Small Moment

I have written many, many times about books and the importance of books in my life. When I was a child, they were my refuge and my beacon to the future. They never let me down.

Books were important to my son Ben, growing up as he did in a house fraught with tension and emotional landmines. It was a sign of how far he had come emotionally when he told me I could let go of his children's books and give them to his cousin for his daughters. Ramona would be fine, he assured me, with all the books already in her life and all the books yet to come.

And he was right.

Books are threaded throughout my life, Ben's life, and Ramona's life. To me, that's the way it should be. So imagine my joy when Alise's mother Mona, Ramona's beloved Nana, sent this to me this week:

The little boy on the left is Ramona's cousin Lyrick, who I will finally meet this August. And the little reader bent over the book on the right? That's our Ramona, reading away.

Ben told me, the last time we talked, that Ramona is reading a lot now. "She can't wait for you to come out so she can read to you," he added.

She can't wait? I can't either.

To Everything There Is A Season

 And this is the season for books.

Many have expressed to me their amazement at my rate of reading, either catching up with the count in this blog or asking me outright. What can I say? I read quickly and I read a lot. A whole lot. Given my uneven energy levels on any given day, an evening spent with a good book or two is sometimes the very best of all worlds emotionally, mentally, and physically.

So what have I read since I last posted? Oh, lots. LOTS:
109. Mean by Myriam Guba (this is a memoir with an attitude by a queer, mixed-race Chicana growing up in a small town)
110. (((SEMITISM: Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump))) by Jonathan Weisman (I can't describe how much this book impacted me, especially given that one of the most pointed personal attacks I have experienced for being Jewish came recently not from the alt-right but from a very close friend of very liberal bent; Weisman correctly points out that at some point on this topic, the far right and the far left are not that far apart)
111. How To Survive Without A Salary: Learning How To Live the Conserver Lifestyle by Charles Long (before Amy Dacyczyn [the Frugal Zealot], Dave Ramsey, Katy Wolk-Stanley [the Non-Consumer Advocate], or the Frugalwoods (#97], there was Charles Long and his wonderfully wacky treatise on truly doing without; this was a reread of a copy I have owned for 30 years)
112. Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation (updated edition) by Tom Bissell (essays about writing and filmmaking and the creative process)
113. Educated: a Memoir by Tara Westover (Westover grew up in an isolated family of survivalists in Idaho; this is her breathtaking and heartbreaking memoir about what it took to break from her family to save herself)
114. Kudos by Rachel Kusk (the concluding novel of Kusk's trilogy (see #105 and 108), a review on the book's back called the tale "alienating" and I cannot disagree; having read the entire series, I can safely say I do not care one whit for Faye, the center of the novels)
115. Whiskey & Ribbons by Leesa Cross-Smith (heartbreaking, heart-lifting , beautifully written novel)
116. Happiness by Aminatta Forna (this novel has many threads, including urban fox populations and habits; while I was reading it, Warren casually mentioned "You know what I saw today in our yard? A fox!")
117. Disoriental by Négar Djavadi (Kimiâ is many things—a child traumatized fleeing Iran, a bisexual person in a culture that cannot accept anything other than heterosexuality, a daughter, a sister, a political refugee, a writer—and she narrates her stories in fits and starts in this patchwork novel)
118. Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires (excellent short stories that keep interconnecting and interweaving with each other story in the collection)
119. Being Mortal: What Matters in the End by Atul Gawande (I read this book in 2014 when it first appeared; rereading in 2018, I am hit and moved even harder by Gawande's views on the disservice the medical profession does those of us with progressive, terminal diseases by refusing to talk meaningfully about end-of-life choices)
120. Calypso by David Sedaris (Sedaris is a writer I cannot read without laughing out loud; thank you forever Ben and Alise for introducing me to his wit)
121. There There by Tommy Orange (this first novel is getting a lot of well-deserved attention; Orange writes knowingly and devastatingly about urban Indians in Oakland California, pulling several characters into a horrific event at a powwow—I told a friend who has it on her "to read" list that it is superb, but remember to breathe)

122. Chasing Slow: Courage To Journey Off the Beaten Path by Erin Loechner (this book is about minimalism and, perhaps, about finding oneself; I enjoyed it because Loechner has the humility to laugh at her own ludicrous lifestyle choices along the way)
123. Sick: A Memoir by Porchista Khakpour (a memoir of Lyme disease, of dislocation (Khakpour's family fled Iran), of addiction, of mental illness, of PTSD, of racism, of writing; this book is not for the faint of heart)

I'm curious where I will be a week from today, at the year's midpoint. You'll find out.

Small Moment

We had a break in the hot, heavy weather last night when a gentle rain rolled through. This morning was cooler and fresher, so I walked to work.

Walking to work on a summer morning is a gift.

A block away, Darrell was out on the swing on his front porch, a mug of coffee in his hand. Darrell goes way back in Warren's life as an instructor and mentor, and I have gotten to know him over the years as yet another benefit of being married to Warren. We exchanged greetings and comments about the weather. Darrel hoisted his mug and said he might just spend the whole morning on the porch with his coffee. As I said goodbye and walked on, he called, "Say hello to that great guy of yours!"

Yes, I thought, smiling, he is that great guy of mine.

Further up the block (literally and figuratively, as the street rises), in front of one of the houses, a cat eyed me with feline superiority. On the front steps of the same house, coffee cups in hand, were the brother and sister-in-law of our next door neighbors. They raised their cups high as we swapped greetings.

Further along, I brushed by lilies spilling over the sidewalk from a waist-high fence planter.

Another two blocks and I was at Court, all the fresher for the walk, the greetings, the gardens, the day.

And that has made all the difference.

Grateful For Those Who Open The Door

Back in 2009, in my very first post, I wrote about opening doors: to the world, to pain, to community. The jumping off point was a favorite quote from I Heard the Owl Call My Name, a beautiful, small novel by Margaret Craven. The novel is about a terminally ill young priest serving a Native village on a coastal inlet in the Canadian Northwest. There is only one other white person there, the government-hired teacher who doesn't want to be there. After the priest is killed in a landslide, the villagers wait for his body to be found and returned for burial:

The village was waiting and listening, and it was the children who heard first the canoes coming up the river, and they ran down the main path calling “They come now. They bring him now.”

In his tiny house the teacher heard the running footfalls on the path to the riverbank, and he went quickly to the door and could not open it. To join the others was to care, and to care was to live and to suffer.

I recently had an unsettling conversation with a very close friend who, while not dismissive of my activities, made it clear that she had not been and would never be involved in her own community. There were lots of reasons why, some of them personal that demanded much of her, but the foundation was simply "I'm not putting myself out."

She could not begin to open the door.

Me?  I open the door every chance I get.

Thursday just past two coworkers and I had a lengthy discussion about some of the juveniles with whom we work. Many of our kids have backstories that are sobering, to say the least. After we finished talking about two in particular and the hurdles facing them, there was a long silence. Then I said, "I love this job and it breaks my heart over and over." The other two agreed.

We're all door openers—those two colleagues and I—along with other coworkers. As our court administrator has observed, none of us are doing this work for the money. My friends and colleagues at Legal Clinic likewise are door openers. So are all the people in this community who give time and themselves to our community, be it with the Symphony, our Farmers Market, food pantries, and other such projects. We do this work because when we hear those footfalls on the path, we go quickly to the door and open it wide to join the others.

I'm grateful for the door openers.

There's GOLD In Dem Dere Books!

My checkout receipt from the library 

Since our local district library joined a larger consortium, users like me have had a whole new world of quick, speedy access open up. Wow! Sometimes I feel I have a book in my hands (from another library system, mind you) before I finish requesting it. Well, maybe not quite that fast, but often the turnaround time is so short that I speculate the consortium libraries must have built giant pneumatic tubes connecting one to the other, or have installed an underground track on which carts full of books whiz from one location to the next. It's been great.

Another change I recently noticed is that when I check out books and print out my receipt listing the titles and when the books are due, there is a little note at the bottom telling me how much I saved on this transaction by checking out rather than buying the books, and how much I have saved "this  past year," which I suspect means "year to date since joining the consortium."

When I checked out five books this past Saturday, I saved $112.89. My overall savings (since whenever it started tracking this)? $1438.89!

$1400.00 plus? That's not chump change. For someone who tries hard to keep the household and personal expenditures lean, this little note just cracks me up every single time.

So what have I read since I last posted? These fine beauties:
99. My Name Is Asher Lev by the late, great Chaim Potok (oh, what I could say about rereading this novel, ranging from the high school English teacher who put it in my hands thinking my artistic soul was tortured to how this introduced me to the works of Potok to how influential Potok's writing was in my studying and eventually converting to Judaism)
100. Go Home! edited by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan (a superb collection of poems, essays, and stories from the modern Asian diaspora)
101. The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat (this novel threw me off with its young woman narrator realizing in the end that she doesn't even mean enough to the sinister commune dwellers she flees to warrant their tracking her down)
102. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard (this was a reread of a book I read over 30 years ago; I was floored upon rereading it to discover Dillard was only 27 when she wrote it—back then I would have guessed she was in her 50s or older)
103. Black Lotus by Sil Lai Abrams (a memoir by a biracial author who didn't know she was biracial until she was 13 years old, this book explores questions of race, family, and the power of lies and truths)
104. Everyone Knows You Go Home by Natalie Sylvester (family, love, death, borders, home, forgiveness, and belonging, all wrapped up in a beautifully written novel)
105. Outline by Rachel Cusk (this is the first novel in a trilogy told by a woman, a mother who has left her marriage and is starting to navigate a new life; Cusk, a British author, has a very spare writing style)
106. The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq by Dunya Mikhail (this book, translated from Arabic by the author and Max Weiss, is a harrowing account of women (and children) escaping ISIS; this book once again hammered home—as has happened so often this year—my woeful ignorance and my extreme privilege as a white woman living in America)
107. The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles by Gary Krist (William Mulholland and water, D.W. Griffith and the nascent movie industry, and Aimee Semple McPherson and her role in making the evangelical movement and the mega-church a fixture in America are all threaded through this look at how Los Angeles went from a town that never should have existed to a major U.S. city in the first 30 years of the twentieth century)
108. Transit by Rachel Cusk [see also book #105] (I'm still not sure where, if anywhere, Cusk is going with this trilogy, other than to have the main character provide a very low key narration to her life; at times, reading it, I imagine her speaking in the hushed tones of a sports commentator at a major gold tournament)

With five months behind me, I will finish the year at around 260 books if I keep the same pace. Looking at how far I've made it through the five I brought home on Saturday, I don't think that should be a problem.

May Finances

It's June and time to look back at the May expenditures for groceries and household items, as well as eating out. I'm hoping we end the year spending  an average of $175.00 a month or less on groceries (food) and household items (examples: cleaning supplies, toilet paper, toothpaste, shampoo) in 2018. I don't have a goal for eating out; I'm tracking it this year more to get an idea of where we fall on that scale than anything.

On the grocery front, we spent $112.53 on food and $19.22 on household items for a combined total of $131.75 for May. For the year, we are averaging right around $153.00 a month. That pleases me to no end.

Our eating costs were considerably higher than usual: $67.00 for the month. About $10.00 of that was attributable to Warren attending an out-of-town training (two days, one night) but the rest was takeout, pizza out one night at our favorite place, coffee with friends (my weakness for hot chocolate and frozen hot chocolate over the much less expensive cup of tea), and, gulp, ice cream. I'm heading out for coffee shortly and will prudently order tea. I have a feeling when 2018 is over, I will learn that we spend more on eating out than I thought we did coming into the year.

Looking ahead to June, our household grocery expenditures should stay fairly even, but the eating out will jump because we are attending the League of American Orchestras national conference in Chicago. While breakfast will be cheap (we're staying in our sister-in-law's condo in Oak Park and will bring cereal from home), there is no way around lunches and some dinners in Chicago. We'll keep it as inexpensive as possible, but it is Chicago.

Onward!