and outward fair behaviour have gained a reputation with the town enough to make that woman stand excused who has suffered herself to be won by his addresses. A better man ought not to have been sacrificed to the occasion; a worse had not answered to the purpose. When you are weary of him, you know your remedy.
-- from The Way of the World by William Congreve, 1700.
I'd met her about a year before, over the phone, through her sister, an old friend of mine. Barb was a sort of matchmaker, who recognized kindred souls in me and Sue, believers who loved to laugh. Barb had known me when I walked my friend Pammy through her last year of life. Call me crazy, but I did not immediately want to be friends with another dying blonde babe just then. But I felt God's ahnd in this, or at any rate, God's fingers on the Rolodex, flipping through names to find a last-ditch, funny, left-wing Christian friend for Sue.
It was March 2001. The wildflowers weren't in bloom yet; the bulbs hadn't opened. A month before she called me for the first time, Sue had been told that tumors had developed in her liver and lungs. She had been in a deep depression for a while, but she finally followed Barb's advice to call me after various people at her church kept saying that she could be happy -- she was going home to be with Jesus. This is the type of thing that gives Christians a bad name. This, and the Inquisition. Sue wanted to open fire on them all. I think I encouraged this.
-- from "Falling Better," Plan B by Anne Lamott (Riverhead Books, 2005).
She ate her lunch wearing only her slip. These slips endeared her ferociously to Lincoln. They were old-fashioned full slips made of cotton. Their soberness and the setting Lincoln saw them in were so poignant a combination that he often felt a little silly with love and found himself grinding his teeth. Now Polly sat at his table, her hair mussed, looking like the model in the studio, the girl who came to have her portrait painted and then fell madly in love with the painter. They sat quietly. Lincoln was very happy to smoke a cigar and sketch Polly as she sat drinking her coffee contentedly.
It was surely not right to feel this happy, but it was also undeniable. The air outside was smoky with spring rain. The street was gray. The warehouses across the street were wet. Polly put down her cup. The pure feelings one had in adult life were complicated and mitigated, and they were dearly paid for, but worth everything they cost.
-- from Family Happiness by Laurie Colwin (Harper Perennial, 1982).