Land Sighting

So last night went better. I managed to confine my panicking to the half hour before sleep, which I'm sure Andrew appreciated. Woke up early this morning, half hour before the alarm, which I hate, so rather than try to eke out a few more minutes of unsatisfactory sleep, I figured I'd get up and be productive. Kitchen's clean, litter scooped, and a load of laundry started. And yesterday, I made my first midwife appointment - January 11 - which also made me feel like I'd done something productive. If productivity keeps working like this at driving away nerves, you may arrive to the world's cleanest house. Not likely, but at this point, we are both free to look out at the distant shore and hope that what is there is exactly what we've been looking for.

Holy Crap on a Cracker!

Well, after a couple days of suspecting (first missed day was actually Christmas Day) and mostly keeping it to myself, I came home last night and took a pregnancy test. Which was positive. Which is definitely a good thing. We'd decided a few months ago that having a child was important to us for reasons that are now lost to me in my panic.

Don't take that personally if you read this some day, which you may very well do. (I'm pretty sure that once you get here, I'll always think of you as my best Christmas present ever!) After my mom, your grandma, died just before I turned fourteen, I found a stack of letters in her handwriting. They're on all sorts of different paper, in different inks, some very fully realized, while some trail off mid-sentence and are never resumed. They're all letters to me - to the me that I was when she hadn't met me yet, to the me that I was when she was waiting impatiently for me to move out already, and to the me that I became, the amusing distraction that kept her from finishing letters to the later me.

Other people reading this are probably thinking, "Oh, how sad," and it was, when it happened, but it's been a long time ago now, and I have to say I learned some important lessons from it. I hope to teach some of those to you - that you love people with your whole heart right up to the minute that they're taken from you, that you love them when they aren't always easy to love, and that your ability to withstand pain and sadness is so much greater than you can possibly imagine, but that when you need it, it will be there. But I also learned that life is unpredictable, and some day, as horrified as I am to admit it to myself, we may no longer be in the same place at the same time. (We'll always be together - the people you love and the people that love you are always with you. That's another one of those lessons.)

And I'd want you to know what I was thinking and to be able to look back on how I'd felt about you from the very beginning. I wish I had something better to report at this point than panic, but there you have it. It's not a terrible panic, and surprisingly, it's not a selfish one - I'm not thinking, "Oh, I'll never have a moment's peace again!" or "I'll not finish another book until 2025!" I'm thinking, "What if I screw up someone's life?" and "What if I make terrible mistakes?" Your father - you'll meet him later - is the kind of person who faces realities a bit bluntly. (In his defense, it was 3:10 in the morning when I woke him up in a tearful panic to question my decision-making skills and to inform him that I don't know the first thing about babies.) Anyway, his saying, "Well, you will make terrible mistakes" wasn't as helpful as he intended it to be, but he's the brave one. Or the one oblivious to enough of the world to be brave, says my cynical voice - sometimes looking closely at things only makes them more scary, and it's useful to have someone around with good gut instincts to follow when you start to cave in on yourself. When you meet him, you'll know that - that he's a good person to follow when you don't know what's best. (You can also thank him for not having a pregnancy test in your baby book - he made an "ew" face at the suggestion.)

From the minute I thought about having you, the world became a scary place. Not a scary place in terms of unattended swimming pools and lurking strangers, but scary in an everyday sort of way. I never noticed all the sharp corners and how easy it would be to burn your hand on the pellet stove and all the frightening openings between the railings on the stairs. Scary! There's the bathtub to slip in and the back deck to trip off of and a big bed to fall out of, and I'm going to be solely responsible for making sure none of that happens, which is an awesome responsibility, and if you are reading this years from now and don't see it as such, believe me when I say you're not ready to have children of your own!

But then I think about what a wondrous place the world is. Your grandma was so great at that - your grandpa too, about seeing how fascinating and interesting the world we live in is. To be able to share the mysteries of deciduous trees, to show you how tadpoles become frogs (your father was beside himself when he found out that next week you'll have arm and leg "buds" - he loves tadpoles and is so excited to be growing one himself), to explain hot and cold, to show you snow and flowers and birds, to be a tour guide to the most amazing place that we know about in the whole universe (at least at this point), that's exciting. People have children for different reasons - most of them egotistical, to be honest, but I'm not doing this because I'm excited about having grandchildren, or because I want someone to take care of me when I'm old, or because I just want to prove I can. I'm just excited about showing you where you're going to live and how incredible all of life is. Which is what I'm going to keep telling myself until the 3 a.m. panics subside!

June in Review

First, I finished Admission (Jean Hanff Korelitz), which was so interesting, just for the insights it offered into the logistics of handling thousands of college applications and the competition for spots in Ivy League schools, but there was a deeper philosophical layer that asked questions about what makes us exceptional, how important college really is in determining who we become, our struggle with being ordinary, etc. These deeper existential questions made it all the more disappointing when she headed for a conclusion so contrived that I couldn't have seen it coming. Still, Korelitz has an appealing writing style, and bad endings are a common flaw of first novels, so I'd likely give her another chance.

Alan Bradley's first novel, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, doesn't make any mistakes, so I'm not at all surprised that the publisher opted the entire series based on the first novel. Wiseass precocious kids, as long as you don't actually have to live with them or be the target of their snark, are a delight, and a little girl obsessed with chemistry, tormenting her older sisters, and solving a murder was so much fun. Flavia is one of my favorite characters in a long time.

I think I can knock my "grocery store" fiction out in one paragraph, and not just because they're both by the same author. Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child just released their latest Pendergast installment, Cemetery Dance, and I also listened to Preston's Tyrannosaur Canyonduring my walks. I was a little disappointed with Cemetery Dance, partly because it felt a little rushed and hollow, but mostly because zombies where pivotal to the plot, but played such a small role. Zombies! If you have zombies and voodoo, you have a huge, rich history to mine for a backstory, but for the most part, nada, zip. Tyrannosaur Canyon was much smarter, full of the kind of esoteric knowledge and odd bits of information that I've come to expect from these guys. And it made me want to go walk four miles every day just so I could hear it all unfold!

A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick was my midlist fiction gamble for the month, and I mostly just came away feeling "meh" about the whole thing. It was okay, but just okay, and I didn't care about or like anyone involved. (It is, by the way, an impressive skill to create a work of fiction in which there is not a single likeable character, but in which you are still interested. Ruth Rendell is a master of creating people that I can't stand, but I just want to see what they do to each other with their nastiness!) And, just when I was about to find some aspect of the book to hang onto, Goolrick tossed a huge plot contrivance in that the entire storyline hinged on and lost me. By that point, I just wanted to know how it ended, so I hung in there. Bad endings, first novels remix, but not enough in the writing style for me to make a return trip, I don't think.

Sarah Vowell's The Partly Cloudy Patriot made for a nice listen while we were on the road. They were essays, so if felt a little directionless at time, and not nearly so funny as Assassination Vacation, but she's always entertaining.

Somewhere in there, Andy finished reading Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) to me, and I realized why I was never interested in the rest of the Anne series. She grows up, learns to repress, suppress, sacrifice, etc., and just becomes someone else. She stops being Anne, which makes me just as sad as Matthew dying! We've moved on to Montgomery's The Tangled Web, a much more optimistic tale....

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was just okay. Seth Grahame-Smith takes Jane Austen's classic, turns the Bennet girls into zombie hunters, and adds scenes of zombie mayhem. Entertaining at first, even made me giggle occasionally, but it probably speaks to the enduring nature of the original that about one hundred pages in, I was more interested in sorting out the original storyline and digging out Austen's work than in Grahame-Smith's added absurdities. The central plot remains true and solid, though, so if this introduces more people to a classic, then it might actually be worth it.

I also made it through Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip in June. Strange and interesting contribution, although I don't think I found it as morbid or depressing as some people seem to. As a historian, I think I saw it more as a reality check, a reminder that life has never been neat, clean, orderly and happy for everyone. We tend to view Victorians as restrained, emotionally tidy people, and Lesy's collection of newspaper accounts from Wisconsin in the late 1900s makes it clear that suicide and marital discord and death and misfortune and insanity were just as rampant in society then as they've ever been. I was intrigued by the woman who never caused any other trouble, but had numerous arrests for smashing shop windows. She might go on my list of people I'd like to travel back in time to visit with....

Finally, I read Emily Chenoweth's beautiful book, Hello Goodbye, about a family struggling to come to terms with death. This was such an honest, gentle story about someone disappearing into illness, and even then, Chenoweth found a way to leave the reader not with the impression of death and diminishment, but with a life-affirming sense of love and family. My fourth "first novel" of the month, and probably the best.

Biographies

I've been doing research on Maxfield Parrish at the moment, and the whole process of compiling even the shortest of biographies is astounding. First of all, inaccuracies are rampant - not just for Parrish, but for everyone profiled. Was in '85 or '86? Were the problems health or financial? So many small details, crucial to the person living the life, just get jumbled up in a pile, mislabeled, misattributed, misinterpreted.

Of course, it's either hubris or ignorance that would lead anyone to believe the complexities of someone's life could be translated into a biography of any length, but especially a short artist's biography. And when looking back with no assistance to interpret a canceled meeting or a failed marriage, we draw the most ridiculous of assumptions from the smallest of inferences. It reminds me of high school, sitting around with girlfriends and trying to extract every possible ounce of meaning from something as mundane as "I'll call you later." Was he looking at you when he said it? Did he say "I'll call you later" or "I'll call you later tonight"? Again, hubris or ignorance to believe that so much could be mined from so little.

And, of course, we oversimplify, even as we over-complicate. So often, when we make plans, the end result is attributable to a dozen different factors - we're tired, we've had a cold, there's laundry that needs to be done, we don't like the people inviting us as much as we might, we've had a frustrating week at work, we don't have the extra funds for dinner out, etc. But historically, when we interpret people's lives, we just seem to give them only one motive. So few decisions boil down to just one pure reason, and it's this simplification that allows people like Jefferson and Lincoln to be depressive and selfish in the hands of one person while the same set of events with a different treatment makes them introspective and caring in the hands of another.

But in the end, my frustration with biographies is that they are frustratingly limited, perhaps inherently limited, in insight. Small details are left hanging everywhere! If you're going to make me believe that you can tie up someone's entire life in a biography, you have to chase down every loose end. Parrish had a long-term relationship with a woman, moving out of the main house, where his wife and children remained, to live with an "assistant" in his studio. After 50 years together, after the death of his wife, whom he never divorced, his mistress, now in her early 70s, left him to marry another man. A basic Google search for Parrish will reveal these details, but not a word about the late-date breakup. How can anyone not need to know what brought this about?

Perhaps that's the point, that the questions that determine our lives aren't even ones we recognize at the time or even see coming. In the moment, it's all so obvious that explanation is unnecessary, and to recreate a life in retrospect must require chaos theory. After all, we can barely know the people in front of us.

Weddings

I cry like a sap at weddings. Maybe it's because weddings are at the juncture of my inner cynic and my inner romantic, and the whole thing just wrenches me at that connecting point. So much of what is said at weddings is meaningless - not, of course, on the part of the couple, but in the larger sense. All those phrases like "till death do we part" and "let no man put asunder" just don't mean anything, even if we want them to. The small cynical voice in my head often adlibs a voiceover track - "unless that man is a divorce lawyer," etc. When people stand there saying the words, they may not want to get out, but in today's world, they know they can, and that makes things feel different. We pretend that marriage is permanent, we hope that it is, but in our hearts, we know very little in life is permanent or at least that very little has to be.

I think I cry because it's all so hopeful. All those hopes, all that faith in what you've told each other and what you hope for from each other, all that belief in the benevolence of an unpredictable future. There's hope in frightening qualities, and I think it only hits me harder as I grow older, because along the road in life, you see more and more of the damage people can do to each other. A wedding is, in some senses, an entrance ramp to a very dangerous highway, and after you've driven the highway for awhile, you witness carnage that you wouldn't have imagined, in places that you wouldn't have expected it. But a wedding is like watching people you love pull out onto that highway. You feel love and hope and fearful concern, you wish them all the luck in the world, and you're horrified by what they're going to see as they travel together. Unlike a wedding, a marriage never really has a happy ending - if you aren't separated by choice, eventually you'll be separated by circumstance.

May in Review

May was a bad month! Only three books, including one that I didn't really care for. (Also, apologies to my lovely fine-free library, because the spring publishing rush backed me up! No need to send bills - I'm returning them....)

Finally got around to Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy which has been lying around here since January. I always enjoy her books, aside from the ridiculously awkward attempts she makes at interjecting sex scenes, because she delves into the history of a different aspect of New York each time. And this time, it was the New York Public Library! And, as a bonus, map and print collectors. As always, I tend to wish I remembered as much about her plots as I remember about the institutions or locations she focuses on, but it's not a perfect world. Nice beach material at worst.

Laurie King's The Language of Bees was more enjoyable. Occasionally a little lighter on historic material than Fairstein, or at least less hard history in terms of dates and places, but much better for plot and atmosphere. I wish social clubs were still in vogue. (And I wish that people I'd actually find interesting would be members, if they were....) I did have the pleasure of dinner at the Queen City Club in Cincinnati while I was reading this, and the big paneled rooms filled with art and bookshelves, watching it rain while munching on macaroons (I would consider membership just for them alone), gave me a nice framework for the imagination during some of The Language of Bees. Also some great accounts of the challenges faced in the early days of flight. Flying over the crags of Scotland in bad weather in the 1920s - not for the faint of heart! I enjoy Mary Russell far more than Kate Martinelli for some reason; it may not be just me, as the two series feel so completely different that it seems they must have been written by two separate authors.

And after that, for reasons known only to Entertainment Weekly's best of 2008 list, I subjected myself to Disquiet by Julia Leigh, which was, at least, short. I hate it when I come away from a book thinking, "I just don't get it," but that's exactly what happened here. Not to fault her prose, which had lovely moments, but I'm not a fan of literature that feels obtuse just for the sake of being obtuse. I suppose at my heart, I believe that writing is about communicating, and I cannot for the life of me understand why someone would choose to communicate confusion or be praised for communicating vagueness. I think this comes back to Nancy's Pearl discussion about how readers enter books; people enter through four "doorways": language, plot, character or setting. All books, of course, have these doorways, but most books have much "larger" doorways in one area or another. And the great works of fiction - The Hobbit, Gone With the Wind, Huckleberry Finn - those books have large doorways across the board. I've found that of the four, language is least likely to induce me, at least without the accompaniment of one of the other three, and that was the case with Disquiet. Yet another example of good writing that does not necessarily make for good reading.

June is already much more promising with four titles polished off already, and two new gifts from the library!

Promise

So, last weekend, I went home, back to my old high school, and watched my nephew graduate. Weird in itself that I've been out of high school long enough for someone to be born and go all the way through high school, but more than that somehow. There are places and events that are so richly filled with memory that the thin membrane that is time becomes even thinner, and you can step back and see your old self.

I found myself sitting next to the me that I was at 17, at the senior awards assembly with a lap full of awards for academic achievements, national writing contests, and scholarships. (I'd had a good year - my brother, the chronic underachiever in high school, came home and told my grandmother she really should have come to the Hollie and a Few Other People Awards Ceremony....) I had (I think everyone does, really) all these ideas about who I was, who I would be, what the adult world was like. And they were, of course, all wrong. Thankfully, in some cases....

Perhaps this is all one of those issues of cosmic timing. I'd been reading Admission by Jean Hanff Korelitz, an insightful novel regarding both the Ivy League admissions process and the expectations we have for life. Each year, exceptional kids rise through the ranks to apply for college, full of insight and idealism (and, in many cases, bullshit), positive that their feet are on the path to enlightenment and wealth and fame. We're also so convicted at that age in the belief that that path is the one, the only, the one true way, and anything else is destined to be disastrous.

Where, in the end, are all these exceptional people? That's the cruelest lesson for the overachiever - the reality that at the end of the day, even the most promising of students usually ends up married, living in the suburbs, overworked, semi-satisfied with marriage and career, underpaid, void of intellectual curiosity, and crafting in their children the same desire, the same search for exceptionality.

And so we question ourselves. How did we get here? Was it all because we chose one college instead of another? Should we have picked a different major? Should we not have changed our majors in our sophomore year? Could we have tried harder, taken more difficult courses? What was all that for anyway? Do we still contain that promise unrealized or did we just fool everyone around us into believe that we had any promise to begin with?

Graduations, I think, are more poignant than weddings. There's so much hope, so palpable and so many expectations that will morph into other things, if they survive at all. At a wedding, the hope is hope you place in another person - the hope that they will be all they say they will be, that they remain who you think they are. In some ways, it isn't as serious, because realistically, we all know that people will disappoint, will change, will require us to adjust or reshape our vision. At a graduation, that hope is for yourself - that you will be all you say you will be, that you will remain who you think you are, and when the adjustment to that vision comes, it is, by nature, much more personal.

Exceptional is rare, and for most, unsustainable. Some of us "peak early," achieving more noteworthy things in our junior year of high school than in the rest of our lives, while some of us just arc delicately through the rarified air of "exceptional," only to find ourselves at some point wafting down into mediocrity. Some of us achieve exceptional in our professional lives, but barely get off the ground in our personal lives as human beings. Some of us just burn up on reentry. As they sit there in caps and gowns, hot and excited, bored with everything around them but so aware, we wonder who is who. Will we ever know? Will they?