A (long) Excerpt and a Link

I keep up with a half-dozen or so "real" bloggers. . .the kind that have readership outside of people they know in the flesh. Occasionally, there is a post I really want to share. This one is funny, but also thoughtful. And, just to make you click on the link. . .

I have a lot of experience being rescued from Kentucky mud, and I have to say, these cowboys are on the job. I’ve never had to wait long to scrounge up a rescue party, even the time I thought an advanced Kentucky ATV trail was really a road. Finding a man with chains is not that hard to do in the country. These guys are everywhere, kind of like the skinny guy in the Apple store with black square glasses that uses hair gel to make his blond hair messy and drinks Starbucks while listening to Jason Mraz in his earbuds. Pretty easy to find in Seattle.

[One of these guys if infinitely more useful than the other. But maybe I'm just saying that because my MacBook has never crashed--jinx, double jinx.]

. . .

I’m pretty sure that flat boredom inflected with occasional moments of crisis isn’t good for blood pressure. In my mind, I am cosmo—attending dinner parties in dresses with purple sequins and bare shoulders and then coming home to the unfortunate drama that the maid didn’t spritz my sheets AGAIN. Sigh.

The thing about that fantasy is that it is never all that. Underneath the glamour, you have to wear Spanx because you’ve born a half-dozen babies. In the real world, another woman, more beautiful than you (thanks to modern medicine), flirts with your husband at that party, and you stupidly bring a bottle of wine before you find out the hosts are really baptist.

Truthfully, we just walk through the mud together with the people we love in our lives, one foot after the other: divorces, addictions, crazies, and for some of us, one embarrassing segment on Jerry Springer. We’re all just broken people trying to do our best to hold it together, some of us just expending more effort to make it pretty.

Yes, I know that's a long excerpt. So now click on the link. You've already read half of it. . .might as well get the good parts I left there, too. Especially the last paragraph.

Quote of the Day

"People must repeatedly be reminded that societies do not disintegrate; families do."

Gladys Hunt, "Honey for a Child's Heart"

On Books

We had some wonderful fresh-raspberry scones this past weekend from my good friend Jen. We ate them for breakfast, and I laughingly admitted that I had fallen in love with scones before I ever knew what they were, let alone tried them. And Kevin instantly knew why. . .the Redwall books.

Though we didn't read them together, they (and so many others) are nonetheless part of our shared history.

As we are reading more and more with Carolyn, I'm continually amazed by how many connections she draws between daily life and some story we've read. Countless times in a day she perks up at the mention of some word, phrase, or name and races to find the book that contains some association to that idea. We're building our own shared history in books, even now.

I've been reading Honey for a Child's Heart, by Gladys Hunt, with its annotated book lists for children birth to 14 years and can scarcely wait to delve ever deeper into the literary world as Carolyn gets older. I rather liked this quote from chapter 3:

One day our high schooler was discussing the whirlwind of destruction left behind by a couple of children visiting us. He said, "I got to thinking about how I would teach my children not to pull up wild flowers by the roots and destroy things, and then I wondered how I had learned myself. I decided I learned from books to respect the world. In C.S. Lewis's books the animals and trees have personality; in pioneer stories Indians tried to walk through the forest without breaking a twig, and settlers respected the land; in Tolkien's books, the orcs are the bad guys who leave a path of careless destruction." He shrugged his shoulders as he concluded, "You put a whole childhood of reading together, and you don't have to take a conservation course."