Summer. I keep wanting to photograph it, but my camera disappeared into teen world, where it’s being used to document gravity-defying skateboard tricks. Surely, the looks told me when I asked for it back, a mere peach cannot compete with anti-gravity.
Maybe not. But they are everywhere, these peaches. And even though I know that one day in a month or so from now they’ll be gone, they feel permanent. That’s what the deep middle of summer feels like.
Depending on what I plug in, I write like Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace, or Douglas Adams. You might want to check it out.
far better to have a silver bee land on your tea pot than the real thing
Happy Bastille Day. Bastille Day is not, actually, why I love France and the French. I love France and the French because of our friends P and M, who I met when I was in my twenties. I spent a lot of time in M’s kitchen, drinking un-English tea (it was fruit scented black tea, and I loved it almost as much as I loved her) out of an old silver teapot that had a bee on its lid. I adored that teapot, the way the lid lifted back on a hinge and the bee seemed to be looking around and approving the whole set up. I spent years trying to find one like it, and I never did. I did find the tea, however, on a trip to Paris. You can buy it in the supermarket, as it turns out.
It was a long time ago, but I can still remember how shocked I was to meet someone my age who owned objects with patina. By the time I was twenty-four, this is what I had left from my childhood: my high school yearbooks, a button from a pink robe my grandmother gave me one year for Christmas, the copy of Wuthering Heights the librarian at Hof Army Base in Bavaria gave me when I was in the fourth grade, and a small tin with a silver lid that was engraved with Rembrandt’s Night Watch, which I found on the window sill of the house we rented in Bavaria when my dad was stationed there.
M had, in addition to the aforementioned tea pot, what seemed like hundreds of family pictures, some in very nice frames. She also had marble obelisks on her coffee table along with big wooden balls, whose only function was to be large and interesting, as far as I could see. She had a little bar cart and nice glasses. She was not afraid to have a large purple couch, which was actually more than a little shabby. The pillows on it were made out of something that looked to me a lot like a rug. I imagine these possessions were the tip of the iceberg, given that most of what she owned was back in Paris. She also had a château and a title, both courtesy of her husband, which was news to me because I hadn’t been aware that titles even existed anymore, not after all the heads were chopped off. So, I loved her, because she was One Hundred Percent Not Me. And she was One Hundred Percent Her French Self.
I also loved the way she looked at things. In her dining room, she hung twenty four botanical prints she’d found in a book at a used book store ($1) and framed with frames from the Big Longs Drug Store, where you could buy anything. Those botanical prints looked as good as everything else in her house.
The funny thing is that they loved us too. In their eyes, we had nothing weighing us down. We were “mellow,” we did not worry, we were spontaneous, we weren’t in a hurry. They liked the way we dressed, particularly my husband in his uniform of levi 501s and t-shirts.
But mostly, we loved each other because we had so much in common. M and I were readers. Serious ones. She, of course, had twice as many books available to her for reading purposes than I did because she could read in both English and French. We were also talkers. We liked to discuss why the French see things the way they do and the Americans, well, the Americans don’t see them that way. We talked about taxes, and child rearing and medicine. We talked about our husbands, who were obviously not ever going to talk about us to each other, being so similar themselves. P and my husband were windsurfers, and skiiers and cyclists. Neither of them liked to delve into the emotional. They mostly just liked conquering water, snow, and roads, which they did together for a long time.
Now they live in Belgium, and we see each other sometimes, but not very often. I miss them. I miss seeing myself through their eyes, and I miss that teapot. Happy Bastille Day, P&M.
Here follows a demonstration of what happens when you write a book review after you’ve both finished the book and managed to misplace it, which is what has happened to me in the last 48 hours with David Mitchell’s Thousand Autumns of Jacob Somebody or Other. Also, this is what happens when you write a book review without even once using the internets to verify your facts. (Why am I not using the internets? I don’t know. I thought it would be fun is the closest I could come to an answer.)
But most likely you, dear reader, have been hearing about this book and don’t need me for facts. It’s certainly easy enough to find the book — just google the phrase “thousand autumns” and bob’s your uncle. (I just now realized that I have no uncles left. It is the one year anniversary of my Uncle Martin’s death. My Uncle Marin was a classic: a basque from Susanville. I have his thermos, the heavy duty one he took to the many construction jobs he worked on, and it reminds me that it’s good to have caffeine when you labor. But goodness, how I digress.)
Anyway, back to David Mitchell. First, I’ll say that without question the most tedious (both to write and to read) part of a book review is the plot summary. For years, I’ve been trying to get away with not doing these in the reviews I write on this blog. I know, I hardly ever write reviews. And the ones I do write are so slim on plot details as to be maybe useless. Which is why it is a constant source of amusement to me that publicists send me emails every week or so asking me to review what look to me like very, very good books. Every once in a while I ask for them to send me one, but then I don’t review it because, well, there’s the plot summary hurdle. I can’t get over it. That’s why I’ve been yammering on about my uncle and the people who want to send me free books. I’m procrastinating. (I would like to add, however, that I would review those books, except I’ve never received one I really loved.)
In a few words, David Mitchell’s book is about a red haired Dutch accountant who finds himself in a Dutch trading outpost, a little no man’s land of an outpost, outside of Nagasaki, which the Dutch aren’t allowed to enter. Not much anyway. It is set in the 18th century. Naturally, the red haired Dutch accountant falls in love with a Japanese woman. In a Shogun-like plot development, he woos her, and in a further Shogun-like plot development, this wooing leads him to a greater understanding of Asian culture. Also, things go wrong, as they do in novels. Is that enough plot description? I hope so because it’s all I have the strength for.
Did I like it? I did indeed. I wasn’t so crazy about the bad guy, whose badness credibility is established by (a) his ability to kill people with mysterious hand waving and (b) his leadership of a weird (shinto, it is said) cult, which spirits women away to be brood mares, and worse. Really, I could have gone all summer without weird sexual rituals popping up in the books I read.
Other than that, and the occasional overwrought writing you kind of expect in books about Europeans going to Japan in the 18th century and falling in love with women who’re midwives, and scarred but still beautiful, it’s a totally captivating book. I will not go on and on about how Mitchell is an up and coming literary writer, because I did not read Cloud Atlas (not liking to have to handle six different narrative voices at once) and because I don’t think it’s necessary. Worse than plot summary is too much yammering on about the author’s (a) age, (b) book jacket picture, and (c) fights with Oprah, which, I’m fairly certain, Mitchell has never had, being English, and looking quite young and sort of sweet in his book jacket picture.
It’s a good summer book.
And that’s what a review that skimps on plot summary and is written without internet assistance looks like.
we waited 20 minutes -- and this wasn't actually our bus. I was too excited when our bus arrived to take its picture.
I’ve spent roughly 620 hours of my life waiting for buses, and at least 375 of those hours involved waiting for the number 51 bus in Berkeley, CA. I took that bus all through grad school and law school at Cal — the stop is right across the street from a fraternity, which provided either an entertaining way to while away time while waiting for the 51, or excrutiating, depending on the day of the week, the level of drunkenness at the frat, and how late the bus was running that particular day. I’ll let you guess how many hours fell into each category.
One clue: I’ve never longed for the time when I could go back to using the bus for all my transportation needs.
It turns out I’ve become less impatient, and apparently I’ve seen so much public drunkenness that I don’t even notice it anymore. As a result, when we were in Seattle, and had all the time in the world, waiting for the bus that took us from downtown Seattle to the Fauntleroy ferry terminal was not a problem. In fact, because it was the day of the gay pride parade, it was pretty entertaining. Although really, I think the S&M contingent could have toned it down some. The guy with the multi-color painted penis? Needed to stay home. Ditto the ladies with the targets painted on their breasts. After William and I walked away from that, and I said I didn’t think I’d be able to scrub those images out of my head, he advised me to think about ballerinas. Apparently, it works every time.
We waited a long time for that bus. And even though I’ve become mellower about waiting, I still love that moment when the bus comes into view.
