“There was a star danced, and under that was I born.”
I am a tad bit busy today. Tomorrow we have two, yes two, birthday parties at our house. First nine little girls come over for butterfly crafts and cupcakes, then six little boys will play race car games and eat more cupcakes. In the midst of all the party preparations, I’ve been remembering the day when a star danced and my sweetpeas came into the world. Oh joy!
Frances and Edward Mayes are two lucky people who found a villa in Tuscany with good olive trees.
“I have to consider that the state of being happy consists of something very simple: your hand parts silver leaves to reach a clump of shiny black olives, your thumb and index finger pull an olive and snap it off the branch, letting it fall just as fast as Galileo said it would.”
There’s a state of contentment that comes only from physical activity. Perhaps you find it in gardening. In this sentence, instead of the olives simply falling Mayes’ refers to the Italian astronomer, giving richer meaning to the simple act of picking olives. We’re doing some planting this weekend which won’t result in fresh olive oil to douse on bruschette but will bring happiness just the same.
Robert Rauschenberg died Monday at age 82. He was a prolific American pop artist about whom much has been written. This sentence, in which American composer John Cage refers to Rauschenberg’s art, is one which stands alone.
“Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.”
Rauschenberg blurred lines between painting, sculpture, photography, and print and paper making. He was also known to pick up trash on the streets of New York and that is what Cage was referring to. Not only could junk be the stuff of art – but in Rauschenberg’s hands it could become beautiful art.
Aside from the specific context that Rauschenberg’s non-traditional approach provided inspiration to other artists, this sentence can be an inspiration to our lives. Cage uses “underfoot” as though you might rush by and trample it. He doesn’t say that we see it; he says we need to take the trouble to look. This sentence speaks of missed opportunities. It’s a more sophisticated version of “stop and smell the roses.” Beauty is there. Now.
“Lilly ran and skipped and hopped and flew all the way home, she was so happy. And she really did want to be a teacher when she grew up — That is when she didn’t want to be a dancer or a surgeon or an ambulance driver or a diva or a pilot or a hairdresser or a scuba diver…”
Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse is the story of a little girl who can’t wait for sharing time at school causing the teacher to take her special things for the day and causing Lilly to show her anger. In this sentence at the end, Lilly is friends once again with her favorite teacher. Kevin Henkes is one of the best children’s book authors. He really understands kids. Here Henkes’ juxtaposition of various possible career choices is so true to life. My aspirations included singer, architect and entomologist. The funny thing is Lilly the mouse is very much like my girl – both are creative and passionate. 🙂
“It is now fifteen years since I first approached the forbidding granite wall of rock, found the jagged cleft cut by the rushing torrent of the river, negotiated the narrow road on the ledge above the ravine, swung around the hairpin bends and plunged through one rock tunnel after another, until I found myself in the sun-splashed forest, surrounded, it seemed, by an orchestra of a thousand birds singing in harmony a hundred songs.”
Does this sound like a cookbook? That’s the magic of Roy Andries de Groot’s The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. In this sentence he describes the first time he traveled to the valley of La Grande Chartreuse, fell in love with its cuisine and spent years chronicling the dishes. De Groot writes that his book is not a tourist guide, yet it is filled with descriptions of this high Alpine valley that will make you want to visit immediately. His descriptions are all the more amazing since de Groot was nearly sightless. Chefs rave about this book; Julia Child said it “is a whole way of life.” I’ve only just begun and read a recipe which takes three days to make… so it may serve as more of a travel than a cook book for me.
I blogged about Dara Horn’s novel The World to Come earlier this year and told the author what a brilliant book I thought it was. Dara Horn emailed me back – how nice is that? She told me she is well into writing her third novel scheduled for publication in spring of 2009. Titled All Other Nights, it is about Jewish spies during the American Civil War. Horn has an interview in Esquire magazine about it and there is an excerpt in Granta last year in an issue titled Best of Young American Novelists.
Horn, at age 31, has already won awards including 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, has been chosen as Editor’s Choice by The New York Times Book Review and others, and is generating raves from critics who call World captivating and daring. Wow – what a way for this young novelist to start her writing career!
And if you happen to live in Central Oregon, you can catch this rising literary star on tour next week. Horn will speak in Bend at the Tower Theatre Thursday May 15 and in Sisters at Five Pine Friday May 16.
Isn’t that a great title? The book is subtitled, “reinventing modern motherhood.”
“Unless the housekeeper of our dreams suddenly swoops down from the sky, the key for many of us is to find a way to savor the dailiness.”
I’m a big fan of dailiness. When you stop rushing, you find the good stuff is already there. The excitement in my daughter’s face when she saw her daisy seeds sprouting would have been enough to make the day a great one. But, it didn’t end there. Every day my kids help me recognize moments worth savoring, the ones you shouldn’t rush past.
In “Good Mom,” authors Trisha Ashworth and Amy Nobile explore how mothers can learn to enjoy motherhood despite the craziness of their schedules. They start off with a check list to see if you need the book, asking if you secretly wish you had your own apartment. Ooops. Another check list item is that you consider a trip to the dentist your special “alone time.” Oh, it’s not?
The book is funny and witty and improved my attitude on a crazy day. I’m off to find joy in small moments. Happy Mother’s Day !
“The mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it’s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet.”
New York Times chief wine critic Eric Asimov knows his way around a wine shop and a paragraph. Here he opens a popular article titled Wine Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head? It turns out two studies show American consumers still don’t know much about wine and are swayed by marketing hype. Asimov is an entertaining writer. Who would think to compare oddball wine facts with the contents of a little boy’s pocket? Probably the dad of two of them. When I read him, yes, I learn about wine but I also learn how engagingly knowledge can be imparted in the hands of a solid writer. Salut Eric!
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesman and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.”
We’re familiar with the hobgoblin sentence – yet what was Ralph Waldo Emerson really saying? Emerson isn’t specific in his essay Self-Reliance exactly which steady conformity is foolish and which is wise. He is telling us to think anew each day and goes on to add, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Ah, if only the players in last night’s Presidential contests seemed truly great! Instead they tailor their words to what will sway the voters at that moment. Emerson could not have known in 1841 about political pundits, exit polls, marketing firms, speech writers and the like. It all goes against the point of Emerson’s essay to follow our own instincts and ideas. It would be so daring and fresh for a politician to simply state their intent regardless of the consequences. And we may just be ready to listen…
“Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary existence and make it yield whatever instruction it contained.”
Angle of Repose is a novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-bound historian who decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. In this sentence we see the West coast through the eyes of a bride who is a true easterner. She continues to define herself through her cultured roots never quite embracing the rougher side of America where she eventually builds her family life. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972.
My husband and I had our own mini reading group since we read Stegner’s book at the same time and could discuss its themes of America as a nation in flux, of young and old, of dreams reached, of finding a resting place when dreams aren’t realized. Wallace Stegner has said of his epic novel, “It’s perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that’s my story.”
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