If It Hadn't Been for Books

"Running for home" stitches, that's what I've been doing. But that's about to change.

Whenever my Mom saw really long stitches on a hem, she'd tsk-tsk and say that her mother always called those "running for home" stitches because it was clear that the seamstress was just trying to finish.

I've been trying to finish up countless things since before the holidays blazed through, giving up nights out to write and squeezing in interviews any day or time. Finally this afternoon, my hired mouth and I (with the able and willing assistance of Lady G) made our final visit to the restaurant for a review lunch so I could finish writing it up.

It's hard for me to believe but I have only to push "send" and my work to-do list is history. For the time being anyway.

Now comes the fun part: deciding what books and clothes need to be packed for the adventure ahead. I've been making lists and piles intermittently for a week now, but without much of an inclination to edit myself. That's all well and good during the pre-packing phase, but once you're down to the final countdown, decisions have to be made.

I was pretty much committed to the books I'd selected from my pile, all ferreted out at the main library's big book sale a couple months ago. In making my  selections for the trip, I'd tried to keep it to a reasonable number.

I mean, if I have a reason to read it, it should come, right?

After having reread Marilyn French's iconic feminist treatise "The Women's Room" a couple years ago, I'm eager to dive into her 1996 novel, "My Summer with George." Knowing how different I was in 1996 from my 1977 self, I expect we'll have some life discoveries in common.

What sucked me into choosing "Kafka was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir" by Anatole Broyard was the back cover blurb saying it was about life in the late 1940s, a time when "if it hadn't been for books, we would have been completely at the mercy of sex." Lack of birth control aside, you can't tell me that's not a vacation read.

But I'm not completely shallow, so when I need obscure cultural history (as I am inclined to when I have days to read), I'll pick up "A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books" and learn something. Surely no one's really surprised I'm a fan of publishing sagas.

Once I knock off a novel, a memoir and a history, I just might allow myself to simply wallow in more self-penned tomes, like "The Tender Bar: A Memoir," not because it was a New York Times bestseller but because it piqued my interest when it came out 13 years ago. Then, just in case, I'm bringing along Sting's "Broken Music" from 2003, because, let's be honest, Sting was the thinking woman's crumpet long before Benedict Cumberbatch was a gleam in his Daddy's eye.

Adding to the book's charm is that it's inscribed to Michael from Shirley & Don: "No matter how far away you are, our best thoughts and wishes are for you. Merry Christmas."

I know, I know, it's a lot of books. But how to decide how much is plenty without being unrealistic and toting heavy non-necessities in my suitcase? Mind you, the half-read, worn book with the full Playboy interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from 1980 is already in my laptop bag, but that could be polished off on the plane, like a bag of those tiny pretzels they give you.

On top of all that, only this afternoon Lady G had handed me Hilary Mantel's "Wolf Hall" a novelization of the Henry VIII/Thomas Cromwell tug-of-war, but also winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize. Dare I bring anything else to read?

Choosing clothes requires less agonizing because I take the stance that it's better to bring too much than want for something I left at home. Dresses, shorts and t-shirts get rolled up and squirreled away into any available space. My hat, some wraps, cute shoes and walking shoes. It's tedious, but progress is obvious as piles disappear and the suitcase sits nearly full.

As for why I'm packing in the first place, well, that goes back to an innocuous conversation at a NOLA-themed evening at Metzger's bar last July. Don't talk to me about wanting to get away to some place warm when it's cold in Richmond if you don't want to get my complete and utter support of the idea.

And, no, that wasn't the absinthe frappe talking. Fact is, I have enthusiasm to spare when it comes to brilliant travel ideas. So, lucky me, I'm off.

But never fear, Richmond, because no matter how far away you are, my best thoughts and wishes are for you.

P.S. I'll be sure to send a postcard.

Everybody Was a Book Lover

For all the online blathering about the impending Snowpacalypse, it seems to be completely focused on one of two things.

The first is alcohol, with reports of heavy-duty trips to the ABC store, trying to figure out how many bottles of wine or cases of beer will be necessary to manage so much leisure time.

The second is the inevitable grumbling about what might happen, as in, the city will be slow to clear streets, how long will we be without power, why do people have to lay in provisions for a week, whine, grumble, complain.

I've yet to see anything about laying in sufficient reading material. Aren't snow days the best possible time to curl up with (insert beverage of choice) and get lost in a story?

January's been a wonderful reading month for me, partially because of vacation, but also because I've been devoting more time to reading at night, resulting in three books already finished this month. I'm on a roll.

The first was Patti Smith's "M Train," a Christmas gift, but also a title that had been highly recommended to me a week before by my aunt as something especially suited to me. And it was, both Smith's prose and the snippets of her colorful life, especially the thread about her finding a ramshackle bungle by the sea, a dilapidated old place that manages to survive Hurricane Sandy's devastation a short time later.

From there, I began a book loaned to me by a friend who knows my taste. "Everybody Was So Young" told the true story of Sara and Gerald Murphy, a well-off couple who married after World War I and proceeded to live their life by entertaining, supporting and sharing ideas with an incredible array of Lost Generation notables.

I'm talking Picasso (who did drawings of Sara), Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald (who was a bit in love with Sara), Dorothy Parker, Cole Porter, John dos Passos and Stravinsky, among many others.

Naturally I was as fascinated by two people who could attract that kind of circle of friends as by their life in Antibes in their bohemian Villa America.

It left me wondering if those kinds of people still exist today, Americans living abroad and willing to support starving artists, critique their work when asked, buy their art when it would help them or if we've become too self-centered a culture for that.

And it wasn't even as if their entire lives were charmed because two of their three children met tragic deaths and, at least in my reading, Gerald was actually a closeted gay man who ignored his own needs for the sake of the marriage and family.

Yesterday, I finished "Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: A Life," one of my library giveaway finds offering many details about Jackie's life I'd never before read. Surprisingly, the book left me feeling sorry for a woman who was never properly loved her entire life, beginning with her parents and right on through her husbands.

It was fascinating reading about how separately she and JFK lived their White House years, with one or the other often in another state or country most of the time, something that seems unthinkable for a First Lady today and yet that was 50 years ago.

Finishing that book last night leaves me wide open to pick the perfect Snowmageddon book or books for the next few days.

Do I want another memoir - I have so many to choose from - or perhaps a best-selling 1950s novel? Ooh, maybe I should finally read the third book in a five book series, having read numbers one, two and five?

Assuming that all my going out plans for the next three days will be canceled, I've got days to lose myself in books, all the more so for the stack of 26 books awaiting my attention in my bedroom. It's a little like my annual sojourn at the beach, when I happily devour books by the day.

Come on, Jonas, give me a reason to knock off a few more.

A Book Lover's Life

There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island. ~ Walt Disney

And there is no more pleasurable way to plunder that treasure than at the annual Richmond Library book giveaway. So much so that I broke routine, eating breakfast and heading directly to the main library instead of out on my usual walk.

Last night was the semi-annual book sale, but why pay even a quarter or dollar when you can wait until the next day and get them all for free, muses the thrifty book-lover? Granted, the selection is more picked over, but, hey, we're talking hundreds and hundreds of book leftovers.

Besides, I'm not convinced that the first-grabbed offerings are stuff I'd want anyway. Or maybe I just enjoy choosing from the dregs, much the way thrifting for clothing is severely limited by whatever's on the racks at any given moment.

Screaming babies aside (and there was one particularly shrill one), I spent an immersive hour and a half digging into the shelves looking for 2016 reading material, coming up with some gems as well as some offbeat choices. Experience has taught me that a book I'd never read at home takes on a whole new appeal at the beach.

Some of my choices - Updike's "Rabbit is Rich," a biography of Robert Kennedy or Hotchner's "Papa Hemingway" - are understandable picks, filling in gaps in series and understanding, while others - "A Reporter's Life" by Walter Cronkite and "Martha Gellhorn: A 20th Century Life" - speak to my fascination with cultural history.

Another obvious interest:  Bill Buford's "Heat" about his year working in Mario Batali's NYC restaurant Babbo.

The strongest theme that inadvertently emerged from my picks were the relationship books: "Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages," "Infidelity: A Memoir, "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage" and, perhaps most interestingly, "In the Garden of Our Dreams: Memoir of a Marriage" by a black couple who share their take on the their personal as well as the social history of the '50s to the '90s.

Most obscure choice? "Sister: The Life of Legendary American Interior Decorator Mrs. Henry Parish II." And, nope, I have absolutely no idea who this woman was or why she's significant, but I can let you know.

I couldn't resist a classic '50s novel, "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," for its noted cultural importance and because I'm fascinated by mid-century literature when writers couldn't help but process the post WWII world. "Experience: A Memoir" by Martin Amis about growing up with a famous father and the changing British literary scene was just up my nerdy alley.

For that matter, anyone with an epic cold she's been nursing all week who gets up on a Saturday morning to pick through stacks of dusty old books has already more than proven her nerd cred.

My loot for the effort? Two bags worth, all hardbacks and heavy as bricks. Heaven.

Something About Harry

The Sixties had taught us the high moral value of copulation, and we were slow to give up on an activity so simultaneously pleasurable and healthy.

I read John Updike for the first time when I was in college, so years after "Rabbit Run," one of Times' 100 all-time greatest novels, had come out. The sequel, "Rabbit Redux," made enough of a splash that even  years after its debut, it was still being held up and discussed to the point that I realized I needed to understand what the fuss was about.

Young Karen set out to discover what that was. I bought a used paperback copy (original price 60 cents) of "Rabbit, Run" - which I still have although its pages are discolored and well-worn- and dove in head first.

The music on the radio soothing now, lyrical and unadvertised, and, coming first from Harrisburg and then from Philadelphia, makes a beam he infallibly flies in on.

The book was appealing to me on so many levels. The main character, Harry aka Rabbit, was 26 - not all that much older than I was at the time - and frustrated with the constraints of middle class life. I was still a college student, but already absolutely certain I wanted a life very different than the safe and pleasant one my parents lived.

But it was more than that. Updike wrote about a suburban underbelly I'd been mostly unaware of and his characters slipped in and out of each other's beds, bodies and hearts with a casualness not readily seen in the families I knew in the white bread community I'd inhabited growing up.

And, wow, just wow, the beauty of his prose was eye-opening. His descriptions were deeply rich, his vocabulary extensive (such a pleasure to need to look up words in the dictionary), his language so polished, startling at the time because of how much he wrote about sex and relationships. Even the fact that he wrote in the present tense, shifting from first to third person seemed fresh and modern.

An unabashed Updike fan was born.

After absorbing "Rabbit, Run," I moved on to "Rabbit Redux," this time buying it new ($1.50 and also still on the shelf) but not expecting it to pick up so much later in Rabbit's life. It was so full of '60s references, as if Updike was trying to make sense of the decade that had changed everything for the adults who'd lived through it.

The reason Skeeter annoys and frightens you is he's opaque, you don't know a thing about his history, I don't mean his personal history so much as the history of his race, how he got here.

Over the years since, I'd read other Updike books, but until I picked up a late-career compilation  "Licks of Love," at the Kill Devil Hills library giveaway this summer,it had easily been ten years since I'd read anything of his.

The dozen short stories in it may have been my first Updike stories, a shame because I was delighting in the language and subject matter from the first page of the lead story, "The Women Who Got Away."

With Updike, it was so often about the women.

We hadn't learned yet to take the emotion out of sex. Looking back, the numbers don't add up to what an average college student now manages in four years.

The real surprise was that the book contains an 182-page novella, "Rabbit Remembered," written in 2000 and the final installment in the Rabbit series, albeit one where Rabbit is now dead, although hardly forgotten.

In fact, he's still the elephant in the room for every character's actions, thoughts and interactions.

Written when he was 68, the man's talent for combining words still reads as a master class in intellectual writing about living a middle class American life, as it had for 40 years, just with the addition of updated hot buttons: e-mail, Y2K and Clinton haters. Updike never missed an opportunity to comment on the cultural zeitgeist.

Her voice is dry and crackled, parched by cigarettes like the desert from the sun, but nice, with family warmth rushing into its old veins at what she takes to be an emergency.

I'm amazed; as I begin reading the story, the names, the characters, the locales and the references slowly return, still tucked back there somewhere in the recesses of my reading memory. Oh, yea, Janice, the wife and oh, god, annoying Ronnie, the nemesis. Even Brewer, the town, rings a bell.

Happiness for her  is already rising in him, like water trembling upward.

Some books you hate to close, knowing you'll miss the author's voice that's been keeping you company for the recent rainy week. Rabbit, you're not just remembered, you're part of this reader.

Ordinary World

Things I didn't expect to happen today:

Finding out how someone arrived at my blog. True story: someone in Midlothian Googled "how to find local sex buddies in zip code 23112." My blog was the 7th listing on the Google results page, apparently because I'd recently used the words find, sex, buddy and local in a post, although not in the same sentence. I imagine he was rather disappointed once he got to my page. And, yes, I'm presuming it was a "he."

Indulgent reading. By 3:30, I'd fine-tuned all four assignments due tomorrow, the same lot that's had me so busy the past week or so. It was a gorgeous afternoon, not humid and comfortably warm. Goof-off time.

Eager to finish John Taylor's "The Pleasure Groove," a memoir of life in Duran Duran (sure, I was around in the '80s but I certainly wasn't paying attention to DD), my book and I settled down in my green Adirondack chair on the balcony, read for two and a half hours straight and finished the sordid saga cultural memoir in the sunshine. It was glorious.

Being asked out in a parking lot. A guy who'd made eye contact and smiled at me in the toilet paper aisle at Kroger approached me in the parking lot afterwards to inquire if I was attached. When I pointed out the obvious age difference, he responded with, "Should that matter?" He said he was 31, but I probably should have asked for ID.

Using earplugs. I go to a lot of shows. A lot. In other words, I long ago destroyed my hearing. Even so, I keep a pair of earplugs in my bag at all times just in case the band is ear-bleedingly loud. I don't pull them out often.

At tonight's installment of Shannon Cleary's Commonwealth of Notions show, I went looking for them within the first two minutes of walking into Sound of Music. Noise rock duo Among the Rocks and Roots were the reason.

The photographer friend, new camera in hand, who'd met me for the show came up, pushing earplugs into his ears, "I wasn't expecting that. I'm glad I had these in the car." Be prepared, my friend, that's my motto.

Feeling like I would faint. Sound of Music was hot and not just un-air conditioned hot (I'm used to that, I live that way) but stagnant air hot. Heat that penetrates your brain and pores, making you feel woozy.

Bolting outside between sets to evening air easily 15 degrees cooler than inside was like immersion in a pool. So refreshing. An ensuing book discussion - come on, I had to talk about "Pleasure Groove" and friend is about to read musician Colin Meloy's "Wildwood Imperium" - kept us out there long enough to cool down and catch up.

Hearing blog pros and cons. A friend told me that when she reads on my blog what I write about my visits to her house, it makes her cry - in a good way. Another friend told me his secret plan to spread a rumor and convince people of an untruth for his personal amusement. I was instructed not to blog about it for fear of ruining his evil fun.

Heat trumping music. Lobo Marino's set had all the usual pleasures - tribal drumming, harmonium and jaw harp, Laney and Jameson's voices blending sublimely - that ensured that a song such as "Holy River" was  a religious experience, while the classic "Animal Hands" got a spirited revival and "Old Man Snapping Turtle" got a variation on a theme by replacing the didgeridoo that had been played on the record with Jameson making what he called "weird animal noises."

On the way out the door after their set, the doorman complimented my hair, saying it still looked great despite the sultry heat of the room. If this was intended to lure me back inside, it failed. Epically.

By this point, I was ready to throw in the towel. I wasn't the only one who stood on Broad Street talking for 20 minutes before admitting we just couldn't handle going back into the airless room, especially since another 30 or 40 people had arrived while we chatted out front.

I'm not proud of that, but there it is.

You think you know how a Saturday's going to go, but you never really do. I wasn't expecting any of that.

After So Many Years

I know I write this blog with the unavoidable biases of a 20th century refugee now living in the 21st.

Even when I'm reminiscing or sharing an anecdote from my past, it's tinged by how we, as a culture, interpret the world in 2015. In my case, you also have to allow for my gross eccentricities, but even then, often my take on life reeks of the here and now.

My annual trek to the beach can usually be counted as one of my favorite weeks of the year and understandably so. Certain pleasures - the outside shower, the long walks on the beach, the contentment of hearing the ocean night and day- carry over year to year while new experiences surprise and delight.

Coming to the cottage in May instead of July means first crack at the new pack of clothespins in the third kitchen drawer. If that doesn't sound like a treat to you, then clearly you've never known the hausfrau satisfaction of hanging wet garments out to dry on the clothesline in the salty breeze. By Independence Day, rust is showing itself on the clothespins. Not so now.

Our earlier arrival also meant that we practically had the beach to ourselves, with only a few visitors in residence nearby. Shells were abundant, unlike later in the season when they're picked over by early morning scavengers while I sleep in.

Lingering over a crescent-shaped bed of shells one morning, I look up to see a man playing bagpipes on his deck directly in front of me. It's a rare shell-gathering expedition when I'm serenaded by bagpipes for half an hour as I take my time searching for just the right specimens while he plays to the ocean and me.

And there's the reading, the pure, unadulterated self-indulgence of spending hours doing nothing but reading a book. I read on the beach, in the porch swing, in the big rattan chair on the screened porch, on the front sunset porch, on the couch after dark and in bed before I sleep.

After nine days, I've read five books and it's a disparate lot.

I begin with Gully Wells' 2011 memoir, "The House in France," about an ex-pat family's years in London during the swinging '60s and the house in Provence to which they return as a family for many years. It's a positively glamorous lifestyle I'll never know (neither Robert Kennedy nor Christopher Hitchens ever dropped by my parent's house), making for fascinating reading.

From there, I take on a 1964 book called "Edith Wharton 1862-1937," part biography and part literary analysis. What catches my attention here is the perspective. Author Olivia Coolidge is writing from a crucial point in women's history, only a year after Betty Friedan's seminal treatise, "The Feminine Mystique."

So while Coolidge is trying to explain the mind of a women who'd been nominated for the Nobel prize in Literature 30-some years before, many of her explanations are colored by the '60s, not Edith Wharton's era.

I don't know what I expected from a 1973 biography of Clark Gable, "Long Live the King," but surely not to read the word "groovy" as many times as I did. Written only a dozen years after Gable died, author Lyn Tornabene, had the distinct advantage of being able to talk to people the actor had flirted with, worked alongside and known.

The humor was courtesy of the interviewees' oh-so 1973 dialog, as they attempted to put a hip angle on a man born in 1901 and dead by the start of the tumultuous '60s. Not hip and the 400-page book showed me enough about the man to know that he would have hated being described that way.

And talk about dated! William Saroyan's "The Human Comedy," written in 1943, is about a world that no longer exists, a world where mothers accept the sacrifice of a son to war as part of their duty to country and even boys under the age of ten are referred to as 'men.' Everyone is in this together and pulls together for a greater good.

Ancient history, in other words. Perhaps most interestingly, it's the book that was made into the film "Ithaca" and filmed in Richmond last year. I'll be curious to see how the dated concepts are seen through the prism of 2015 when it comes out.

My final read of vacation was a 2009 novel picked up at the Kill Devil Hills library used book sale after I finished all the books I'd brought with me.

I'm not even sure why I selected it. I rarely read current fiction, I'd never heard of the author despite a cover squib saying, "One of the best writers in America~ Washington Post" and the cover photograph of angst-ridden millennnials is just the sort of rot I abhor. And don't get me started on a main character whose iPod has more musical importance to him than his stereo.

"The Song is You" has turned out to be the beach read over which my mind (and possibly heart) are most entwined. The main character, a mid-40s man still deeply attached to music, is trying to figure out how to be happy after some huge personal losses.

References to music thread throughout ("It took some more beer and listening to the Sundays before the illusion of randomness melted away"), catnip to a music lover such as myself. "He swung through his collection with what he felt was random compulsion, one song paused and blinking its consumed time after less than a minute because a chord or a voice or the liner notes reminded him of another song."

I have done that musical tangent game many a time myself.

Which is to say that the book captured me to the point that I began rationing out my reading the last two days, unwilling to go home knowing the ending. No, I meted out the pages, particularly saving the last 30 for once I was home. I want the pleasure of this book, this offbeat romance, the music that defines the anti-hero, to be something I got to savor at home and not just at the beach.

Because life at the beach is illusory, wonderful but unsustainable and now I'm back and things feel different. Because they are.

Maybe the song is me.

More Poetic Than We Know

My plans for the evening got postponed due to my friend's root canal recovery, so for a change I stayed in and listened to music and read, two of my absolute favorite past times. I purposely pulled out some CDs that I hadn't listened to in a while, years in some cases.

What struck me as I was listening was how the lyrics to some songs immediately came back to me, even ones I hadn't heard in forever; word for word, I remembered them as if I'd heard them yesterday.

And it occurred to me that we learn song lyrics now like people once learned poetry: as something to be committed to memory and recited back for our own or others' pleasure. I don't know many people who could recite a poem at the drop of a hat, but what are song lyrics if not poetry set to music? This line of thinking somehow made me feel better about the poetic literacy of our culture, not to mention my mental faculties.

I see a dog upon the road
Running hard to catch a cat
My car is pulling to a halt
The truck behind me doesn't know

Everything is in the balance
Of a moment I can't control
Your sympathetic strings
Are like stirrings in my soul

I could go anytime
There's nothing safe about this life
I could go anytime

Find the meaning of the act
Remember how it goes
Every time you take the water
You swim against the flow

The world is all around us
The days are flying past
And fear is so contagious
But I'm not afraid to laugh

I could go anytime
There's nothing safe about this life
I could go anytime

Anytime
Come without warning
Anytime
It could be so easy

A walk in the park
Or maybe when I'm sleeping
Anytime
See the clouds come over

I feel like I'm in love
With a stranger I'll never know
Although you're still a mystery
I'm so glad I'm not alone

I could go anytime
There's nothing safe about this life
Make it so easy to fly in the night
I could go anytime

Poetry, right? I don't think I even realized I knew those words until I heard the song and they came out of my head. And that was just one of several such instances tonight. Such fatalistic lyrics make for great poetry, whether you can sing or not (I can't). It's satisfying enough just to read or recite them.