Water For Elephants

Best Read so far of 2011: Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. I got sucked into this book by reading the preview thing they offer on Amazon where you can read the first few pages. I immediately fell in love with the main character, Jacob Jankowski, who is a feisty patient in a nursing home watching the circus come to town. We learn that when Jacob was in college he lost his parents in a car accident just before sitting his veterinary exams at Cornell. Rather than finishing his degree, he leaves and joins the circus where he's put in charge of the animals. He falls in love with the circus's rag-tag, decrepit assortment of horses, lions, a chimpanzee, and a later in the novel, one lone elephant. Oh, and he falls in love with another man's wife.

Sara Gruen captivated me first through the character, then through the setting, and then through the plot. I thought all elements were very well done. It is a lovely, enchanting, and engaging book. I couldn't put it down. It appeals to the part of us all that wanted (or still wants) to run away with the circus. We find a life there that is brutal, and base, and exhilarating all at the same time.

It's not a squeaky clean book. There are a couple of things (like a description of the circus exotic dancer/prostitute). So don't say I didn't warn you.

The movie is being released this summer. I, for one, always like to read the book before I see the movie. It will feature Reese Witherspoon and that creepy looking guy from the Twilight movies (maybe this will make me like him).

Me, I'm betting the book is better than the movie.

Today's the Day: New Year Take 2

Today's the Day: New Year Take 2.

Why? Well, I thought this year got off to a sort of rocky start for me. First, the kids were sick. Then I had a bad attitude. Then I just could not get motivated to do anything. Call it the winter blues or whatever I didn't want it setting the tone for the entire year. So I decided to declare a New Year take 2. I mean, hey. I can celebrate again and put myself in a position to expect a better 2011.

Why today? It just feels like a good day. The sun is out. The broken heater in the house is fixed. I'm having lunch with friends. I've already had a good workout today. Dinner is planned and should be easy. I've been cleaning and doing laundry. So far it feels like a good, productive day. The kind of day I want to fill my 2011 with. So there you are.

2011, I'm ready for you.

Now.

Worth a Read: for MLK Day

In honor of Martin Luther King Day allow me to share a book which I feel is worth a read:

"Song Yet Sung" by James McBride:

Read the review from Publisher's Weekly on amazon (see link above). It gives a good overview of the book's character's and plot. The writing of James McBride is poetic and rich and wonderful. So is this story and each of it's characters as well as the background information he gives in the author's notes. This book is well worth the time you'll spend with it. It's worth a read.

Possessions

When I was serving a mission for my church in The Netherlands I visited Palais Het Loo, a former palace of the Dutch royal family. The palace sits on acres and acres of forested land with elaborate gardens, stables, and palace rooms with displays of how the royal family lived. The possessions of the royal family were meticulously catalogued and displayed throughout the palace: dresses on dress stands, a silver handled brush, white gloves with satin buttons, a wooden rocking horse, and rows of automobiles. There were paintings and rich tapestries, elegant place settings at empty tables—the possessions of people who are no longer living.

I wonder how our possessions shape us. What our purchases tell about the kind of people we are and what we value.

I think about the few possession of my mother that I now own: a pair of Pyrex mixing bowls, a spatula, and the quiet book she made so we’d behave during church. I wonder where other things of hers went. What happened to the small silver jewelry box lined with red velvet that she let me use as a couch when I was duplicating the home of “The Borrowers” inside a shoebox for a book report? What about the homemade advent calendar that we used to count down the days until Christmas? The music she played on the piano? Her wedding ring that had been missing its diamond since I was a little girl? She had few valuable possessions, maybe none. We don’t mourn the loss of her things. We mourn her. We miss her and the experiences we could have if she were still here.

I think of the lives of people that pass through this earth forgotten and undocumented. I think of the Holocaust. Those images we’ve seen of roomfuls of shoes and eyeglasses that were kept while the lives of people who owned them were cast away, contemptuously. How many people live and die without the careful documentation of their existence, while we catalogue the hairbrushes and gloves and dresses and rocking horses of only the wealthy and important?

We all have possessions and there isn’t anything wrong with that. Humans have always had items they kept for useful purposes, emotional reasons, or for their aesthetic beauty. But let us also remember people and what shared experiences and relationships can give us. I believe that people are more important than things. Always.

Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving

". . . you can feel the rejuvenating effect that a good meal can bring on. The way it can make people kinder, funnier, more optimistic, and remind them it's not a mistake to go on living."

-- pg. 241, Suzanne Collins, "Mockingjay"

Another quote I love

"On the day I die, I want to have had dessert."

from Anne Lamott in the book "Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith"

To astronauts and miners

Why is it that the news stories we remember, the one that shape us and our youth are mostly stories of sadness—of death, of destruction? For my parents, it was the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. For the high school students I sometimes teach it is the falling of two towers on a sunny day in September.

I still remember sitting on the hard carpeted floor of my elementary school, watching a TV strapped to a rolling cart. We’d all gathered in a common area, the place we called “the pod” to watch Christa McAuliffe become the first American teacher in space. We watched as the Challenger Shuttle took off and then exploded in the bluest sky I’ve ever seen. I don’t need a picture to remember what the explosion looked like: a trail of white that bulged at the top and then split in two directions. We’d watched the launch live and we sat there, staring at the screen until someone—a teacher—turned it off. We didn’t talk. We knew that they were gone—those people on board. They’d just been smiling at us.

They’d been waving.

My oldest daughter was only a year and half on September 11^th. Although she’s seen footage and knows about what happened that day, she doesn’t understand it. It may shape the world she lives in and the policy and political decisions of her generation, but it’s not a day that’s hers.

I’m glad that the news story that marks her, that first affected her, the one where she began to see the world differently, was a day when 33 miners rose one by one after 69 days underground. I’m glad that hers is a story of hope. A triumph.

My 10-year old daughter watched all she could of the Chilean mine rescue. She called me asking me for updates on her way to and from school. She knew and understood that there were more than just miners down there, underground. That paramedics and rescue workers had gone down too. She had questions and she had empathy. She wanted to watch every moment, but there was homework to do, piano to practice, a room to clean.

“Let her watch,” I told my husband.

I sat next to her. We watched as the last miner climbed out of something that NASA helped to build. It looked remarkably similar to a space shuttle, like a small, wire rocket.

It rose out of the ground. I heard cheers and there were smiles. Then the door opened.

And there was waving.