“Odd that you should choose to be a midwife, having never experienced birth yourself.”
In other circumstances the words would have stung. She thought, Do not physicians provide medicaments for illnesses they have never suffered? But Hannah held her tongue. Two in her care were suspended between life and death. She had more important matters to worry about.
I want to start with a caveat: I don't tend to read historical fiction, and if I did, I wouldn't be looking for historical fiction built around domestic drama and romance. So, for all I know, The Midwife of Venice might be a very fine example of its genre, and if others find it satisfying, then it succeeds. As for me, I picked this book up because I'll be in Venice next week and wanted to get in the mood – and it worked for my purpose, too. This was a fine, if lightweight, read; I doubt I'll seek out the other volumes in this trilogy.
You are ruled by men – the Rabbi, Isaac, our father when he was alive. You are a little ghetto mouse and will never be anything else.
As the book begins, Hannah – a Jewish midwife of extraordinary gifts – is summoned by a rich Venetian nobleman to attend to his wife. Not only is it against the law for Jews to offer medical aid to Christians, but as Hannah's Rabbi warns her, if either the Contessa or the baby were to die under her care, their Ghetto's entire population would be held to account. Hannah is moved by the Conte's account of his wife's condition, but more so, she sees his desperation as an opportunity: Hannah's husband, Isaac, has recently been kidnapped and enslaved by Maltese Knights, and if she is able to demand a high enough fee for her services, she'll be able to pay his ransom and bring the man she loves back home. The narrative moves between Hannah's drama in Venice and Isaac's in Malta, and with plenty of cliffhangers, manufactured suspense, and not-quite-credible circumstances, the plot advances through a fairly predictable story arc. The historical facts are often inserted inorganically:
Now he was in Valletta, capital city of Malta, stronghold of the Knights. During their long nights and endless days in jail, Simón, another Ashkenazi Jew and a fellow prisoner, had explained to Isaac that in 1530, Charles V of Spain had bestowed this island of rock and wind on the Knights of St. John in exchange for their protecting the archipelago against the infidel Turk. The Knights succeeded in defending the land from the rapaciousness of the Ottomans, but over the years they had grown greedy. Bewitched by their victories, they used the pretext of defending their island to prey not only upon the infidel ships of the Ottomans but on Christian ships as well, seizing cargo and enslaving all on board, rich or poor, merchant or servant, woman or child. They called themselves Knights but they were little more than pirates, grown rich through crimes sanctified in the name of the Holy Crusade.
And the drama was quite dramatic:
Hannah felt a pain under her breast and a tearing sensation, as though her heart had come loose from its moorings. In her mind's eye, she covered the mirror and rent her clothing. These were not the empty gestures prescribed by the Rabbi years ago, but heartfelt this time. Shiva was complete. Now, Jessica was truly dead to her.
But still, author Roberta Rich captured something of the feeling and history of Venice; this wouldn't be inappropriate for high school students to read before The Merchant of Venice in order to get a sense for Shylock and the injustices he lived under. With mention made of everything from the canals to plague doctors to Commedia dell'arte, Rich obviously put in plenty of research and she whetted my appetite for the soggy city. Good enough for my purposes.
When you unconsciously dress like a gondolier in Venice
(Wilder, M/ Pitchford, D) Performed by Hilary Duff
Hey now
Hey now
Hey now
Hey now
Have you ever seen such a beautiful night?
I could almost kiss the stars for shining so bright
When I see you smiling, I go
Oh oh oh
I would never want to miss this
'cause in my heart I know what this is
[Chorus]
Hey now
Hey now
This is what dreams are made of
Hey now
Hey now
This is what dreams are made of
I've got somewhere I belong
I've got somebody to love
This is what dreams are made of
(Hey now)
(Hey now)
Have you ever wondered what life is about?
You could search the world and never figure it out
You don't have to sail the oceans
No no no
Happiness is no mystery it's
Here now it's you and me
[Chorus]
Open your eyes
(This is what dreams are made of)
shout to the sky
(This is what dreams are made of)
Then I see u smiling, I go
Oh oh oh
Yesterday my life was duller
Now everything's Technicolor
[Chorus:]
(Hey now)
(Hey now)
Hey now
This is what dreams
This is what dreams are made of
Hey now
Hey now
This is what dreams are made of
I've got somewhere I belong
I've got somebody to love
This is what dreams are made of
(Hey now)
(Hey now)
Hey now
This is what dreams
This is what dreams are made of
Well, I didn't pick Hey Now this week because of its artistic merits, but it feels like the perfect song choice for what's coming up next: Kennedy and I are leaving in a few days for a tour of Italy; her graduation present being to take me along on a dream trip. I wrote at length once about the backpacking holiday I took around Europe with my friend Kevin back in 1986, and I can't believe that it has taken me over thirty years to go back. So, yeah, this trip may be more about what my own dreams are made of, but Kennedy ain't complaining.
As for the song: Lizzie McGuire was one of the few TV shows that I found charming when I watched along with my kids, and we all enjoyed this movie when it came out. (As a matter of fact, for Halloween that year, I made Kennedy the haute couture igloo dress that appears in this film and she looked adorable in it.) It was around this time that Hilary Duff began her pop star career, and Dave and I took the girls on what felt like their first real March Break vacation: to Cleveland to see Hilary Duff in concert (with incredibly fun visits to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the zoo, the Science Center, etc.) There's a pleasing sense of symmetry in my mind to use this song to link then to now; and especially because The Lizzie McGuire Movie was set in Italy and Kennedy and I intend to rewatch it before we leave. Nothing deeper than that this week, but that's what's on my mind.
He looked like a taunt tasted like a world apart felt like barriers dissolving
He looked like opportunity tasted like hope felt like love
He looked like a miracle tasted like a miracle felt like a miracle
A real actual straight from God prostrate yourself in prayer as you hadn't done since your brother left miracle
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie is a modern retelling of Sophocles' 5thC BC play Antigone, which explored whether or not phusis (natural law) ought to take precedence over nomos (man-made law). Shamsie updates this debate by setting her story in modern-day London and centering on two families of British Muslims who are of Pakistani descent. There's no denying that Muslims in the West have been the focus of extra security measures since 9/11, and according to Shamsie, the vast majority of them conduct their lives just trying to avoid the notice of the state (“Googling While Muslim” seems the threat equivalent of “Driving While Black”). So if a family or community member needed help, and giving that help would run you afoul of seemingly draconian laws, what risk would you endure to give that help? Would you risk your reputation? Your citizenship? Your life? This book feels very timely and weighty, the prose was clear and rarely overwrought, but I don't feel like Shamsie – in directly mirroring the plot of Antigone – quite pulled off the inevitability of a Greek tragedy; modern characters aren't irrevocably tied to hamartia, and I always had the sense that different decisions could have been made. Still worth reading.
Fathers and sons, sons and fathers. An Asian family drama dragged into Parliament.
In one family, Eamonn is handsome and feckless; a young adult with a trust fund and no career path; the son of a wealthy white mother and a notorious Pakistani-British father: rockstar politician Karamat Lone (the atheist, Muslim-raised, newly appointed Home Secretary; “sellout, coconut, opportunist, traitor”). The tough on crime Karamat, as an ex-Muslim, is able to voice concerns about Muslim extremism that a white person couldn't quite get away with, and to prove his seriousness, Karamat muses about not only taking away British citizenship from dual passport holders who travel abroad to join jihadist groups, but taking away citizenship from any Brit joining such groups; intending to leave such people stateless. The question is: How far will Karamat go if the people he loves find themselves on the wrong side of his political posturing?
For girls, becoming women was inevitability; for boys, becoming men was ambition.
On the other side of the tracks, Isma is the eldest of three children of a known (long dead) jihadist, and ever since their mother and grandmother died, she has acted as a substitute parent to her much younger twin siblings; the beautiful and pious Aneeka and the shiftless Parvaiz. Now that the twins are nineteen and out of high school, Isma has decided to leave home and finish her PhD, and with Aneeka having earned a scholarship to law school and Parvaiz finding himself without direction, he becomes easy prey for an ISIS recruiter who offers him purpose, brotherhood, and the story of a father to be proud of. Before this, Parvaiz's greatest ambition had been to record and engineer enough street noises to get a job creating soundscapes for videogames, but Farooq insists that the young man is already qualified to join the “media arm” of the caliphate. Farooq leaves Parvaiz to flip through a series of pictures on his tablet:
Men fishing together against the backdrop of a beautiful sunrise; children on swings in a playground; a man riding through a city on the back of a beautiful stallion, carts of fresh vegetables lining the street; an elderly but powerful-looking man beneath a canopy of green grapes, reaching up to pluck a bunch; young men of different ethnicities sitting together on a carpet laid out in a field; standing men pointing their guns at the heads of kneeling men; an aerial night-time view of a street thrumming with life, car headlights and electric lights blazing; men and boys in a large swimming pool; boys and girls queuing up outside a bouncy castle at an amusement park; a blood donation clinic; smiling men sweeping an already clean street; a bird sanctuary; the bloodied corpse of a child.
Despite what seem like warning bells, Parvaiz is just naive enough to allow himself to be lured to Raqqa (where he will, soon enough, learn to distinguish the difference in sound between a nail piercing a hand during a crucifixion and a sword slicing through a neck during a beheading), and meanwhile back home, Isma wants to distance herself from her brother's bewildering actions and Aneeka is willing to do anything it takes to bring her twin safely home.
In the stories of wicked tyrants men and women are punished with exile, bodies are kept from their families – their heads impaled on spikes, their corpses thrown into unmarked graves. All these things happen according to the law, but not according to justice. I am here to ask for justice.
So it comes down to justice and the conflict between phusis and nomos; is it better to keep your head down and leave others to the fate they've chosen, or do you take a stand against bad laws at the risk of your own freedom and safety? This idea of man-made laws seems not only to apply to the bills coming out of Parliament, but also to the interpretation of Islam: there's a huge chasm between the gentle and reverent practise that Isma and Aneeka observe, the quiet prayers that Karamat still finds himself reciting, and the burka-imposing, sword-wielding thuggery that shock Parvaiz in the caliphate.
Updating Antigone allows Shamsie to explore this issue as tragedy, and the lives of these characters do seem tragic; so much is out of their control as to seem the whims of the gods. But by tying herself to Sophocles' millenias-old play, Shamsie committed to a climax of tragic proportions that didn't ring true to me in modern times. The fact that I was mentally resisting the narrative of Parvaiz joining the jihad as a helpless dupe probably proves that I needed to read a story in which this happens: I know that peace-loving people can be radicalised, but in the wake of attacks like in Manchester and Barcelona, I'm not interested in root causes (but do like being challenged by the idea of someone who regrets his choice to join ISIS once he sees the truth of them). So, overall, I didn't love Home Fire as a novel, but I was certainly interested in it as a book of ideas. It wasn't my favourite on the Man Booker longlist this year, but I can totally appreciate why it's there.
Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:
People wanted the girl to come back, so she could tell them where she'd been. There were too many ways she could have disappeared, and they were thought about, often. She could have run down from the hill and a man could have stopped to offer her a lift, and taken her away, and buried her body in a dense thicket of trees beside a motorway junction a hundred miles to the north where she would still be lying now in the cold wet ground. There were dreams about her walking home. Walking beside the motorway, walking across the moor, walking up out of one of the reservoirs, rising from the dark grey water with her hair streaming and her clothes draped with long green weeds.
Reservoir 13 immediately opens with a mystery: A thirteen-year-old girl, Rebecca (Becky, or Bex) Shaw was last seen moodily following behind her parents on a hike through England's Peak District, and at some point, she simply disappeared. A search party is assembled, detectives hold news conferences, the local village (in which the family had been holidaying) cancel the annual New Year's festivities out of respect, but the girl is never found. What follows is no thrilling whodunnit, but rather, a slow-moving examination of this tragedy's effects on the local village – the ways in which life changes, but more so, the ways in which life goes on – and in a nod to the thirteen reservoirs in the surrounding hills, the narrative plays out over thirteen chapters, covering the ensuing thirteen years. The teenagers who had briefly gotten to know the Shaw girl are followed as they go through high school and university and enter their adult lives, there are births and deaths amongst the other villagers, marriages and divorces, strangers move in and familiars move away, and behind everything, nature blithely rotates through the seasons; from bud to harvest; from rut to wean. This is unlike anything I've read before, and while I found it somewhat hard to enter, patience does pay off: Jon McGregor just might win the Man Booker Prize with this moody experiment.
There are several blurbs of praise from other authors in my edition of this book, and part of what Sarah Hall says is, “Reservoir 13 is a unique feat of communitarian storytelling”. While I can't find a definition of “communitarian” as a literary technique, this book would seem to serve as its exemplar. An omniscient narrator flits among every character in the village (from the Vicar to the badgers under the hedgerow) with hardly any breathing space between each. The following excerpt is typical of this, and despite its length, only a third of one paragraph:
At the butcher's for May Day weekend there was a queue but nothing like there once would have been. Nothing like the queue Martin and Ruth needed to keep the shop going. Martin had been keeping this to himself, although it was becoming obvious and nobody asked. Irene was at the front of the queue telling everyone what she knew about the situation at the Hunters'. She did the cleaning there, and knew a thing or two. You can imagine what it's like for the girl's parents, she said. Having to watch us all down here just getting on with things. Ruth saying but surely the village couldn't be expected to put life on hold. Austin Cooper came in with copies of the Valley Echo newsletter and laid them on the counter. Ruth wished him congratulations, and he looked confused for a moment before smiling and backing away towards the door. Irene watched him go, and asked if Su Cooper was expecting. Ruth said yes, at last, and from the back of the queue Gordon Jackson asked would there be any chance of getting served before the baby was born.
There are just enough characters in this book to make it hard to keep them straight by name alone, but McGregor does a fine job of adding enough context that he doesn't need to continually write “Jones the custodian” or “Thompson the dairy farmer”. And while there isn't much given by way of back story for anyone, following them over thirteen years paints a full picture of everyone. And everything. For example, the first time “well dressing” was brought up, I had no idea what that meant. But one year there will be a mention of soaking the boards for the well dressing, another year, someone draws out a plan for the well dressing. After thirteen years, I had a pretty complete picture of everything that's involved with this custom. And that pertains to the whole as well: what isn't clear about the people or setting at first will all eventually be filled in; what a remarkably satisfying effect this format develops.
I also really enjoyed the rural setting and what changes a picture painted over thirteen years captures. I loved that the local Estate employs an old-fashioned riverkeeper, while out by the reservoirs, a wind farm is built. I liked the image of urban activists coming out to protest the opening of a new quarry (with their tents and drumming) while the unruffled locals knew to keep their windows closed and their laundry indoors when the blasting starts. I appreciated that an organic green grocer's in the bigger town over makes more profit than a local butcher's; that the biggest worries of the parish council concern verge maintenance and parking issues. And as the book ends and some of the local houses are being bought up as second homes by Londoners, I had to wonder how things might change going forward.
As for the mystery of Rebecca Shaw: there are anniversary commemorations and babies born after the fact who will grow up to ask questions, but as the pages I had left to read began to dwindle, I fretted that I would be left without an answer. Along the way, over the course of the years, secrets are revealed that raise the prospect that one or the other of the locals might have been capable of harming the girl; just as likely that one of the many abandoned mines, peatbogs, or cloughs had swallowed her up. The lingering uncertainty drives the narrative forward while adding dread to the atmosphere (every time a diver entered a reservoir for routine maintenance, I expected him to surface with a skull). That McGregor is playing with the reader by undermining expectations seems guaranteed.
Reservoir 13 wasn't my favourite, so far, on the 2017 Man Booker longlist, but it has a lot of the elements that the prize's jury seems to perennially gravitate towards: experimental format; the encapsulation of a particular time and place; a focus on humanity. I wouldn't be unhappy if it won; I'll seek out prior works by the author either way.
Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:
As Nan Finn said of people who went missing in the woods at twilight, they had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow when there should have been no snow, a rogue blizzard when winter was a month away, led astray by the pale, bewitching light of late November, the lulling light of sunset in the fall.
First Snow, Last Light is the third volume in Wayne Johnston's Newfoundland Trilogy, and having now read all three, I get the feeling that this series wasn't pre-planned as such from the beginning; that Johnston simply decided to revisit an old idea (and his most striking character, Sheilagh Fielding) two more times over the years. Because I've read the first two books in this series, it would be hard for me to say if this one stands alone as a compelling read, but taken as a whole, it's a satisfying, if uneven, trilogy. Note: I read an Advanced Reading Copy, so excerpted quotes may not be in their final forms.
The Vanishing Vatchers. I was left with nothing but the setting of their lives, the stage, the props and costumes, the performance that only I had fallen for and which had moved on to somewhere else. That its run was done, everyone but I believed.
First Snow, Last Light begins with a short second-person introduction: “You” arrive home from school to a locked and unaccountably empty house – your recluse mother has always been there to greet you before – and even after you go get your coach, Father Duggan, from school to come and wait with you, your parents never return. The narrative then begins properly, from the point-of-view of Ned Vatcher, the boy whose devoted parents mysteriously vanished one November afternoon in 1936 when he was fourteen. Told in a straight timeline from 1936 to 1961 (with some of Ned's childhood memories woven in at the beginning and moving a bit beyond at the very end), the perspective jumps from Ned to Sheilagh Fielding (and a couple other characters, including whoever intermittently comments on Ned's sections, calling him “you”), and we watch as Ned grows up an orphan; eventually earning a Track & Field scholarship to Boston College and returning to St. John's to become a millionaire by transplanting the American ideas he had learned while away. The nagging mystery of what happened to Edgar and Megan Vatcher was enough to keep me engaged, but the overall plot – the poor boy gets rich and devotes his life to finding his parents at the cost of his own happiness – felt a little thin. And while I had been looking forward to reading about Fielding again, there were fewer scenes of her verbal jousting to enjoy than the last time around, and then everything I have grown to love about the wry dipsomaniacal giantess is upended by this:
I spent the balance of the war setting down an alternative version of my life, which I called The Custodian of Paradise and which I fancy I might someday publish. Such was the measure of my despair that I devised a fictional existence that was far stranger, far more fantastic than my real one.
Whaaaat? The interesting parts of Fielding's history – the self-exile, the Provider and his delegate, the reason behind the fallout between her parents – is all “fictional”? It just makes her dissolute life seem even more pathetic, and I wish Johnston hadn't reduced her so. I appreciate that we get to see how Fielding's life turns out (even if I can't quite believe the number of marriage proposals she receives over the years), but I didn't like how it turns out. And in the end, I didn't much care for how Ned's storyline pans out either. Still, it's pointless to complain about an author not writing the story I wanted to read.
I turned round and rested again, facing west now, up the Bonavista as the section men said, toward the continent of Newfoundland, the intersection of the main line and the branch, the never-glimpsed wilderness from which the question we had failed to answer had been borne to us, the country that would never be discovered or forgotten, the colony of unrequited dreams that would never be acknowledged as a nation except by those of us who made it one.
Here's my overall takeaway: I think that The Colony of Unrequited Dreams was a work of genius; a five star literary interpretation of Newfoundland's history. The Custodian of Paradise was an interesting reworking of the first book, filling in the perspective of Sheilagh Fielding; probably Johnston's most compelling character. The timeline of First Snow, Last Light begins just before the end of the first two volumes, and through the story of the enterprising Ned Vatcher, references how Newfoundland modernised itself – transforming from British colony to Canadian province – but this book doesn't really add much to the understanding of Newfoundland; it lacks the big picture historical events of the first book and the community-level strictures of the second. Other than to tie up Fielding's story – and she felt pretty peripheral to its plot – I don't know what the overall point of this book was. Even so, I was looking forward to reading this book and am glad I did. I recommend it to other completionists.
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit lonely And you're never coming round
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit tired Of listening to the sound of my tears
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit nervous That the best of all the years have gone by
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit terrified And then I see the look in your eyes
(Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then I fall apart (Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then I fall apart
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit restless And I dream of something wild
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit helpless And I'm lying like a child in your arms
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit angry And I know I've got to get out and cry
(Turn around) Every now and then I get a little bit terrified But then I see the look in your eyes
(Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then I fall apart Turn around, bright eyes Every now and then I fall apart
And I need you now tonight And I need you more than ever And if you only hold me tight We'll be holding on forever And we'll only be making it right 'Cause we'll never be wrong
Together we can take it to the end of the line Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time (all of the time)
I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks
I really need you tonight Forever's gonna start tonight (Forever's gonna start tonight)
Once upon a time I was falling in love But now I'm only falling apart There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart
Once upon a time there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total eclipse of the heart
(Turn around) Every now and then I know you'll never be the boy You always wanted to be
(Turn around) But every now and then I know you'll always be the only boy Who wanted me the way that I am
(Turn around) Every now and then I know there's no one in the universe As magical and wondrous as you
(Turn around) Every now and then I know there's nothing any better There's nothing that I just wouldn't do
(Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then I fall apart (Turn around, bright eyes) Every now and then I fall apart
And I need you now tonight And I need you more than ever And if you only hold me tight We'll be holding on forever And we'll only be making it right 'Cause we'll never be wrong
Together we can take it to the end of the line Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time (all of the time)
I don't know what to do I'm always in the dark Living in a powder keg and giving off sparks
I really need you tonight Forever's gonna start tonight (Forever's gonna start tonight)
Once upon a time I was falling in love But now I'm only falling apart There's nothing I can do A total eclipse of the heart
Once upon a time there was light in my life But now there's only love in the dark Nothing I can say A total eclipse of the heart
A total eclipse of the heart A total eclipse of the heart
So, yeah, this is a totally unoriginal song choice for the day after a solar eclipse - and especially since it was only at 70% from where we live, and it can be argued, didn't affect me much - but sometimes the unoriginal choice feels like the only choice; and especially when I've felt so uninspired lately. I couldn't be bothered to write a Tunesday post for the past two weeks, and I've noticed over the past couple of summers that I'm less interested in picking up my life story in the summers; maybe it's a leftover from my school days; I must resist "homework" outside of the normal school calendar. So, I'm just going to use this week as a summer recap.
I already wrote about Kennedy's graduation from university, but her celebration included the first pool party of the year, and with everyone from her Granny to her Uncle Ken and Aunt Lolo jumping in the water with her, this felt like the beginning of summer to me (who watched from the gazebo, like the dry and cosy spoilsport I am).
Despite it being Canada's 150th, this year's Canada Day celebrations were the same for us as ever: watching the world's largest Canada Day parade make its way down King Street, heading to Riverside Park in the evening for fireworks. Although it rained in between both events, we remained happy and dry; made our usual quick exit from the park and beat the traffic (oh, the things that please me: I want to be a part of things, but with zero inconvenience).
The day after my second cataract surgery, we made our way up to Sauble Beach, as has become tradition. With both girls only able to come for a few days because of work and other commitments, Dave and I headed up first; enjoyed some local craft beer on a patio across from the beach. We would spend several evenings on this patio over the course of the week, enjoying the fact that both girls are now old enough to join in.
This high ropes course was new at Sauble Beach this year, and although Dave, Kennedy, and I thought it looked like way too much work to be fun, Mallory and Sarah were excited to try. They spent an hour or so challenging themselves on what looked to be impossible obstacles, and opted to do the jump at the end instead of walking down the three flights of stairs from the top on their exhausted, quivering legs.
We brought Peaches with us (we only "rescued" her last September, so this was her first opportunity to come along) and it was fun to watch her swim in circles at the end of her leash (even if most of the beach is technically dog-free and she had to spend her days in the cottage; I'm thinking, as an indoors-dog, she preferred it that way). Sarah has been a fixture in our family for most of her life and she said during this photo that every time she's out with us she imagines that other families are looking at us and saying, "Isn't adoption great?" Smart aleck. I had encouraged Mallory back in June to write an essay for a scholarship contest through my work, and I received an email while we were at Sauble saying that she was one of the five nationwide winners this year. It was cool to return to work after a month off (because of the cataract surgeries) to see her essay framed on the staff room table and a notice of congratulations tacked up on the bulletin board. Kennedy turned twenty-two last week, but despite having made her the cherry chip cake that she requests every year, I didn't take a picture of her blowing out her candles - at the time it didn't feel necessary for a twenty-two year old's birthday, but now I regret it; she's special every year. We have been going to London every weekend to ready the inlaws' house for sale (the need for which I have written about), and between that and work and trying to read my stack of books, the summer is winding down fast. Which brings us to yesterday and the eclipse.
Working at the bookstore, I was lucky enough to realise when people were starting to buy up the books and magazines we had in stock that had eclipse glasses in them, and get some for us, too, before they sold out. Also lucky enough to have been home during the day with both girls and experience the whole thing together. We sat out on the deck, looking up at the sun through the viewer every few minutes, and while the day only eventually became slightly dimmer than a usual summer's day, through the viewer we could clearly see the moon shadowing over the curve of the sun. In between our monitoring of the eclipse, Mal selected a playlist for our listening pleasure - and her first song was, indeed, Total Eclipse of the Heart, followed by Bad Moon on the Rise, and the theme song from Little Shop of Horrors (great choices!); eventually just reverting to her Halloween playlist with The Monster Mash and Love Potion #9 (less great choices!) Then Mal read us a bunch of bad eclipse jokes - and I thought the "No, son" joke was so terrible/corny/good and reminded me of the Rick-Grimes-Dad-Joke-Meme that I had to make that image up there to put on my facebook (despite both girls warning me that "that meme is dead". I got my likes anyway.) Mallory also read us info on what the ancients thought was happening during an eclipse, so when our experience was at its projected height, Mal ran inside to grab pots and wooden spoons "in order to chase away the dragon that is eating the sun" like the early Chinese people would do. The neighbours can thank us later. Dave was asking me last night if I remember the eclipse of 1979 - and I do, but not in much detail. I have an overall memory of it being more or less total; that I was eleven and it happened on a school day; that we made those pin hole boxes in class to watch it through. I think one or both of my brothers had brought welding goggles from home to watch it with. But other than in pictures, I didn't remember seeing what it actually looks like when the moon is blocking out the curve of the sun; it didn't make that big of an impression on me. Which is weird, because it's a big, communal, historically devastating event; I found it weird that so many people could have shrugged about the eclipse this year as though it's ordinary and mundane. It's good and proper that it doesn't cause fear or superstition anymore, but it's still a pretty cool phenomenon that we short-lived humans will only see a few times if we're lucky; maybe experience a total eclipse once or twice. I don't know how you shrug that off - which I kind of did when I was a kid. Which leaves me pleased that the girls and I had made a small event out of it yesterday. And that's the summer that was.
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