My ‘across the street’ neighbor’s red azaleas bloomed their little heads off this spring. Jane planted those bushes at the corner of their car port, back in 2001, where she and Stan could see them, first thing, every time they came home. Everybody on our block knew how little green there was in Jane’s thumb, so we were taken back that spring when she put those bushes in and not just one but three of them . High expectations we smiled to ourselves.
To say they didn’t really ‘take off’ those first two years would have been kind. But somehow they made it through that summer and stubbornly straggled through the 107 degree days of the next. Stan was careful not to cut them down as he rode around the modest lot on his mower though the blooms those years were sparse.
Then, that third year, Jane’s cancer was confirmed and Stan spent that summer awkwardly, painfully, hopefully, trying to make it better for her.
By the next spring she was gone and a good part of Stan went with her.
Life can be full of irony, pain,mystery and joy.
Earlier this winter, before there was a solitary bud on a single limb of those azalea bushes Stan, too, crossed over to that better land the hymns promise us.
It’s taken a whole 10 years for those azaleas to come into their own but this year those bushes that Jane had so optimistically planted were rapturously glorious. Looking out my window, across the street at them, they were just pure, plain, bittersweet joy to behold……. remembering Jane.
I’ve just finished reading and re-reading three books by Sebastian Barry an Irish playwright and novelist whose non judgemental love for his characters and his rich insight into Irish history is a searing constant revelation evoked in lyrical prose. His words open a clearer window into the complexities of the Irish civil war in the early part of the 20th century showing both the horrors and the humanity common to the times.
The Secret Scripturewas short listed for the Booker prize in 2008 and won the 2008 Costa Book of the Year in January despite the judge’s assessment ( with which I agree) that the ending is flawed. The book’s primary narrator is a woman who may be approaching her 100th birthday in the insane asylum where she has spent most of her life. Once a striking beauty Roseanne Clear now describes herself as “a thing left over … a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a song less robin — no, like a mouse that died under the hearth stone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids … No one even knows I have a story.” Dr. Grene, her caregiver, had given her a biro with blue ink which she determines to use along with some ‘discarded paper’ to record the memories she has so that when she is gone her own story of her life will be found. The power the Catholic church wielded over the everyday lives of anyone living in Ireland in those times is portrayed wrenchingly in Roseanne’s continuous betrayals. These tragedies she records with an amazing lack of blame saying “There is no difficulty not of my own making. “ and in another passage “I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren’t like them.” Dr Grene has his own dilemma: the asylum is going to be closed in a few months with as many of the frail patients returning back to society as can be safely discharged. As Dr. Grene attempts to assess Roseanne for possible discharge the journal he is keeping becomes crucial to his understanding of her tangled past. We forget or perhaps have never known that it was common in the much of the 20th century for Irish women to be “sectioned” for “moral” reasons, for flirting, for being too pretty or boisterous, for being too much of a temptation, for being unwed and pregnant, for having been raped and ruined. In reviewing The Magdalene Laundries Norm Langenbrunner, a priest of the Archdiocese of Cinncinatti says ”When Ireland became a free state in 1922, politicians and prelates began to work collaboratively to make Catholic morality the criterion for Ireland’s public image. Among their primary concerns was sexual immorality…..In an incredible display of hypocrisy, the women were blamed for all sexual sins, while the men involved went free.” The Secret Scriptureexplores this complex era of dance halls, jazz, civil war, betrayal and turmoil though the cloudy lens and vicissitudes of an old woman’s memory and the empathy of her caregiver.
Annie Dunneis set on a small farm in Wicklaw Ireland around 1959, in a rural Ireland that no longer exists. It’s here we find the book’s narrator, a slight and remarkable spinster and her spinster cousin Sarah, anticipating the arrival of her young nephew and niece. With poetic, emotive, bewitching language, Sebastian Barry brings us into Annie’s small limed cottage, her hen yard, her life. We’re there in the shadows, as she explains the proper gesture for drawing rain water, we are there in the dairy, watching, as she and Sarah perform the ageless sorcery of making butter. We suffer her slights, her spites, her quick tongue and temper, the aches of her toil but mostly we experience her frugal pleasures and the fierce joy and love she feels for her family. The Washington Post calls this novel a ‘deliciously poetic book’. It is one of the best written books I’ve read in a very long time. If you read this book and remain unmoved by it you have my pity.
The Whereabouts Of Eneas McNulty was published in 1998 and is set in roughly the same time period as The Secret Scripture. It’s the story of Roseanne Clear’s brother-in-law, the one with a price on his head and marked for death by the IRA, continuing the turbulent saga of the McNulty’s of County Sligo. At 16 Eneas goes to sea in the British Merchant Navy, spends time in the dives and whorehouses of Galveston, grows out of the boy and into the man, musters out – goes a year home in Sligo with no work because of his service for the British and then, irrevocably goes the step too far in joining the RIC, The Royal Irish Constabulary, the police force augmented by The Auxiliary, the Tans. After a brutal killing of a fellow policeman by the IRA , while he is left unscathed, he is mustered out of the RIA returning in terror and shame to Sligo. There he is labeled a traitor marked for death and his boyhood friend is the assassin chosen to kill him. His life becomes that lonely life of the man ever on the run, beginning on the cattle boat he takes to England to find work. The Wall Sreet Journal says ‘Eneas’s gripping and tragic story serves as a reminder of the fine line that lies between hero and murderer, politician and criminal.’ This too is a book full of beautiful prose and compelling characters, a well told story of mis-adventure.
I reviewedBetween Wyomings by Ken Mansfield here, giving it only one star.
A much better review is Barbara J. King’s of Robert Wrights’sbook The Evolution of God . It can be found here. Here’s an excerpt:
“….., I admire the master work that went into The Evolution of God. Like a baleen whale sifting through ton after ton of microorganisms to derive sustenance, you have digested source after source and distilled it all into a compelling account of the world’s turbulent religious history.”
I have just finished reading a paperback book Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels. The Boston Globe said ” Word by blessed word it is a gorgeously written book….” And that it is but so much more. The fact that the author is also an accomplished poet is evident from the book’s first line “Time is a blind guide”. Michaels evokes empathy, horror, a sense of the boy’s unspeakable enduring sadness, his fear, his loss, his love, in the reader with small tight haunting sentences such as this one.
“Each time we stopped, I was numb against his solid body, a blister tight with fear.”
Or these, “When I first encountered the Jewish market I felt grief. Casually, out of the mouths of the cheese-seller and the baker came the ardent tongue of my child hood. Consonants and vowels: fear and love intertwined.”
This is an epochal love story , born in the Holocaust between a boy buried in the Polish bog at Biskupin and the geologist who rescued him. I did not race through this book, slim as it is, but stumbled often, as Stephen Crane said, ”because it is bitter and because it is my heart” . I will be reading it again. Maybe with a cup of Yuqian Dragonwell.
Some mornings, even with the neglect my back yard has endured lately, it can seem approximately paradise. This was one of those mornings, perfect for Assam in the cup, fit for mellow contemplation.
The power of tea is to heal, to soothe, to comfort, to relax or conversely to give you a swift kick in the posterior to get you moving on cold or sluggish days, iced it's the perfect elixir on hot days. It can be the most frugal of indulgences or wildly extravagant. It's at once very ancient and the most modern and chic of drinks. Hmm, I think it's time to have a cup. Pull up a chair and join me, won't you?
This is the cat who came to stay with Granny – he’s an onery little cat. He’s supposed to stay over by the tree but he likes to climb.
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