Other Fundies: Book Review No. 4

In Times of Siege is a lovely novel by Githa Hariharan.  Set in New Delhi, it centers on a middle-aged-don't-rock-the-boat history professor whose life is turned upside down by dual surprises:  the vibrant young woman trapped in his home while recovering from a broken leg, and the unexpected repercussions of a teaching unit he has prepared which fails to satisfy Hindu revisionists. 

We are so used to hearing about religious conflict from our own persepctive.  This novel provides an understated introduction to similar passions erupting in other parts of the world.  The professor's mildly ironic and detached surprise at his predicament is intriguing, as is the young woman's frustration with her circumstances and passion for his cause.

Late Summer Morning

Oregon Roses

I had a glorious beginning to my day.  When I awakened to the plaintive and very loud meows of the kitty trapped in our room, the sky outside my window was streaked in the palest of pinks.  I took care of the animals, threw in a load of wash, and headed out for a walk to the small lake nearby.

It was clear and sunny, and almost no one was out and about yet.  There's a walking bridge over the stream running from the lake, and I settled down there to stretch out, my face to the sun and a small waterfall rushing behind me. 

When I got home, ALL THREE of my children were gathered in the kitchen.  What a wonderful sight!  Of course, they had eaten all of the breakfast food, so I had to run out to the grocery.  On the drive there, a holiday morning was clearly in evidence on the treelawns: dads holding coffee mugs, blond toddlers toppling over each other, and dogs racing back and forth.

Everything looks fresh and clean this morning.  Strong winds all night blew the humidity away, no one is racing off to work, and the gardens are heavy with the summer purples and pinks of impatiens and the autumn reds and yellows of mums.  It's a perfect morning to live here.

Walked: 3 miles.

Saturday Six

I am grading 9th grade summer papers.  So far the grades range from B+ to D-.  This is not a fun project.  So I am going to procrastinate by playing the Saturday Six:

1. What's your favorite thing to do while indoors?

Read and play on the computer -- they're  tied, I guess.

2. What's your favorite thing to do while outdoors?

Walk on the beach.

3. Do you wear any jewelry regularly?  If so, what and where?

My great-grandmother's 10th anniversary ring -- it's a diamond in its orginal (and, therefore, antique) setting and I was named for her.  I wear it most of the time.  I have lots of earrings, but I usually wear a small gold pair that my grandmother bought in an antique jewelry store for my 15th birthday when we were in Spain.

4. You have the choice of spending time alone, with a few close friends, with many friends and aquaintances, or in a large crowd consisting of people you do and don't know.  Which one would make you the most comfortable?

I prefer to spend time either alone or with a few close friends.  I can think of only one time that I had a blast in a huge crowd, but I was with my family.  We spent New Year's Eve a few years ago on the Champs-Elysees in Paris with about a million (literally) other revelers.  I didn't want to go, but I wouldn't have missed it for anything, even if it was only about 10 degrees F and fog did encircle the Tour d'Eiffel at about two minutes to midnight.

5. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

Oh, I'm not one of those shoe people.  I wear Tevas in the summer and clogs in the winter.  I maybe have 12 pairs of shoes, including running and walking shoes and flip-flops.

6. READER'S CHOICE QUESTION #21 from Jeanno43 and Cherie:   If a fire or other circumstances forced you to leave your home with all of your loved ones and pets -- but only time to rescue one single item, what would you choose to take with you and why?

The photos and family videos, of course. 

My Childhood Home

There's not a lot to say.

Electoral Warfare

This isn't a book review, but I am pulling the first part of it from the 06/15/04 entry in  my old journal, the one that's about to hit the dust:

David Brooks had a fascinating column in the June 15  New York Times.  He argues that the electoral divide in this country is between the "aristocracy of the mind," which votes Democratric, and the "aristocracy of money," which votes Republican. 

Pollsters now distinguish between professionals and managers. Professionals are "knowledge workers" and tend to vote Democratic.  Managers are corporate types, and tend to vote Democratic.  John Kerry is a lawyer; George Bush is a business school graduate. Democratic administrations value self-expression (remember Bill Clinton?); Republican administrations value order and loyalty.

We experienced precisely that divide in this household during the last election, between a lawyer/teacher wife and a corporate manager husband.  I see it in my father, a product of a New England college with ivy tumbling down its brick walls, who is practically apoplectic over the news every evening, and my brother, who didn't finish college but is a successful businesman who calls me regularly from his cell phone in his SUV.

I'm not sure that it's so simple, however.  I work in a school, an institution that promotes the life of the mind, in which the vast majority of both students and faculty are deeply conservative. A few weeks ago I was reading with great interest reports stating that the most accurate predictor of political affiliation is religion: Americans who got to church regularly and are religiously influenced in their voting tend to be Republican.  Well, I go to church regularly, and to church classes and committee meetings and prayer groups, and my faith has a profound influence on my vote -- but that vote ain't for the Republicans.  (It's too bad that both the media and the Democrats overlook progressive Christian voters.)

So I don't know whether you can pigeon-hole the American voter or not.

A direct link to the Brooks column (that in September probably no longer works):

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15BROO.html?th

Update:  I spent Saturday night at my brother's.  Now, I love my brother very very much.  In many ways, we are closer than most siblings, having gone through years of childhood trauma together.  We understand things about each other that no one else would be likely even to notice.

But -- he is indeed voting for BUSH.  His entire household -- in addition to him, his new wife and college-age daughter -- are not only all voting for Bush, they are all gung-ho Bush.   Parts of our extremely brief conversation Friday night:  

Brother:  Kerry is just a moron.  

Me:  Well,  actually, I would say that the one you are characterizing is Bush.  (I am just so incredibly articulate and subtle when astonished.)  

Brother:  Well, that's what's happening in this election.  Each side thinks the other  side's guy is a moron.  Did you watch the convention?  

Me:  A little.  I discovered that I really couldn't stomach the Republicans for too long.  Did you watch the Bush daughters?  

Sister-in-law:  I thought they were cute.  

Me:  Cute?  They came across as complete airheads.   

Sister-in-law: Well, I thought they were cute.  

Long silence as I try to imagine how I would feel if my daughter, who is only 17, handled herself in public as the Bush daughters did.  (I do feel sympathy for them.  Obviously they were paraded in front of the convention as a response to the elegant and genuine Kerry daughters, despite their lack of political experience and sophistication. And they clearly love their dad and are certainly entitled to support him.)

Brother:  Look, I don't like Bush's positions on other issues either.  But he's the only one who can handle the terrorists.

Me:  Bush has no more ability in that area than anyone else.  

Sister-in-law:  I don't like Kerry's wife.  

Brother:  You mean Ter-ay-sa?  

I decide that silence is the better part of valor.  The woman is entitled to pronounce her name as she pleases, and I like and admire her tremendously.  I keep my mouth shut.  

Brother:  Well, hang in there sis.  In 4 more years you can vote for Hil-ar-y.  

Sister-in-law:  Oh, yuk!  

Me:  You know, I think I'll go to bed.  

I really didn't want to give my sister-in-law a hard time.  She has hosted me graciously several times this summer as I have used their house like a hotel on some of my many trips.  We can agree to disagree.   But our conversation was a shocker.  I am used to my students' political views -- but my brother's?  

In better news, our children are all back under our roof.  Last night was the first time in weeks that I went to bed without calculating what time it was in France or the Czech Republic and wondering whether anyone I knew there had actually gone to bed.  

Today: Walked 3 miles.

Yesterday (Saturday 9/4/04): Walked 3 miles.  

Friday 9/3/04: Walked 3 miles.

Witches: Book Review No. 3

 

I'm teaching eighth grade American History for the first time this year so, while I was listening to presentations on World War II and the peoples of Iraq from my high school history classes and bracing myself to read a slew of exam papers last spring, I was also immersing myself in young adult historical fiction.  No fun, of course.  After all, I had to read these novels before I could assign them as summer reading.  A terrible burden.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond (1958) by Elizabeth George Speare is a classic, and Witch Child (2000) by Celia Rees is a more recent novel in the same vein.  Both feature a feisty young heroine, stymied but not undone by the strictures of colonial Puritan society.  In both cases, the young lady escapes a repressive and possibly life-threatening situation by journeying across the ocean to a new land and a society that combines new opportunity with unexpected oppresion.

Witch Child, set in 1659, opens a window to the orginial inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and their interaction with the English settlers.  The Native Americans are skilled woodspeople and healers, and save the lives of the new arrivals with little fanfare and less thanks.  The protagonist's troubles, originating in England, continue in part because of her friendship with a people whom most other colonists views as "untouchables."

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is herself something of a tangential character in a novel set in Connecticut in the 1680s.  Frontier battles with Indians barely merit a mention; here, the conflict is between the Royalists who support the English governor and the Puritans who insist upon the freedoms granted in their colonial charter.  The central character finds herself caught between the two groups, as well as between the freedom she has enjoyed as a carefree girl in Barbados and the rigidity of her adult life in America.  The "witch" enables her to see her way to making peace with all the fragments of her life.

It's significant that two of the best novels I've come across with female characters at the forefront both center on witchcraft.  Women's potent roles in connection with birth, sickness, healing, and caring for children combine with their subordinate status in a patriarchal and authoritarian society to create an ever-present undercurrent of fear.  The men seem terrified of the power of the women, whose connection to the natural world is both mysterious and unalterable, and the women are ever threatened with exposure and death in the event that their own authority becomes untenable.

Not, perhaps, the thoughts with which one would introduce American history to thirteen-year-olds.  But inevitable thoughts for an adult woman face-to-face with the burdens under which her female ancestors struggled to create a new world.

 

(In case this sounds familiar: this was originally an entry in another journal I started but gave up on -- I've just moved it over here.)

Walked: 4.7 miles.

Birthday Boys

Twenty years ago, I began the day in a drug-induced haze, which eventually cleared enough for me to have a lengthy discussion with the doctor who had replaced mine for awhile (How is it that doctors can go home to sleep, but laboring women have to stick with the program?) about a nonprogressing labor that was about to turn into a c-section.  By early afternoon I would be sitting on an operating table arguing with an anesthesiologist about a botched epidural (Ha! Little did I know that a botched spinal was about to follow).  Not much that I had planned actually took place during that labor, but I did have the extraordinary, amazing, absolutely transcendent experience of watching in a small mirror above my head as two tiny bodies were lifted from mine.   

I don't remember much of the next hour, but the babies spent it in a warmer next to me and the pictures show the personalities that have been apparent since their first seconds of life: one dozing contentedly in utter oblivion to the lights and action surrounding him, the other wide-eyed and apparently completely panicked by his emergence into this world.  In a few years, the first would be marching confidently into the Atlantic Ocean, while his brother would be racing back and forth on the beach screaming, "Mom!  He's going to drown!  He's going to drown!"  

I'm imagining them in Prague today.  One is sipping a cup of coffee, relaxed and oblivious to the fact that they need to get to the station for their overnight train to Amsterdam.  The other is tense and alert, trying to hurry things along.  And back here at home, missing them, we find that we don't have three teenagers anymore.  

Happy Birthdays, guys!

 

Walked: 3 miles.