“Brother I sit here all day on my fanny and I don’t look as if I had a brain in my head. But you’d be surprised what I hear…”
(The Big Sleep)
BTW, I heard from a couple of people at the wedding festivities that they were reading Moby Dick after reading our blog. Also someone told me she had gone out and bought Matterhorn and read it after reading about it on the blog. This warms my heart. Keep up the good work, readers! And let us know what you are reading.
Well, we have survived the wedding festivities. Beloved family members and dear old friends found their way into town (sometimes delayed overnight in places like Syracuse and Newark–bah–but eventually intact). The rehearsal dinner, my main concern, went smoothly and was lovely. The wedding service was beautiful and went off without a hitch. The bride and her bridal party were lovely and rocked the long walk like super-models. The groom and his men were stalwart and stood up straight and true. The reception was wonderful. Everyone is still speaking to each other. More pictures to follow. For now a few wise words from Madeleine L’Engle:
“No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I’ve been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I’ve learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won’t stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed.”
Don’t be surprised if we don’t post for a few days, as the boy and his intended are gettin’ hitched on Saturday. Lots of relations (for us anyway) are coming into town for the festivities. Hopefully we’ll have pictures to share next week! Until then, think positive thoughts and send them our way.
I will be channeling Diane Keaton (even though she was, of course, the mother of the bride in this movie, and I will be–metaphorically-speaking–wearing beige and having no opinion like any self-respecting mother-of-the-groom.)
I am a New Englander by birthright and a Midwesterner by acclimation. My ancestors were all Yankee-bred.
Chamberlins from Vermont, Sargents and Putnams from Massachusetts, Rands from New Hampshire, Wheelers from Connecticut, Tukeys from Maine. The Houghs and Carnahans from Pennsylvania are the farthest south we go.
We boast no southerners in this family, but nevertheless, I feel drawn to the South. Some of its culture repels me: the pseudo aristocracy-Gone-With-the-Wind delusions, their misguided Robert E. Lee-sense of honor, slavery. But like I said, there is much to recommend it as well.
For one thing, there is the grand literary tradition exemplified by Faulkner, Welty, Capote, Harper Lee, Reynolds Price et al. They do not romantisize, even here:
It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
And, of course, there is the gospel-enriched music: from Hank Williams to Dolly Parton and Lyle Lovett—almost all of my favorites and some of my soul mates.
Yes, I love the American South. I even subscribe to Garden & Gun magazine, which purports to reflect “the Soul of the South.” Well, I will say they have interesting articles about the likes of Padgett Powell and Wendell Berry and Olivia Manning.
And I dream of a Tennessee Mountain Home, don’t you?
Here is Dolly singing about her Tennessee Mountain Home. (Listening to this song on an old compilation CD of “Mom’s Favorites” made by daughter #1 back in the day prompted this post.)
Have I mentioned that I really want a Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora) tree?
My dual personality channels Carol Merrill to show off our classic blue Mustang c.1977/8. She traded a bright future on Let’s Make a Deal to go to grad school. Can’t you see her as a foil to Monty Hall?
Once there was a little boy who spent a lot of time fighting evil with his two older brothers.
It was tiring work and the little boy often missed his nap. When he got very tired, he fell asleep wherever he happened to be…
on a stair
in a chair
watching TV
at dinner
and his (bad) parents were always right there with the camera! Don’t call Social Services, he’s almost grown up now and apparently none the worse for wear, though still short of sleep. You need a nap, laddie!
Wood was born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko in San Francisco to Russian immigrant parents. She made her film début a few weeks before turning five during a fifteen-second scene in the 1943 film Happy Land. In 1947 she appeared in two favorites of mine, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Miracle on 34th Street. A few years later at age 15 she starred with James Dean in the classic Rebel Without a Cause, uttering the immortal line, “I love somebody. All the time I’ve been… I’ve been looking for someone to love me. And now I love somebody. And it’s so easy. Why is it easy now?” Somehow she made you believe it.
And the next year she appeared in John Ford’s The Searchers with John Wayne. Indeed, she had quite a career, despite not really being a very good actress. Frequently the studio powers-that-be had her playing Native Americans, Puerto Ricans, Italians–I suppose because of those big brown eyes–and she was never very good at faking accents. But there was just something about Natalie you had to like.
She died much too young (and tragically) in 1981. Rest in peace, Natalie. May light perpetual shine upon you.
Natalie with Steve McQueen in “Love With the Proper Stranger”–a good Friday movie pic, don’t you think? Steve is better than usual in this movie, and he is always great.
“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”
From Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (Chapter six)
Oh, I laughed out loud as I typed this!
Lucky Jim, published in 1954, was Kingsley Amis’s first novel, and won the Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. Set sometime around 1950, the book follows the exploits of the eponymous Jim Dixon, a reluctant medieval history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university. Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest book of the second half of the 20th century. The New Yorker said in their review that it was a “highly unusual first novel by a young English writer who is endowed with, and in control of, more than his share of talent, humor, and human sympathy.” Well. It is very funny.
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on July 16 in 1951. It has been translated into almost all of the world’s major languages. Around 250,000 copies are sold each year, with total sales of more than 65 million books. I am one of its biggest fans and have been since I first read it in the 10th grade. I was one of those teenagers that identified with Holden Caulfield and forty years later I still do. I love him and his creator as much as any fictional character and author out there.
“The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You’d have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn’t. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn’t take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they’re mean bastards at heart. I’m not kidding. ” (Chapter 18)
dual personalities 