Mary Ellen

Last weekend I went down to Cape Girardeau, Missouri for the 97th birthday of my great-aunt Mary Ellen.  She was my maternal grandma's only sibling.  Grandma Gert was born in 1906 and Mary Ellen was born in 1912.  

My grandma died four and a half years ago.  She was 97.  We were very sad but we also sort of felt that she had chosen her time to go.  At least I did.  She was a very independent woman and she hated it when she got to the point that she needed nursing care. 

As a young girl she had decided that she was not going to stay in the small Kentucky town in which she had been raised.  After graduating from high school (no small feat for a girl in that time and place) she went across the river to a business college in Cairo, Illinois and learned shorthand and typing.  Then she took off for the big city - St. Louis.  This was the 1920's and she was going to be modern.

Here she is:

Gert

Her sister Mary Ellen was always more traditional, but no less strong willed.  Mary Ellen didn't, apparently, have any issue with the idea of staying in Kentucky.  She was, in fact, engaged to a local boy but he drowned in the Mississippi River.  She didn't talk about that much.

Here she is:

Mary Ellen

Of course, I don't remember either of them looking like this, but I think they would like their "young" pictures to be shown.

Mary Ellen ended up marrying someone that everyone describes as a very nice man - Carl.  She and Carl were introduced by Gert and her husband Mike. Gert and Mike had met in St. Louis but by this time they were living in Cape Girardeau because of Mike's job.  Mike was the complete opposite of anyone that Gert would ever have met in small town Kentucky.  He was from Chicago.  He was a good looking Irishman (Mary Ellen told us that her parents thought he looked like a gangster).  He apparently had a big personality and liked to drink (Gert, who was a teetotaler later in life, admitted that she went to a speakeasy or two with him).   He was Catholic (my grandma and her family were Baptist).  He had been married once before (and when asked if he was divorced when she started seeing him, Gert would never answer the question). 

I never met my grandfather, he died when my mother was in high school.  By the time he died, they were living in St. Louis.  My mother and her sisters would talk about him but they remembered him from a child's point of view. My grandma never talked about him.  Even when asked a direct question, she seldom answered.  And when she did, you were never sure if she was telling the truth.  She was known to "have her own version" of things.

So my only knowledge of my grandfather from an adult came from Mary Ellen; who didn't talk much about him either until much later in life.  She liked him.  She said he was a lot of fun.  He had a lot of friends and was a good time.  He introduced her to Carl, for which she was grateful. 

I never knew Carl either.  He died a year or so after my grandfather died.  So both Mary Ellen and Gert were left in the early 1950's as fairly young widows with underage children.  They both had girls.  Gert had four girls including my mother; Mary Ellen had two girls.

By this time their mother Lily had also died and only my great-grandfather, Papa Marshall, was left in Kentucky.  Mary Ellen and Carl had moved right across the river to a small Missouri town, so she went back and forth seeing Papa and taking care of him.  My grandma, on the other hand, had shaken the dust of Kentucky off of her feet when she left and seldom went back except out of necessity. One necessity was visiting the cemetery.  She buried my grandfather in Kentucky which, when you think of it, pretty  much ensured that she was going to return to Kentucky some day.

But she and Mary Ellen visited back and forth.  My mom and her sisters were (and still are) close to their cousins.  Gert had always sent them down to spend summers in Kentucky with their grandparents or with Mary Ellen and Carl.

So after Mike and Carl died, Mary Ellen and her daughters would drive up to St. Louis with Papa and spend the holidays with Gert and her daughters.  And Gert and her daughters would go down to southern Missouri to spend weekends.  As the girls got older they brought their boyfriends and then husbands down to meet "Auntie".  And then their children.

My grandma never re-married.  After Mike died she went back to work for a time; until after her youngest daughter got married.    When I was four years old my parents moved from a small bungalow into a bigger house and shortly after that my dad convinced my grandma to move in with us and stop working. 

Mary Ellen always lived in the same house that she and Carl bought and raised their daughters in.  Where my grandma had no attachment to "things" and, over the years, gave away or sold all of her furniture, Mary Ellen's house was filled to the brim with furniture, much of which was family furniture but a lot of which was stuff she bought at auctions.  She always had a vegetable garden.  And her yard was filled with flowering trees and azaleas.  It was beautiful in the spring.

Going to visit Auntie was, as my sister said last weekend, a true "over the river and through the woods" experience.  We went down often, which in my early years, before I-55 opened. meant a long trip on country roads.  When I was born, my mom and dad drove down and put me on the front porch of Auntie's house in my little seat, rang the doorbell and ran away.  She always said that she and I would have had a great time together if they hadn't come back.  But they gave themselves away, laughing behind the bushes.

She was like a traditional grandmother; she lived in a grandmotherly house with lots of nooks and crannies and places to scare younger siblings; she cooked big grandmotherly meals for us from recipes handed down from her own mother; she told us stories about the family.   She would take us over to Kentucky and show us things that were important in the family stories and introduce us to people in the town that we were distantly related to.  She would pull out old pictures and tell us about the people in them.   We would go to the cemetery in Kentucky with her and she would freak out my youngest sister by taking her to Carl's grave, with the joint headstone.  Her name was already carved in the headstone with her birth date but, obviously, not her death date.  My little sister really disliked that and Auntie would say "Do you think I'll fit?" and lay down on the ground in front of the headstone until my sister would beg her to get up.

Mary Ellen did marry again.  I only vaguely remember her second husband, Wade.  He died in a car crash in the 1960's.  All I'll say is that nobody mourned too much.  After that she lived on her own and seemed to enjoy it.  She was an active member of the Baptist Church and sang in the choir for years. She was inordinately proud of her yard and loved when the Azalea Festival would happen.  She would sit outside and wave at the people who would come by her house to see her yard. 

My grandma continued to be independent.  She was such an interesting woman.  She read constantly and liked to talk about what she read.  She didn't like anyone telling her what to do -- although she never hesitated to (very bluntly) tell everyone what she thought.  Her version of a compliment was: "I'm so glad you don't have knock knees.  Your legs are nice and straight."

One day she announced that she was moving out of our house and into her own apartment.  When she finally got too old to live on her own, she moved up to Virginia for about a year to live with my aunt and her family. The next thing we knew she was moving back to Cape Girardeau at the age of 82 to a lovely retirement home.  She had her own studio apartment but could go to a dining room for meals.  She discovered that a lot of women she had known long ago when she lived in Cape in the 1940's were living there - so she had lots of bridge partners.

Cape wasn't too far from the town where Auntie lived so they saw each other a lot.  They weren't by any means a "sweet" pair of sisters.  They disagreed.  Often.  Both were, as I said, strong willed.   And they were very competitive with each other. 

Every year in February we would go down and do a joint celebration of their birthdays - which my grandma would insist was a celebration of her birthday.  But we celebrated them both.

For a long time my grandma resisted moving out of her studio apartment.  The doctor would ask "Are you ready for assisted living?" and she would say "NO" and that was that.  She would regularly lecture Mary Ellen that she should sell her house and move into a retirement home and Mary Ellen would say an emphatic "NO".  

But when my grandma turned 96 there was no disguising the fact that she needed assistance.  The retirement home had an assisted living facility and she moved in, but soon after she was moved to the nursing facility.  She hated it.  She hated the lack of privacy and she hated having no one "in their right mind" to talk to.  One day in October 2003 she got up and went to breakfast, her favorite meal of the day.  It was going to be a busy day because my mother was going to be down there to take her to the doctor.  At her last doctor's visit the doctor had said "I'll see you in 6 months."  The 6 months was up.  After breakfast she went back to her room to lay down.  She always liked to lay down after a meal.  She never woke up.  I always figured she didn't want to go to the doctor and get locked into another 6 months.

On the morning that my grandma died, before anyone could tell Mary Ellen what had happened, Mary Ellen suffered a stroke.  She lived but she had lost her short term memory ability.  It was one of those unexplainable things that one of the sisters would have a stroke at the moment the other was dying.  Or, as Mary Ellen might have said, that one sister would die as the other was having a stroke.  They were competitive that way.

It was a nice funeral service and reflected my grandma's independent spirit.  When she got into her 90's she announced to my mother that it was time to make the funeral arrangements.  My mother (who always went to the doctor with her) asked her if there was something she should know.  And my grandma said no, it was just best to be prepared, she wasn't going to live forever.

While making the arrangements, she specified no church and no minister.  My mother asked her if she wanted any service at all and she said Oh yes.  Well, who do you want to do it, my mother asked?  Oh, the Bobs can do it, she said.  The "Bobs" were her two sons-in-law named Bob - my dad and my uncle Bob.  She loved them both and they loved her.  So the Bobs did the funeral and it was the nicest funeral I've ever been to.

For Mary Ellen, losing her short term memory turned out to be, in a way, a blessing.  She could no longer take care of herself and had to be placed in a nursing facility in Cape; but since she had no short term memory she was, more often than not, happy.  She still liked getting visitors.  And since she hadn't lost her long term memory, you could still have a fairly coherent conversation with her.  She just wouldn't remember it the next day.

Last week we all went down for her 97th birthday party.  She loved birthday parties.  She loved presents.  She loved being the center of attention.  On the way down we talked about how she was probably determined to hit 97 because that's the age Grandma lived to - and they were so competitive.  The birthday celebration had to be at the hospital because she was in for tests. She wasn't awake much.  She would fall asleep in the middle of opening presents.  When my parents and my sister and I first went in to see her she was asleep.  So we sang Happy Birthday to her and she smiled in her sleep.  Before we left, though, we were all able to talk to her and tell her we loved her.

Mary Ellen made it to age 97 and had her birthday party and then, this week, she died.  She was a great lady.  They were both great ladies.  And great role models.  Two women born in another age who lived through the modern age, the Great Depression, the death of a husband, and through the adversities of old age.  Two very different women who yet had so much in common.

As my sister said last weekend, having both of them was like having the best of all worlds.  We had a modern, independent, strong grandmother who was blunt and sharp tongued and taught us that we needed to learn to take care of ourselves in this world.  And we had a traditional, grandmotherly person in our lives who we could go visit and who loved us for who we were, not for what we should be.

The more traditional of the sisters, Mary Ellen's funeral will be at the Baptist church -- although the Bobs are standing by in case they are needed.  She'll be buried in Kentucky - that headstone can now be finished.  We'll think about Gert and Mike and Carl while we're at the cemetery looking at their headstones.   And my great-grandparents, Marshall and Lily.

Then we'll all go out to lunch and have catfish and hush puppies.  And share stories.  About both of them.  And somewhere they will both be happy to know that they are the center of our attention.

In the Library

No, that's not where I am. That's the name of a scent. Seriously. I'm not making this up.

The creator is Christopher Brosius and according to this article (well, blog post) he describes In the Library as

"First Edition, Russian and Moroccan Leather, Binding Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish

I don't know. I like books. I like the smells of libraries. But I'm not sure I want to wear it.

h/t bookninja

The Book Thief

The first surprise was that I found it in the Young Person's Literature section.  This novel had been recommended to me by so many adults that it never even occurred to me that it wasn't a novel for adults.

The second surprise was to find that the narrator was Death.

And what a good narrator Death was.  I felt sorry for Death at times, so much work and so little respite.  But the incongruity of having a Young Person's novel narrated by Death never really left me.

I read this novel immediately after re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird and at first I regretted that.  If I had known that The Book Thief was about a young girl I might have waited.  But it ended up being fine.  I did spend some time comparing the novels - both are coming of age stories and both show how even during times of turmoil the lives of children are still the lives of children.  And both strikingly depict how children see things that adults might have a hard time describing in such a matter of fact way - in many ways Death speaks like a child in this novel. But in general the novels were so different that it didn't matter that I read them back-to-back.

The horrors of Nazi Germany both before and during World War II are narrated by Death as he tells us the story of Liesel Meminger, a young girl who lives with foster parents outside Munich not far from the Dachau concentration camp.  It is a dark story and although it is filled with hope it is also bleak in the way a truthful tale of World War II must be bleak.  Zusak, in fact, pulls no punches and Death tells us all along that the ending will be bleak.  Since this is the outlook that one might expect from Death, I had a tendency to discount these foreshadowings but of course Death was right.  Between the decisions of the Nazi regime and the might of the Allied bombing campaign, Death was busy during World War II. 

Zusak takes risks with this novel and, for the most part, they pay off.  The novel starts a little slow for my taste, but fortunately I was on a plane with nothing else to do but read and by the time I reached about page 50 I was hooked. 

Like Mockingbird I don't really think this is a novel for young adults, it is just a novel written at a level that they can read.  Occasionally I wished for a different, more sophisticated style, but only occasionally. The sentence structures are simple but effective.  But the subject matter is probably more appreciated by adults.

There are many parts of this novel that I liked, but the thing that I've been thinking about the most is the scene toward the end in which Liesel, who has become an avid reader, destroys a book because she realizes that words are what carried Hitler to power and created the world she lives in; words can manipulate.  And her benefactor, far from being angry at the destroyed book, gives her a blank book and tells her to write her own words.   I liked that.  Words have power and can be used for good or evil purposes.  But if we have words we are empowered.

This was one of my What's in a Name Challenge books - the first one that I've read.  This was my book "with a 'profession' in its title".   I suppose the profession is "thief".   I feel a little bit like I cheated because, while Liesel was a good book thief, she was too young to have a profession.  On the other hand, the challenge didn't say that the person in the novel had to be in that profession as a way to support themselves. 

Judging

At Happy Hour last Friday we had a discussion about watching movies versus reading books.  It made me wonder how other people judge movies and books.  For me, the way I judge movies and books are totally different although I'm not sure, in the end, that I'm harder one or the other.  I just reach my conclusion in different ways.

I have a simple way of judging whether a movie is "good" or not.   For me, a perfect movie is one that I experience totally in the moment.  From the moment the lights go down in the movie theater until the moment the closing credits start to roll I will forget I'm in a movie theater and I will inhabit the world that is created on the screen for me.  I completely suspend disbelief.

Of course no movie is perfect.  There is always a moment in every movie (or two or five or fifty moments) when I am pulled out of the story and I remember I'm in a movie theater watching a man-made creation.  Sometimes it's because a camera shot is TOO good and I'm reminded it is a camera shot.  More often it is because of a lapse in continuity or a problem with characterization or inappropriate soundtrack or some other event that arose out of a choice the filmmakers made.  The moment I start to wonder why the creators made that choice (even if I think it is a brilliant choice) I'm pulled out of the movie and it becomes a little less perfect for me.  For me, the structure of a movie needs to be invisible and I should only notice it after the movie is over and I start to think about why I liked it.

I walk into every movie believing that it could be the perfect movie experience.  For me, movies are like math tests.  Everybody has a perfect score in that single moment before the teacher says, pick up your pencil and turn over your test.  Then ... the points start to come off.  And my red pencil is ruthless. In the end, most movies that I see end up having what would be an average grade if I were grading them.

Novels are different for me.  I assume that every novel I pick up is average.  There isn't anything wrong with average.  You can say nice things about average. So I often say nice things about novels that I don't think are particularly special.  I try to find something good about them, I try not to be too harsh in pointing out the things that I think didn't work. 

But the way I experience a novel is exactly the opposite of how I experience a movie.  I am always aware that a novel is a man-made creation and some of my favorite novels have found me talking to the author (sometimes aloud) as I read.  Complimenting or berating her.

So, if I were grading a novel, I would start with the idea that the novel is average and I would look for ways that it deviates from average in either good or bad ways.  As I read a novel I'm looking  for structural elements that I like, that make me think "ah that's where you are going, very clever to have set it up this way". 

This can work a couple of ways for me.  Sometimes I'm entranced by structural elements as I read.  I'm enjoying the story but at the same time I'm enjoying the structure.  I stop to re-read sentences, I go back to the start of chapters to see how the author has managed to trick me.  That's fun.  In the best novels (at least my definition of the best novels) my reading might evolve this way but I am also aware that I'm going to have to re-read the novel.  That the structure is being revealed to me in such a fashion that the beauty of the whole structure will only be revealed when the novel is finished.  And at that point I'll have to go back and re-read to see how the author did that.

If I don't notice structural elements while I read it's usually a sign that at the end I'm going to classify the novel as just average.  This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy the plot or like the characters, I just don't like them enough to classify the novel as above average.  (I read so many novels that "average" is a pretty wide category, sort of like a Bell curve). 

Let me be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with this.  I don't think "C" is a sign of failure.  It's a sign that a book is just fine, it's not bad, there's nothing particularly wrong with it but it just didn't grab me and make me want to re-read any part of it.  Just as I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with a movie that's average, I just won't want to see it again.

I have no idea if my way of looking at movies and novels is common or uncommon.  It's just the way I do it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

One of my reading groups chose the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, as this month's book to read. A New York Times best seller, this novel has been recommended to me by many people. It has a compelling story. I predict we will have a good discussion about this novel.

In the end, though, it didn't grab me. I would never want to read it again.

What I started wondering about half-way through this novel was: Why did Hosseini choose to take a story that spins out over a long number of years and confine it to 400 pages?

I often wonder about length of novels. How does an author decide to balance the span of years of the story with the number of pages he has allotted to himself? There doesn't seem to be a rule: authors seem to be free to lock themselves into any page limitation (or lack of limitation) they want. I look at my nightstand and I see Anna Karenina, a novel of 800 pages but with a story that takes place over only a few years. But ... Anna Karenina was written a long time ago in another time and in another country.

My first thought was that Hosseini was influenced by what the modern American book industry thinks will sell. I didn't want to think that - but I did. I've noticed over the last number of years that most novels sitting on the piles of "new fiction" at Barnes and Noble are, at their most basic level (page count), structured the same way. They are between 300 and 400 pages. It's almost as if a story that can't be told in less than about 350 pages shouldn't be told. And 400 pages seems to be pushing it; most new novels seem to be about 300 pages.

This seemed unfair to Hosseini - to think that he "sold out" to the book industry and was only interested in creating a best seller and not a successful novel. And since I think this novel will provoke good discussion, I wondered if I was wrong to make this initial judgment.

But the fact is that, for whatever reason, Hosseini chose to tell a BIG story in under 400 pages. This would be a difficult task for any author. Hosseini's tale is not set over 40 years of peace and prosperity where the most exciting thing that happens in the world surrounding the characters is the birth of new lambs each spring. No, this is a story in which the world the characters inhabit is beset with coups d'etat and war and invasion and revolution and religious misery.

Hosseini seemed to solve this problem (or try to solve it) by telling a small story set amidst a big background. This is a story of how big events affect ordinary people. That's a perfectly legitimate choice, used many times before. What is Gone With the Wind but the story of one woman living amongst the chaos of a civil war and its aftermath. Of course, Margaret Mitchell chose to tell that 10 year story in almost 1,000 pages. Which again, begs the question, of why Hosseini chose to limit his page number in this way. Notice I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he chose to limit his pages. If I assume that he didn't make that choice consciously and it just ended up being 400 pages, then we move into a whole other discussion. But I truly think it was planned.

The other thing that Hosseini seemed to do to solve the problem was to tell thirty years of the forty year story from the point of view of young girls. A simplistic point of view. Maybe because I just finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, I found myself wishing through the first half of the novel that the little girls' stories were told from a more retrospective point of view rather than right there in the moment. The simplicity of their thought processes bored me a bit. I like little girls; I was a little girl once. But I don't particularly find the perspectives of little girls all that enlightening.

The other question that went through my mind was: why did Hosseini decide to break up the stories of his two principal characters through the first half of the novel? Given his page limitation I thought it was odd that he chose to tell the entire story of both women in straight chronological time. Mariam and Leila are not the same age, so it would be impossible to tell a simultaneous story about Mariam's childhood and Leila's childhood in a chronological fashion - they had to follow each other. But this means that in order to reach the point in the story where their lives intersect he has had to tell a 30 year tale in 200 pages. Each girl's story is about 15 years. If he had chosen to tell some of the stories in flashbacks or some other more complicated form than chronological he could have, perhaps, said more in fewer pages. And perhaps this would have allowed for deeper characterizations of the other characters in the story.

I thought that many of the characters in this novel, other than the principal characters, were simply sketches. Some sketches in the first half of the novel are drawn more boldly than others but they are still drawn for the reader and not, I think, created for the reader. I found it difficult to enter the story and experience what the characters were feeling in the first half of the novel This does not mean I didn't understand what the characters were feeling (the author is a competent writer, he's very clear about what they are feeling.) But I didn't feel it in my gut.

For instance, the death of Mariam's mother in Part One did not carry the weight with me that it could have. Nor, even, did the betrayal by Mariam's father. I felt as if the bare plot outline of Part One was good enough, and compelling enough, to have justified its own 350 page novel. Certainly the characters introduced in Part One that surround Mariam are complicated characters and further fleshing out of those characters would have been welcome. And yet Hosseini hurried through those 21 years of his story.

My problems with the novel fell away about half-way through Part III when I did step into the women's lives and care about them. But when I reached the end I found myself a bit annoyed that I had to read 400 pages to appreciate the approximately 50 pages that worked for me.

So I simultaneously thought the novel was too short and too long.

Ordinarily I would just shrug and put the book away and not wonder about why it didn't grab me. But I knew I needed to discuss it this week at my reading group and I also needed to figure out what I wanted to write about it.

I realize that I should try to judge a novel by what an author is trying to achieve and not by what I think he should have been trying to achieve. It is always dangerous to try to guess what an author's goal was when writing a novel, but I think Hosseini wanted to tell a story that would give the reader enough information to understand the plight of Afghani women over the last 40 years and get the world talking about it. And he achieved that. This novel is being discussed in book groups across the country and a lot of people are talking about the plight of women in countries like Afghanistan. So I suppose this novel is a success. But I still didn't like it.

As I pondered this, I happened across a completely unrelated blog post by Rohan Maitzen in which she admitted that an Egyptian novel she was reading came out of a completely different literary tradition than her own and that made her initially misunderstand it. Once she started to read the novel on its own terms, she appreciated it more.

I thought about that and I thought about Hosseini's novel and I wondered if perhaps the storytelling tradition out of which this novel comes is just not appealing to me. It struck me that the story is told in the way parables are told: small vignettes that are compelling - with just enough background and characterization to make for a good discussion. To write the novel in a more complex way, with flashbacks, would not work for a parable. The real discussion of a parable is going to be about the lesson to be drawn not about the plot or the characters - so the plot needs to be told in simple fashion and the characters can't be so interesting that they distract from the lesson. And that, possibly, is part of the reason that Hosseini made the choices he did with this novel. A linear, chronological story with enough detail to get the point across but not enough detail about the secondary characters to distract from what the lesson is. This novel will provoke discussion, but the discussion will always lead back to the plight of Afghani women in a general sense, not the specifics of this novel.

That is probably why this novel didn't work for me as a novel. I am a person for whom simple storytelling forms do not appeal. I don't like fairy tales. I don't like folk tales. I'm not wild about short stories. So a novel that is a parable would not be a type of novel that would appeal to me. Maybe that explains it.

But I expect the discussion tomorrow night to be good.