Time for a new look, eh? The old one was starting to feel dingy and claustrophobic. It still needs a few tweaks, so I hope you’ll bear with me for a day or two until the dust settles.
In honor of the new theme I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane, for those of you who have been reading this since the beginning (hi, Mom). And if you haven’t, maybe you’d like to see the old designs anyway.
Next week the clan will be heading up north to family camp again, this time with a literary twist. My husband’s offhand observation that the camp was located in the heart of Hemingway country led to a proposal that we read some of his short stories in advance, and discuss them while we’re there.
There has been some confusion within the family about exactly which stories we are supposed to read; so far I haven’t had time to sift through all the emails to try to figure it out. Furthermore, we all seem to be reading from different collections and editions. Steve got stuck with a fat library paperback with teensy print, teensier margins, and an unpleasantly stiff library-reinforced cover.
When Joey had his accident I was about 150 pages from the end of John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany. That was my book group’s pick for July and our meeting was scheduled for a few days later. I had been having very strong and very negative feelings about the book and it was just too much to process at the same time as the accident. I ended up taking a break from the book and skipping the meeting. I did come back to it, though, and now I’ve finished it.
I have a lot of complaints about this book but I’ll just write about one of them for now. It was a total rip-off of one of my all-time favorite books, Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business. I boldly told Doulicia, who happens to be in my book group, that if Robertson Davies was still alive, and in a litigious mood, he could probably sue Irving for plagiarism. She answered with a challenge. “Is it plagiarism,” she asked, “or homage?”
Veronica Mitchell tagged me for this one. Some of these questions were pretty tough and some were downright painful. The painful questions were the ones that asked you to consider fictional characters as if they were real. Who would you invite to a party, who would you want for a sibling, etc. Those questions made me aware of something I had never before articulated, though I’ve felt it all my life: the bittersweetness of fiction. Like the bittersweetness of parenting, it’s there all the time, underlying even the most intense pleasure. And the better the book, the more poignant it is, because it’s not real and you will never get to meet your best friends.
I had the devil of a time keeping this photography website under wraps while I was working on it. Leslie’s work is simply stunning, and I am so excited to share it with you now that we’ve gone “live.” Here’s a screenshot showing a single photo, but do visit the site to see the whole show.
Joey is doing great! Two days ago he had surgery on his nose — outpatient, but with general anaesthetic — and it went really well. The doctor told us he’d be in a lot of pain, but he didn’t even want ibuprofin, let alone the prescription painkillers. And just in case you had any lingering doubts, that same evening Joey regaled us all with some wicked potty humor at the dinner table.
We are making a point of saying Joey had “an accident with his bike” rather than Joey was “hit by a car” because even though it is true, it sounds so horrific.
We were very lucky. He is fine.
We were biking together yesterday morning (trying to be virtuous, dammit!). We were riding on the sidewalk. I know they say you’re safer riding in the street, but I have always assumed that only applies to adults who know how to drive and therefore know what to expect from traffic. So we were sailing down a fairly steep hill (South Seventh between Liberty and Washington, if you know Ann Arbor) with a good distance between us — me in front — when all of a sudden a car turned into a driveway right in front of Joey. He was not able to stop in time (I later learned he’d been sailing down the hill no-handed) and he smashed into the car.
