BlogLily

Good heavens, I’ve just learned that the people at WordPress expect us all to choose avatars, or else they’re going to start putting a big fat question mark next to our names every time we leave a comment. I don’t know about you, but of the many things I am not, a question mark is at the top of my list. I feel I’m more of an exclamation mark, actually, or a lovely curvy comma. But I can’t digress into a discussion of which piece of punctuation best suits me, I’ve got bigger problems.

At first, I thought an avatar was a musical instrument played by an ex-Beatle, but I did some looking last night and learned that they actually were Hindi god-representatives (and yes, I am aware that’s probably terribly, embarrassingly inaccurate, but I’m going with it, not having time to do better — I’ve got to make myself an avatar after all.)

The avatar recently morphed into an internet term for a picture that’s going to go up along with every little comment you leave anywhere in the ether world. It was bad enough having to choose a name, but I have no idea how I’m going to choose a picture that acts like a kind of name.

Last night, I spent three hours — hours I should have been spending doing the work of justice for my job, in which the People of the Great State of California pay me to handle legal appeals — three hours, trying to find a picture that sums me up.

And I failed. How hard can it be? Well, it turns out it’s really, really hard if you, like me, have minimal computer skills, very little graphic sense, and a dislike for color pictures of lilies. That was my idea, a simple one really — I’d find a nice drawing of a lily to be my avatar. Trouble is, all the lilies out there that you can get for free are florid, sentimental, icky lilies, and that’s not me. And even if they were, they have to be the right size, or capable of being cropped to the right size. The closest I came was a very nice black and white botanical drawing of a lily of the valley from some university biology department in Florida, but when I tried to use it, it came out looking like a scary spidery creature. Not the sort of public persona I’d like to project.

And that’s the trouble — you don’t want to have to pick just one image to represent you. Some days, an elegant botanical drawing might be fine. Other days, you might want to go with something a little wilder.

I haven’t resolved this problem. Perhaps it will take several glasses of wine to restore my perspective. It’s not like I’m naming a child, after all. Not exactly. (I’m thinking, to tell you the truth, it’s a lot harder. You don’t have to find a picture to represent your child. And you can choose a name plenty of other people have chosen. In fact, I found it very simple to give my three children the names of English kings. You can’t go wrong there, since they’re common enough names, will never embarrass them, and when they ask you why you chose them you can say, oh, we just figured if it was good enough for a king, it’d be fine for you.)

It’ll have to be a work in progress, this whole avatar business. For now, I’ve gone with a bowl of cherries, which life really isn’t, at least not all the time.

Around here, summer always ends in a blaze of cake baking and party-giving, which is why you haven’t heard a peep out of me for a while. (No, I was not buried under an avalanche of shopping bags or so stunned by my clean office I was rendered paralyzed: I was up to my elbows in cake batter.)

Here’s the cake.  It’s a small round chocolate cake with about eight cupcakes arranged around it. The thing in the middle is a dowel with ribbons tied onto it. My favorite part? The grapefruit fruit slice on the top.  It looks sort of jaunty.

Yesterday, the youngest of the BlogLily boys celebrated his birthday at a family dinner. Earlier, over the weekend, he had a little party with his friends. It all sounds very simple, but honestly, it’s not really possible to celebrate a birthday in the United States of America simply anymore. And that, dear readers, is because of goody bags.

How the tradition of giving gifts to someone other than the celebrant at a child’s birthday party is unclear. My guess is that it came about because of some desire we have to help our children avoid unpleasant experiences, thinking — wrongly as it turns out — that avoiding them is the same as learning to handle them.

The worst and best part of a child’s birthday party, when I was a child, was the moment when the birthday child opened the presents. It was the stuff of which drama is made: would your present be acceptable, would there be something you wanted so badly you could imagine tearing it out of the birthday child’s hands and running away with it? Would the birthday child have a little manners misstep, and how would their mom handle it?

This present opening ritual was generally not very pleasant, despite the potential for an entertaining moment or two. I didn’t go to a lot of children’s birthday parties, not that I remember anyway, but I do remember the time we gave a barely literate girl in my class — the girl who struggled every time she had to read out loud — three books from the book order thing you do at school. I can still remember her look of utter disgust and the way her mother busted me with a mean little laugh, I’ll bet you read those first, she said. Indeed, I had, trying not to bend the pages, not thinking anyone would notice, knowing that it wasn’t the thing to do. It was terribly humiliating.

But I did file away for the future something about how not to treat a child who makes a mistake when a guest in my house. I also learned that it is not a good idea to give someone the very gift you would most like for yourself. Not everyone is like you. It was a vicious way to learn this, and the mother and girl were nasty too. Still, it was an experience that helped shape me as a social person and for the better.

What happens now, at a lot of parties among my children’s school friends, is that the presents are hustled out of the way, into a room out of sight, like they’re shameful. They aren’t heard from again until you get a thank you note. You never see them opened, never find out if anyone else gave a better gift than yours. I’ve done this myself, thinking to avoid any unpleasantness on an important day. The rest of the party goes like this: the children are entertained in some way: bowling, a clown, a craft project, a magician. After a while, a cake comes out, the song is sung and the guests are handed a goody bag, full of candy and little nick-nacks that quite possibly cost as much if not more than the gift the child brought to the party. This is the signal that the party is over.

It occurred to me once that goody bags were like a potlatch — a tradition I learned about when we studied the Indians of the Northwest, during the time I lived in Tacoma, Washington. (By that time, the Indians of the Northwest made a living selling tax free cigarettes from their land in Puyallup, but that is an entirely different story.) Anyway, when a tribe had a potlatch event, they’d load up their canoes with every valuable thing they owned and then they’d row over (paddle over, sorry!) to the neighbor tribe and drop the whole damned load off with their neighbors. And then you know what? The neighbors would have to turn around and give all their stuff away. I remember sitting in the classroom watching the filmstrip about this and wondering what would happen if all the other tribe had to give away were books.

Anyway, the goody bag/birthday present exchange does resemble a potlatch, although it has a different impulse at its core: it’s not so much about a kind of militant generosity (take that: here’s a Mercedes! Well, well…. here’s War and Peace..) but more about something I alluded to in the beginning of this post: goody bags disguise the truth that sometimes other people get the presents. Your turn will come — but you will have to wait for it. Instead, we’re telling children, Yes, that kid got a lot of presents. But you got some too, so it’s okay.

It is very hard to learn that you are not at the center and quite understandable that parents might want to short-circuit coming to terms with that knowledge. Certainly this is a painful truth in our own family of three children, where each boy struggles with the knowledge that there are others who command attention and resources, others who have things to say at dinner and want to use the bathroom or the computer.

But I think that handling this fact of life need not be a stark lesson in self-denial and stiff upper lip. It is also the case that the person who is the center of attention must learn how to make his guests feel welcome and important. And that’s why the things you do at the party matter. One thing I’ve noticed is that the more children who attend, and the more complicated the event or entertainment is, the less fun the party is.

It turns out that the most entertaining parties we’ve had have been the ones we put on in the street in front of our house (we live at the end of the street and no one drives down it). We set up a little carnival, hand out tickets and have prizes for the games. (No goody bags — but then there are the prizes, which are a lot of fun to win, even if all they are is a tootsie roll.)

This year, the youngest brother wanted to have his own carnival, having watched his brothers’ parties for most of his life. Except he didn’t want to have a lot of guests. In fact, he had two. And that made it unlike any other birthday party I’ve ever given or been too. It was just incredibly low key. The carnival was a piece of cake, since we’d made the games years earlier. And the cake, was too because it’s the same one I always make. A few neighbors, the two friends, the BlogLily brothers, my husband and I.

In case you are interested in what the carnival looked like, here it is:

An obstacle course:

A ball toss (our neighbor Pam, for the third year in a row, dressed up as a clown and ran this game, bless her heart):

Toss the football through the hula hoop.

Fishing (a BlogLily older boy crouches down behind the screen and eventually clips something to the clothespin that’s on the fishing pole.)

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And then when the games had all been played (the children had a little bag with enough tickets to play the games a few times each), the BlogLily boy opened his presents — both of them — in front of everyone. The children who gave the presents explained why they liked them so much and the birthday child said thank you quite genuinely, because the whole idea of being given a gift was as fresh and wonderful as it should be. There is nothing sadder than a child who gets present fatigue after the fourth gift and begins to open packages with the resignation of someone opening a past due bill he can’t possibly pay. And then we all ate chocolate cake, played the games for a while longer without prizes, and went home. Until next year, when we have another carnival party.

Here’s evidence. That’s my desk at the far end of the room. I have a chair to sit on now. You’ll notice there’s not a shopping bag in sight. (If you’d like to see how many shopping bags could fit in this room, go here.) The shopping bags are all neatly stowed, inside the largest of the bags, downstairs next to our refrigerator, to be used to take things OUT of our house. You’ll notice a second desk, on the right. That desk is not really under my control, belonging as it does to the other adult in this household. He’s pretty neat though, most of the time.

The most significant gain from this effort? I feel no fear when I walk in this room. I hadn’t really known just how bad it was until the anxiety left the room, along with eight bags of recycling, one bag of things destined for the shredder and a bag of stuff to give away. I’m much happier now, knowing there’s nothing in any of those shopping bags that’s going to start smelling or cause someone to come and bang on our door in the middle of the night making some sort of demand.

Here are some things I learned from this exercise. The list is illustrated, because I found the cord that connects my camera to my computer.

• I own more colored pencils than any single woman in America. Eighty-one to be exact. That’s a lot of colored pencils, especially for someone who doesn’t color anything. What’s the half life of a colored pencil? Twenty years? Please remind me I own a lot of colored pencils the next time I decide to pick up a pack of them.

• One of my sons managed to buy six sharp daggers, disguised as “letter knives” on a school outing for which he was apparently given too much pocket money. The daggers were stuffed into a grocery bag by me, his horrified mother. I have fished them out and secured them in a hiding place so secret no child will find them until he becomes an adult and thinks to look in the box where the Christmas cards and wrappings are kept. (To the left of my desk.) Come to think of it, he won’t find them when he’s an adult either. The only person who ever does the Christmas cards or wraps the gifts is the mother. (And sometimes the father, because he is a Nice Man.)

• I love my pink thermos. And that is one cute child. Enough said.

• I found a lot of things I bought to give people and then forgot about. A bottle bag (brother in law who is a vineyard manager), a package of purple pencils (pre-teen girl), a pair of candles shaped like sandals (friend who loves Hawaii), colored pencils (amazing, I know), Christmas ornaments (who cannot use a particularly charming Christmas ornament?), socks with Christmas patterns on them (ditto — sister in law gift, in particular), and an already wrapped glass bowl my husband bought for a birthday gift and then did not give because it was in his luggage that was lost and not returned until after the birthday party was over (who knows?). I put them all in a basket, and I plan to give them away this time. For real.

• We are in less trouble than I thought in terms of getting ready for the boys to go back to school. I was able to find the lists of required school supplies and then, much to my delight, stock everyone’s backpacks with supplies we already own. You’ll note that colored pencils are listed as “optional” on the supply list. That is because the school knows, just from sizing me up at the single parent event I have so far attended, that I am the sort of woman whose son might very well come to school with eighty-one colored pencils in his backback, enough to supply the sixth grade class with colored pencils basically forever.

• I located each and every one of my sharpie multi-colored pens. And put them in a Moroccan tea glass. This makes me especially happy. I love sharpies, especially the thin kind and the colored kind. They make many marking jobs much easier. Not having them all in one place was the kind of thing that bugged me, and about which I could do absolutely nothing. Until now, that is. And that toast rack I bought in Paris a long time ago? It’s great for holding file folders.

• Another daunting organizational issue that arose was what to do with the cards we give each other and other people give to us. I have never even been tempted to make those into some kind of craft project, thank you very much, so don’t even think about suggesting it. But we do like to look at the cards. The solution? I discovered that I own TWO one-hole punches. It was the work of an instant to punch holes in the cards and then put them on a binder ring, the kind that costs about .25 at your local stationery store. I did not have to buy one because I already own, like, fifteen of them, knowing they would be handy for something, just not realizing what or how much.

• In a piece of book-related news, I discovered a $25 gift certificate to a bookstore in our neighborhood. I also realized I really want to read the new Richard Pevear translation of The Three Musketeers. And so, I got rid of that gift certificate and acquired one thing I really want to read and own. Beyond the one gift certificate (and a coupon entitling the bearer to one slice of pizza), I found no negotiable paper, no jewelry, no love letters. Oh well. I did find a place to put my computer. My desk.

And that’s it, organizing fiends. I’m done here.

Several of the rooms in our small house have, over the last year, become scary places. One such place is the office where I work. Where I worked, I should say, before it became impassable due to my bad habits and poor housekeeping.

I haven’t always been like this. I used to actually work in that office. But in the last year, I’ve developed the slovenly habit of stuffing all the detritus of our life, regardless of its urgency, into a paper shopping bag and shoving it in a closet right before dinner guests arrive. (I know you do this too, which is why I feel like it’s okay to mention it.) The bags in the closet migrate upward, like warm air, and land in my office, untouched. This is how it looks now:

Actually, this is not a completely accurate picture of the conditions in my workplace. In fact, I had to stand on an Amazon box filled with bills and binders full of schoolwork to take this picture. Behind me? A lot more shopping bags.

You can’t tell, but inside those bags are a jumble of bills, notices from the boys’ schools, library books, invitations and thank you notes, baseball cards, a pair of those shoes with wheels on the bottoms. Need I go on? I’m sure you get the picture. Things have gotten a little out of hand.

When I looked at this picture my first thought was that I had no idea I owned so many shopping bags. Or that my lovely black ankle boots were in the middle of the floor. I also saw that someone had removed my chair from my desk (the one at the end of the room), apparently under the impression I’d left the country and wouldn’t be needing it anymore.

A year after this behavior began, I had two epiphanies.

One: it might be nice to have my desk back, and a new window to look out of. I was getting tired of writing my novel at the dining room table, which is sometimes being used to make dioramas of the California missions, or to fight World War Two, the sorts of activities that distract me from my mission of finishing my novel by October 1.

Two: it occurred to me that maybe there was something good in those bags: money, for one. Lingerie I’d bought and forgotten about. Books I might read. A gift certificate. An unopened love letter. A notice that I’d won something.

And so, with my children and husband out of the state this last week, and a lot of extra time on my hands, I’ve been going through bag upon bag of detritus. It’s not as glamorous as having been called suddenly to appear on Court TV and explain why the government’s wiretapping program is unconstitutional. Still, cleaning out those bags has been more compelling than I’d imagined. I haven’t posted in a few days because I’ve been having so much fun going through the bags. Also, I’ve been unable to get out of my office to make it to the computer.

At this point, I can tell you that I’ve arrived at the end of the room. I feel like someone who’s crossed the prairie in a covered wagon. The Pacific Ocean’s in sight. I didn’t have to eat people to get there. All I had to do was rummage through thirty-six shopping bags of detritus.

And so tonight I’ve returned from the end of the room, bearing some news: nothing very bad will happen to you if you shove stuff into a Macy’s bag and forget about it. It turns out that if you age your detritus for a year, it has no power over you anymore. Things that do matter have already escaped from the bags. And things that don’t matter will stay in there, becoming increasingly unimportant. It works this way: If the school event matters, your child will tell you about it. Unread New Yorkers are not interesting a year later. Chances are if there was something really good in one of them, a friend would have emailed you a link to it. Even bills have a way of getting paid. Without really knowing why, over the course of the year of bagging my detritus, I gradually moved my bill paying from paper to computer, where I could pay our debts without having to look at a paper record of them. Looking back now, I see this was because I couldn’t bear to look in those bags and fish around for the bills.

This is good news indeed. But I know you would like to know if there was anything good in those bags. You’ll have to check back tomorrow or the next day. I’ll post a picture. And a list of treasures. And then, back to writing, reading and cooking.

Actually, that was the sound of me putting a lovely book I recently finished (J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country,) in an envelope and sending it to someone in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Some of you might recall that, a month ago, I tried to unload a plethora of stationery items on you. I managed to get Q to take some, because he is a kind man, and I still have a stack of file folders to send to the wonderful Dr. Gonzo. But beyond that, the reaction to this offer was a collective cry of, don’t you dare send me any more blank journals!

But someone has been thinking about this problem of what to do with our acquisitions. And they came up with Book Mooch. ( I found out about it from Diana at Diaphanous.) It’s very easy to use. The basic idea is that you enter the books you want to give away in a database. You get an email when someone wants one. You mail it to them. You get to mooch a book for every one you give away. The wonderful thing though is that you don’t ever have to get any books back if you don’t want to. I see the stack of books I want to find homes for literally disappearing before my eyes. I hope it works. I hope you go over there and look at my list. It’s very small right now, but I plan to add a few every few days.

One answer to the amount of stuff we acquire is not to acquire it. And I do that by visiting the library. But books seem to come to me despite the fact that I have cards to the libraries in two different counties. I love the idea that I can send the books I don’t need to keep to people who have decided they really want them. Jimmy Carter’s autobiography is a great example of this. I liked having it, and looking it over. But it’s big and takes up a lot of space and someone might need to read the entire thing. Maybe they will then be inspired to go and monitor elections somewhere (like Ohio). That’s the way things should work.

It took me moments to set up an account a few days ago. It is obviously free. (I am all over free things.) And then, I plucked ten books off one of the stacks on the floor in my office, entered their ISBNS (you can find the ISBN on the back of the book or on the page that has the copyright information). Beautiful little snapshots of my books appeared on my page of the site. Some of them are books I’ve read and really liked (Henning Mankell’s The Fifth Woman is there). Some of them are very specific books I doubt anyone will ever want to read. (In Other Words: The Science and Psychology of Second-Language Acquisition? Hey, it’s in perfect shape and it is a very interesting look at the many different ways people learn languages.)

I’m running out the door to go on a quick hike and mail A Month in the Country to Grand Rapids. I cannot think of two better things to be doing today.

Here’s a quiz for you: name one contemporary politician who inspired you to read a poem in its entirety.

For me: Ted Kennedy. It’s not a route to poetry I’d taken before (or since), but Kennedy’s invocation of Tennyson’s great dramatic monologue, Ulysses, at what was a clearly a watershed moment in Kennedy’s life, made a huge impression on me when I was twenty years old.

It was Tennyson to whom Kennedy turned in his keynote speech at the 1980 Democratic convention, a speech in which it was clear he would never be president, having failed to gain his party’s nomination. This is what he said:

“And someday, long after this convention, long after the signs come down, and the crowds stop cheering, and the bands stop playing, may it be said of our campaign that we kept the faith. May it be said of our party in 1980 that we found our faith again.

And may it be said of us, both in dark passages and in bright days, in the words of Tennyson that my brothers quoted and loved, and that have special meaning for me now:

I am a part of all that I have met

Tho much is taken, much abides

That which we are, we are –

One equal temper of heroic hearts strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

For me, a few hours ago, this campaign came to an end. For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

I know there are a lot of things you can say about Kennedy, but when I was twenty I didn’t know anything about his many weaknesses. When I heard him speak, I understood that he was bidding farewell to some idea of himself and embarking on a new course, one he both welcomed and feared. And I think I also knew even then that I was listening to one of the last political figures who could comfortably refer to a long-dead poet in a significant speech. That he did so without apology or fanfare, as though this was the proper way to go about explaining himself, is something I have never forgotten. When I was twenty, one of my fears was that I would not be a good enough reader, surrounded as I was by a university full of practiced, confident readers. Kennedy seemed to be saying that one need not feel that way. That poetry belongs in a lot of places, not just in the academy. And from this, I came to see that we can trust our reactions to poetry; that there is no reason why we may not find our own meanings in what we read, without fear that we are not sophisticated enough to read properly.

Tennyson wrote this poem after the death of a loved friend. And it’s possible to hear, in the voice of Ulysses, Tennyson’s own struggle with loss and death. It’s also possible to misread the poem as nothing more than an exhortation to “carry on” in the face of sorrow. But there’s more than that going on. Ulysses is old and his life is nearing its end. His son is carrying on business in Ithaca. That all voyages take you closer to death is something Ulysses understands quite well. And he knows his next journey won’t take him back to Ithaca. He welcomes it anyway, celebrates it even — knowing that this is what it means to be human, hard as that can be to bear. And I think the poem suggests, and certainly it suggested to Kennedy, that although we leave behind ambitions and loved ones, they are still part of who we are.

What I found, after reading this poem, quite slowly, because that’s how you have to read it to really get it, is that the poem moves me still. Twenty years ago, the poem was about something I didn’t quite understand. Now? Well, it makes me want to read the Odyssey again. And it makes me admire Ted Kennedy, a terribly imperfect man, who’s held fast to some things that matter to him, including Tennyson and poetry’s power to console us and teach us how to behave in life’s difficult moments.

Here’s the poem:

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy’d
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vest the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honour’d of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers;
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breath were life. Life piled on life
Were all to little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle-
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro’ soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me-
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads- you and I are old;
Old age had yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1842)

Those are just a few of the unlikely recipes I found today in an old recipe box from Indiana. Other favorites include Lima Beans Au Gratin, Green Soup Plus, and a recipe attributed to “TV Hour Mag” called Carrot Chowder. Carrot Chowder features the unappetizing combination of one pound ground meat (type of meat unspecified), a lot of water, four cups of grated carrots and four cups of tomato juice. You couldn’t have created something more disturbing had you closed your eyes and dumped the first four things you touched in your refrigerator (make that your fridge after you’d just returned from a six week vacation) into a large soup pot filled with water.

I’ve been meaning to rescue some recipes this week from the many wonderful recipe boxes I’ve been ordering from EBay. But these, it seems to me, should never have been exhumed. Nevertheless, the life of a woman who must have been a spectacularly bad cook interests me very much.

I imagine she was cooking in the 1940s through the 1960s, and that she was not a woman who had decided to liberate herself from the kitchen. At least not overtly. Hers, I think, was more of an underground movement. I have a picture of her: she played a lot of bridge (one of the recipes is scrawled on the back of a contract bridge score card). She’d sit at her kitchen table in the afternoon, blinds drawn, husband at work, children at school, a cigarette in the corner of her mouth, a small glass of some clear, lethal liquid at her elbow. She’d flip through the pages of TV Hour Mag, looking for the profile of her favorite soap opera star. And then she’d pause at the recipe for Carrot Chowder and think to herself, what the hell, why not try something new? Her next thought, barely expressed under the fog of bridge, lethal liquid and soap operas? It’ll serve them right for expecting me to cook all the time

The evidence is that hers was a pretty successful underground movement. Take “Green Soup Plus,” a recipe cut out of a newspaper and billed as “an elegant way to treat soup from the pantry shelf.” Its ingredients, beyond one can of condensed green pea soup, something I didn’t even know existed, are sour cream, curry powder and this shocker: flaked cooked crab. Crab on green pea soup? What an unkind thing to do with a lovely bit of crab. My guess is that it wasn’t a lovely bit of crab, but an old leftover bit of crab cocktail brought home from a restaurant she’d wheedled her surly husband into taking her to. On top of the crab, you are directed to throw some flaked coconut. I suppose you could squint at the dish, and imagine being in the Tonga Room, drinking some kind of drink with an umbrella in it, while you poison your family with a brew of green peas and slightly “off” crab.

I’m only going to talk about one more piece of culinary Semtex this woman created for her family: Lima Beans Au Gratin. She might have thought that calling it Au Gratin would tease them into eating it. And maybe they did. But that must have been the last time they ever asked her to cook for them. Why? In addition to one pound of dried LARGE Lima beans (”cooked,” the recipe says, but without any suggestion of how long or how) there are directions for making a soupy milky mix of butter flour milk and evaporated milk. The whole thing is then topped with a lot of diced pimento and paprika. Clearly, the idea was to hide the badly cooked Limas under something that must have looked like milk stew. The scary bits of pimento? Who knows. Maybe her family liked pimento and seeing it on top of something lured them into plunging their spoons into the milky morass and actually eating those LARGE Limas.

I hope she made it out of Indiana alive and unprosecuted. I’m guessing her life in Indiana did not turn out the way she’d imagined when she agreed to marry Mr. Blender Tuna Mousse. (I haven’t talked about blender tuna mousse for a reason. Were I to describe it, you would dream of it and that wouldn’t be nice.) I’m hoping she ended up in Miami, the place I know she truly wanted to live. In Florida, her hair would always be the color of the sun, her glass always full, the umbrella perched in her drink always open, her television tuned to a lovely soap opera, her feet pedicured and on top of a flowered ottoman, a nice man scheduled to show up every evening at 7:00 with a bouquet of roses and a promise to always, always, always, take her out to dinner. If he knew what was good for him, that is.

That, anyway, is what I considered telling my children, before they left this morning for a week with their cousins in New England. Unfortunately (or fortunately) this news would not have had much impact on them. They already believe toothpaste can kill them. That’s why they don’t like to spend much time brushing their teeth.They feel the same way about all other personal grooming products. They understood, long before United Airlines, that shampoo, conditioner and soap, liquid or otherwise, are the instruments of evil. I had to do exactly nothing when I checked their carry-on luggage for forbidden items. None of those things had even been packed. Now, if there was some plot to blow up airlines using action figures, we’d be in a world of hurt.

I thought it would be hard to tell them about the latest plot to blow up airlines using liquid concoctions. But the truth is, when I did give them an executive summary of this news (omitting the stuff about toothpaste and shampoo, lest it lead to further intransigence on the subject of personal grooming), they laughed. Even after they read the story in the New York Times, they still thought it was pretty funny. Perhaps it was because this plot is like something you’d see in a cartoon, where the bad guy is so patently ridiculous that even a French adventure hero like Tintin could deal with him with just a look and a “zoot.” It’s hard to imagine how somebody could blow up a plane with a tube of Crest.

Of course I didn’t like seeing them run up the corded-off ramp toward the security checkpoint. I don’t like it that people want to blow each other up. I don’t like having to tell my children this. But children have innate good sense about this. They already know that people will try to hurt each other. And at least they are able to laugh at adult efforts to do so, even when, under it all, there is something deadly serious going on.

Anyway, to take the pall off the page from all this, I’d like to record here the rules the children came up with for behavior on this trip. Let me say that there are six children on this trip: my three and three of their cousins. They range in age from 13 to 6. There are four boys and two girls. The only adult who will be with them is my husband. He was an Eagle Scout. He loves this kind of thing. The other adults love him and make plans to stay in swanky hotels while their children are gone.

The children would never voluntarily have come up with these rules had I not asked them to talk about the one thing they cared the most about in how people treated them. They would have much preferred to trade burps and talk about why the cheese on their pizza could stretch so far. I want it out there now: I am a bossy, rule making person. I can’t help it. In about three years, my children will be making fun of this quality. But they’ll never forget how important it is to take turns when you talk, which is rule number 1 at our dinner table. (Nobody does it…. not yet. I have hope.)

So, here they are:

• Cousin number 1 (boy, eleven years old): I like hugs.
• Cousin number 2 (boy, six years old): No excluding.
• Cousin numbers 3 and 4 (girls 12 and 13): Kisses. (lots of giggles)
• Cousin number 4 (girl, 12) Inside voices (cousin no. 2 having just shouted in her ear about the kissing thing)
• Cousin number 5 (boy, eleven years old): No hitting.
• Cousin number 6: Positive. Say nice things.
• Aunt, who is not going: Be helpful to your uncle.

I know it’s been said before. Children should rule the world (with a little adult help making the lunches). Yes, there would be a lot of messy hair and cavities, the occasional Lord of the Flies moment and I do not even want to think about how they’d handle commuting. Even with all that, were they to have more say in how things go, we’d all be having a lot more fun and we’d most likely be much safer than we are today in the nasty, divided, violent world we’ve all gone to so much trouble to make for them.

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned my devotion to Yeats.  It’s because of poems like The Lake Isle of Innisfree, an early poem, written in the 1890s.  It rhymes and has a regular meter and is the sort of thing you might murmur to yourself when you wake up and want nothing more than to spend the day drinking tea and thinking about what’s in “the deep heart’s core.” Here it is, number 4 of 100 favorite poems (not in any particular order): 

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about endings. It’s not just because, about a month ago, a doctor told me I have stage 3 cancer, and I hung up the phone thinking, that’s it then, better burn those diaries from college. (In fact, I don’t have stage 3 cancer — she was an idiot. I’m going to be fine.) My thoughts about endings probably have more to do with the fact that I’m actually nearing the finish of my first novel, the one I’ve been writing for, oh, maybe five years. When the conversation among my friends turns to it, I feel the way I do when I look in the fridge and see something that’s been in there way, way too long. I want to slam the door and point out the window and say, my goodness look at that sunset.

Endings are hard. This morning, my husband had to fire someone. (A bad someone, but still….) He hasn’t been able to sleep for days. Even simple social goodbyes can be difficult for some. I have a friend who’s an otherwise intelligent (brilliant, in fact) person. And yet, this friend always thinks of one more thing to talk about before we’re about to go, a date to make, or a gift to give, or a worry to display. You stand there, hand on the doorknob, unable to close the deal on goodbye, wondering why your friend does this.

But it’s actually quite common. And it begins early. Children have a very difficult time with goodbyes the first few times they have to say them to their parents. When one of my boys started preschool, he cried every day for a week when I left. I had no idea, really, what an act of courage it was for him to bid me goodbye. I knew I was going to be back in a few hours and that these people were a lot more fun than I am. He, on the other hand, knew I was never coming back. What did he know? To him, it was just as likely that today was the day he’d discover he’d been born into a culture where parents leave their beloved children at daycare and then never come back, sort of like the way the Spartans left their children naked on cold hillsides after birth to to make sure only the hardy ones became Spartans. The others? Well, they later became the inventors of gortex.

For children, as for adults, sometimes the fear of goodbye can be cured simply through the repetition of happy returnings, of regular lunch dates, of having your mother come and pick you up just when she says she will. The truth, though, is closer to my son’s real fear. It’s maybe what my friend who can’t say goodbye already knows too well: at some point there are terminal goodbyes. And those are very, very hard.

Which brings me to my novel, the one that’s almost done and then I can stop cringing about it. It’s a mystery. I love writing it. I like very much having a structure already there and then populating it with my own creations. And I do know pretty much how it ends. You have to. One of the pleasures of writing and reading genre fiction is that you know — at least very broadly — how it will end.

In a way, genre fiction mimics life in the utter predictability of its endings. The end of every life is death. The endings in genre fiction are similarly unvarying: the shy girl from Nebraska will always marry the dark sexy guy from Manhattan, the town will always be cleared of the guys who steal cattle and the mysterious stranger will move on, the good detective will make some mistakes along the way, but in the end he will always figure out what happens.But in mimicking one of the few things that are certain in life, genre fiction also offers us a consolation of sorts. Perhaps the frightening thing about death is not so much that we die, but that we don’t know when or how. We don’t know if the last page of our lives will be a chapter into the story, or in the middle of the love scene, or just before we find out who did it. Genre fiction (and to a certain degree, all realistic fiction) tells us this: Yes, there will be an ending. There will always be that. But it will be a predictable ending, and if you choose to, you will be allowed to go the entire pleasurable ride. And you will be entertained, and surprised along the way. No one will betray you with something you didn’t expect. The end will always make sense.

That life is not like this is something that need not concern us today. Today, I’m on the trail and can see the end of my mystery in sight. It’s terribly satisfying to be here. Even more thrilling, though, is knowing that when I finish this one, I’ll be able to start another. And another. Until my own end which, I’m happy to report, is not yet in sight.

You could say our TV was murdered by Barney, the big purple dinosaur with the unnervingly cheery voice. The one children seem to like in inverse proportion to how disturbing their parents find him.

This is what happened, Dear Reader. One day, about five years ago, a Barney video (the fat chunky kind — this was before DVDs) got stuck in the video slot of our small, crappy television. It seemed like a message from PBS (the public broadcasting system, for those who don’t live in the United States): if you want your three boys to become readers, let the television stay dead. Why PBS would want to say that, I have no idea. Maybe they’d been forced to watch too many episodes of Barney.

And so, we threw away the TV (we did pry the Barney tape out, in case we changed our minds). Mayhem did not ensue. This is what happened, in case you’re interested:

• Our boys were too young (6, 6 and 1) to effectively fight back. I’m not sure we could do this now when they are 11, 11, and almost 7. They’re starting to band together on issues. Local 1 of the Union of BlogLily Children is on the horizon. Their first demand will most likely have to do with media access.
• It wasn’t that a calm settled over our house. The words “calm” and “our house” cannot, in fact, be used in the same sentence, except maybe at 2:00 in the morning. But, in the absence of access to Dragon Tales and Arthur and video viewing, they read Magic Treehouse books, books they loved and which gave them a feeling of mastery as readers.
• They did complain. As they got older, and they realized this was a sort of weird thing we’d done, they complained a lot. We ignored them. The parent, harsh as it might sound, is the one with the bank account. Unless they were going to secretly go out and get a job, nobody was going to buy a television.
• Phase Two of the media wars: They saw that gameboys and other things of that ilk might be a good television replacement. Alas, Dear Reader, I hope you don’t think less of me to learn that I told them gameboys suck the life out of your brain and they weren’t coming into our house. Ever. It helped that their best friend wasn’t allowed them either. The result? A lot of whining and a lot of reading.
• Phase Three of the media wars. I love computers. Everyone in my family loves computers. (I’m betting their heads are nodding right now and they’re thinking, yes it’s true but Lily is so LAME with her computer. All she ever does is write. And you’d think when she figured out how to upload pictures that she was the first person on the face of the earth to use a digital camera. But I digress.) So yes, I let them play computer games. Computer games and our failure to control them, are actually a good illustration of why we had to get rid of the television in the first place. We are terrible at setting limits. At first, they played educational games. Their brains were getting sharper. They were solving puzzles with Fripples, hanging out with Liberty’s Kids, occasionally reaching the Pacific Ocean on the Oregon Trail. They were spending a lot of time with someone named Carmen Miranda. (Yikes. A sharp-eyed BlogLily boy has just pointed out that her name is Carmen Sandiego and that I should know that because I bought them that game. Sorry.)
• Can you hear that hissing in the Garden of Eden? It’s . . . the sound of a sports game spinning around on the dvd drive. In a millisecond, sports games morphed into war reenactment games, games where you can fight full on battles for world domination. Again and again. They’ve fought every known conflict (and quite a few conflicts that haven’t even occurred) in our little breakfast nook. Multiple times. It gets really loud in there. I let it go, because after all, they are the weirdos without a television. (This is what they tell me anyway. I don’t think they’re weird at all. They’re handsome, smart, athletic, violent little boys. What’s not to like about that?)
• My favorite ploy for re-instituting television? One of my sons snapped at me, after the six millionth discussion about the lack of television, “You’re just doing this because all your friends think it’s so cool.” It was a brilliant moment of psychological insight. The trouble, though, is that my friends don’t actually think this is cool. They think this is crazy. And they know we do it in part because we find it difficult to set limits. If we were more like our friends, they who can set limits, we’d be watching Jon Stewart at night on a really large television while our children are asleep.
• We do watch movies. We watch them on a laptop, our family crowded around the little screen like ancient peoples huddled around a fire on a cold night. Every once in a while somebody yells at someone else to tilt the screen so they can see what’s going on.

So, that’s where we are five years in. Our six year old is just on the horizon of being a reader. He loves movies. He doesn’t care a lot about episodic television. The older boys are resigned to their fate. They know this is a family tradition. (My own parents didn’t really like television and periodically we didn’t have one. It wasn’t until the 6th grade that a television moved into our house for good. I watched a lot of Star Trek and I Dream of Genie. I loved our TV.)

One thing. Lately, we’ve been thinking about getting a huge big screen television and a king sized bed. We’d like to watch movies in a nicer venue. No cable though. Not until Local 1, BlogLily Children, figures out how to get the cable guy here on the sly.

Here’s the great question Kate asked the other day: why is it that more women than men read novels? One way you can tell it’s a great question is because it’s already spurred an interesting discussion in Litlove’s Reading Room about whether men and women read differently.  (And, just this morning, a wonderful essay by litlove on gender difference.)

My first move? To ask the four men I live with what they like to read. I can’t take a survey. I have to rely on anecdotal information. But that’s okay. It’s a blog, for heaven’s sake.

The BlogLily boys like to read stories and to have stories read to them. They love the Narnia books, Children of the Lamp, Harry Potter, the Moffats, the Fudge stories, and Greek myths. They really like comic books.

And they don’t care that much about whether the main characters are girls or boys. In fact, they don’t really like the kind of books where the characters are only girls or only boys. One boy said he likes his fiction “co-ed” – because it’s more interesting. Another boys pointed out that as long as a book is funny, he doesn’t care who the main character is. The other boy just likes it when there are pictures.

What do I take away from this? I’m inclined to believe that all children love stories – humans are just programmed that way. At this point, though, the question becomes one about whether children of both genders have equal access to the skills you need to read independently. My guess is that there are big swaths of boys, particularly boys in poorer families, who don’t become readers because of the problems they experience being taught how to read in school. And so, right there, some boy readers drop out. And then, I think there’s another big drop off because reading for pleasure isn’t seen as manly in American culture. So, when boys become teenagers, and being manly matters, this is something they might put aside. Some boys will not care about this particular definition of being manly — they just keep right on reading.

And then, say, you get to adulthood, a man who’s maybe been discouraged from reading fiction but still has that same desire to hear a story he’s always had. So what does he do? Here’s my guess: I think he reads stories, but he doesn’t call what he reads a “novel.”

Many men would call the books they read adventure stories, or mysteries, or thrillers, or biographies about people involved in adventures or mysteries or thrilling events. But one thing all these books have in common is that they tell wonderful stories and they fill our need to have someone tell us a tale.

My husband is my evidence for this. He’s an engineer. He’s not a person you’d think reads novels. But he does. (Unlike many other men, though, he knows when he’s reading a novel.) The first writer he remembers reading as a young adult was Alistair MacLean – he of Where Eagles Dare and The Eiger Sanction — adventure stories. He likes stories set in inhospitable places, it turns out. He reads them in the form of biographies, and non-fiction (books like Nansen’s Farthest North and that wonderful book about Lewis and Clark called Undaunted Courage). But he also reads fiction – he loves Patrick O’Brien, not just for the stories of adventure, but for stories of relationships. In none of this reading could he be said to be searching for “ideas” – he reads for what I think is a more common pleasure, the pleasure of a story well told, a story that takes you somewhere you don’t live. And I think many men do that, by seeking out genre fiction, to avoid the stigma of the “novel” and yet to have the pleasure of a story.

The thing I feel badly about, though, is that some boys lose this lovely connection to stories during childhood. These boys get some version of it when they play video games, but something deeper and richer is denied them. In the end, I hope smart people are putting energy into that problem, rather than into telling us that men don’t read novels because novels don’t have anything to say to them.

All around the web, industrious people are making lists of the 100 best poems of all time. Can you imagine? I couldn’t do one hundred of anything, except maybe peanut M&Ms on a very bad day. But I like thinking about poetry, so I thought I’d try ten at a time, starting with Chaucer and, proceeding in groups of ten until I ended with Seamus Heaney. Sadly, I managed to write down three poems and why I love them before I had to quit and reach for the M&Ms. At this rate, it’ll take me until the dawn of the next millenium to get to Wordsworth. Which is fine. I’ve got a stash of M&Ms and all the time and poetry books in the world.

The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer seems like the best place to start. When I was in college, every English major had to take a really hard class called English 125. One reason it was thought to be difficult is because you were required to memorize the first eighteen lines of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. People didn’t like memorizing Middle English. And so this requirement regularly drove English majors into Economics. Coming from my small, crappy public high school, I was so scared of it I waited until I was a junior to sign up for it.

Funny thing is, it wasn’t that difficult. All you had to do was go to the language lab. Once there, the recorded voice of a woman who sounded exactly like Ingrid Berman murmured the lines into my headphones, over and over, for an hour or two until I got it just right. I still remember walking out of the language lab into the twilight, the bells from the churches on the little New England green sounding the hour. There were a lot of cobblestoned paths, and I picked my way along, reciting to myself, feeling vaguely foreign and very far away from Tacoma, Washington. Every once in a while, I’d run across somebody else, doing exactly the same thing. You didn’t say anything, you just nodded at one other, fellow pilgrims, setting out on a wonderful journey.

Figuring out what the prologue meant, line by line, phrase by phrase, sometimes word by word, was a heartening exercise in slow, deep reading. By the time I had memorized the first piece of it and looked it all over closely, I knew it down to my bones. In the prologue, Chaucer sets a wonderful scene: It’s April. Spring is arriving — the sweet showers have come and there’s new life springing up everywhere. People are beginning to feel restless. When that happens, they go on pilgrimages, particularly to Canterbury, which apparently was a good place to go on a pilgrimage. When you’re through with the prologue, you’re ready for the pilgrims to take a long rest at an inn to introduce themselves, which is what they seem to spend the rest of the Canterbury Tales doing.

If you’d like to read the prologue, in Middle English, it’s here.

Ariel’s Song from The Tempest. It’s silly to think you could make just one choice from all of Shakespeare, and that from a play, but Ariel’s song, from the Tempest, is quite wonderful. In many of the comedies, you see people going into the forest, or being shipwrecked, or putting on a disguise or even some combination of these things. What matters is that they lose themselves somehow. And then, by the end of the play, they emerge, transformed. Ariel’s Song is about that, in a way. In her hands, of course, the sea change makes a sort of precious fossil out of a man. But it gestures toward the living transformations that are happening on the island as she sings. You could memorize this song, and walk around, singing it, feeling very sprite-like:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

It’s this: the sea change/Into something rich and strange, that I love about Shakespeare.

The Relic. Donne is incredibly sexy. I was shocked when I found that out. I’d never expected poetry by someone dead to be sexy. When I was 18, I had a huge, fateful, hopeless thing for a guy who happened to like Donne. This poem reminds me of how I felt about him when I was 18. Actually, to tell the truth, it reminds me of how I wished he would feel about ME when we were 18.  The amount of desire that’s encapsulated in this poem is astonishing.  And although Donne suggests this love was never consummated physically, it’s the denial and holding back that’s truly erotic.  I love the “bracelet of bright hair about the bone” and how completely Donne loved this woman, this miracle.

The Relic
WHEN my grave is broke up again
Some second guest to entertain,
—For graves have learn’d that woman-head,
To be to more than one a bed—
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies,
Who thought that this device might be some way
To make their souls at the last busy day
Meet at this grave, and make a little stay?

If this fall in a time, or land,
Where mass-devotion doth command,
Then he that digs us up will bring
Us to the bishop or the king,
To make us relics ; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby ;
All women shall adore us, and some men.
And, since at such time miracles are sought,
I would have that age by this paper taught
What miracles we harmless lovers wrought.

First we loved well and faithfully,
Yet knew not what we loved, nor why ;
Difference of sex we never knew,
No more than guardian angels do ;
Coming and going we
Perchance might kiss, but not between those meals ;
Our hands ne’er touch’d the seals,
Which nature, injured by late law, sets free.
These miracles we did ; but now alas !
All measure, and all language, I should pass,
Should I tell what a miracle she was.

There you have it: three wonderful poems. 97 to go.

No, this is not a post about a movement to free the oppressed Anemones; it’s an ode to Dover Books, the source of these anemones. And about a lagniappe of sorts.

To your right is a nice William Morris anemone pattern. It comes from Dover Books. It was free.

I like a lot of things about Dover Books. That they sell things that are reasonably priced and fun and low tech. And that their embrace of the internet has just led them to do more reasonable and fun things.

I’ve bought things from Dover Books before. The other day I was thinking about how nice it would be to have some clipart that might be used by children who would like to advertise (a) the world’s largest yardsale; (b) the best lemonade stand Ever; (c) a low cost dog walking service. (The BlogLily boys are as entrepreneurial as they are weapons crazy.)

And that’s when I discovered that, in addition to a huge catalog of interesting things, Dover will email you every week — for free – a selection of images you can use for projects such as the ones I’ve outlined above. That’s a pretty nice internet lagniappe. When I came across it I thought about how it’s not creepy or bad to offer something free like that: it’s a a terrific way to thank people for being customers and potential customers. The Bloglily boys are going to have to think about yardsale, and lemonade stand and dog walking lagniappes. They’re something that makes doing business with people a tiny bit nicer.

Oh, and one other thing. Dover Books has a huge series of paper doll books. Do you remember paper dolls? I loved them. I doubt there are many children who play with them anymore. But Dover keeps carrying them: a lot of them. Brides around the world, Fairies from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Napoleon and Josephine! Someday, a resurgence of interest in paper dolls will sweep the world and Dover will be there ready, with those paper dolls, for a reasonable price for a new generation of paper doll appreciators.

The Madeleine Project is the name for my effort to go back and see if that which gave pleasure in the past still resonates when it’s revisited. The only rule is that it can’t be expensive to relive the past. For me that means you have to be able to check the past out from the library, rent the DVD, or get the ingredients for it at Safeway.

So far, I’ve looked at poetry (Donne’s St. Lucy’s Day). I’ve been meaning to re-experience my favorite green pasta with fake Parmesan, but haven’t gotten around to it.

Trollope is the next installment in the Madeleine series. About twenty years ago, while I was studying for the California bar exam, I spent the summer reading Trollope. I loved Barchester Towers, in part because it was so good at skewering an institution that takes itself so seriously. In the case of Barchester Towers, that institution is organized religion. Twenty years ago, I was worried about entering an institution sort of like the church, an institution that seemed to take itself awfully seriously, the law. In fact, the law and the church were two professions often chosen by sons who weren’t first in line for the family title. As the fourth child, and with no family title for anybody, it seemed like a good choice. Back then, I suspected I wasn’t going to be very good at my new job, the one I was due to start after the bar exam. I hadn’t liked law school. There weren’t enough stories. The interesting ones were buried in the case books and nobody ever wanted to really talk about them.

What Trollope did was demonstrate that people in power, the people I was a little afraid of, can be utterly ridiculous. I went on to read the Palliser novels, a series that took on politics. And then individual great novels like Can You Forgive Her? and the Eustace Diamonds. The last two are well worth reading again. I’ve never forgotten that thing about people in power often behaving in utterly ridiculous ways. The Palliser novels were a bit of a slog. Other people like them very much, so you might want to check them out too.

In case you’re curious, here are the things I know about Trollope. His mother made much needed money by writing. She was pretty good and pretty popular. Trollope didn’t have a patron, unless you count the postal service, which is where he worked, as an administrator for a good part of his life. Money was a worry for him. He is credited with inventing the post box, that wonderful British icon.

He is also one of the great 19th century novelists and Barchester Towers is probably his most well known novel. It’s the story of a lovely, leafy town in England and the shenanigans that happen among the clerical set when a new bishop and his odious wife and assistant come to town. The novel is full of men and women whose business it is to bring the Church of England to the world. (I say women because, although women obviously weren’t preaching from pulpits, one of the novel’s greatest characters, Mrs. Proudie, does her utmost to run things from behind the scenes.)

There are wonderful things here, very funny looks at how foolishly people behave. For that alone, this novel should be read more than once. It will cure you of pomposity and stubborness — at least while you’re reading it. Afterwards, well, that’s up to you.

The thing I kept noticing this time around, though, is something I don’t remember from reading it before. It’s the narrative voice. It’s a third person narrative, but the narrator (who is never named and not a character) has a personality. He’s a chatty guy. And every once in a while, he breaks in and tells you what’s really going on. It’s a little like the moment in film when a character turns and addresses the camera, except in this case the narrator isn’t a character. That moment, by the way, has seldom worked for me (too self-conscious, too hip, too meta). But this narrator really does. And he proves that Trollope had a light hand with the meta-stuff. (I’m just guessing, and I hope you Dear Reader will correct me if I’m wrong, but a meta-something is just a comment on the way that something works. A meta-novel draws attention to itself as a novel, for example.)

Here’s an example. One of the subplots in the novel concerns a woman named Eleanor Bold. She is that most wonderful of characters in English fiction: the rich, beautiful widow. Naturally, a lot of people are interested in whom she’ll marry next. (There’s no question she’ll marry again. The funny thing is that she’s the only one who’s utterly unaware of the speculation around what she’ll do. She’s too busy spoiling her young son to see much of this.) The worst thing that could happen, in the eyes of many (including her father, sister and brother in law) is that she’ll marry the horrible greasy curate, Snope, and bring the odious Mrs. Proudie into their circle and basically ruin their lives. And then there’s Bertie Stanhope, a ne’er do well fortune hunter who’s also trying to worm his way into her affections. Nobody really cares that these two men would be bad for Eleanor, they just don’t want her to chose someone they don’t like. I admire Trollope for recognizing how deeply self-involved we all are. And although he laughs about it, he sees this as a universal weakness rather than an individual character flaw — and that’s because he’s a generous novelist.

So how does he handle the suspense about Eleanor’s future? He tells you not to worry about it:

“But let the gentle-hearted reader be under no apprehension whatsoever. It is not destined that Eleanor shall marry Mr. Slope or Bertie Stanhope.”

He goes on to explain that this kind of suspense isn’t to his taste as a novelist:

“And here, perhaps it may be allowed to the novelist to explain his view on a very important point in the art of telling tales. He ventures to reprobate that system which goes too far to violate all proper confidence between the author and his readers, by maintaining nearly to the end of the third volume a mystery as to the fate of their favourite personage.”

Not for him, these kinds of mysteries. He points out that your friends are likely to tell you what happened anyway, or you can just turn to the last page to find out what happens. And then he says something I just love, which is, essentially, that a good story isn’t held together by keeping a reader in suspense:

“…take the last chapter if you please — learn from its pages all the results of our troubled story, and the story shall have lost none of its interest, if indeed there by any interest in it to lose.

“Our doctrine is, that the author and the reader should move along together in full confidence with each other. Let the personages of the drama undergo ever so complete a comedy of errors among themselves, but let the spectator never mistake the Syracusan for the Ephesian; otherwise he is one of the dupes, and the part of a dupe is never dignified.”

I do so like that idea: A writer’s job is to make the reader feel like she’s been taken into his confidence. And what that means is that the writer will never deceive the reader as he tells his story. At its most basic, that simply means that the writer’s job is to be honest with the reader, to convey as carefully and accurately as he can the truth of the story he is telling. That doesn’t preclude humor or wit or even the occasional surprise — it means that the writer’s essential promise to the reader is that the writer will tell the best story he knows how to tell.

Twenty years later, that’s a wonderful thing to hear. I give Barchester Towers ten madeleines, ten being the highest on the madeleine scale.