The Point of Existence? Reading -- or Not

John Scalzi has noted a recent article bemoaning the lack of pleasure reading in our society; apparently fewer than 50 out of 100 Americans admit to reading a novel, poem or play over the past year.

That's not so hard for me to imagine.  I've been giving away books, and sometimes it's hard to find takers.  I get together with a group of women friends most Saturday mornings, and I often take a small stack of books to hand out.  Some of my friends read as voraciously as I do, some don't read at all, and at least one finds my taste bizarrely eclectic.

But I don't know that it's such a terrible thing that everyone isn't out there scavenging for reading material.  While I can't imagine a life without books, I hardly ever get to the movies and, as at least one of my friends has repeatedly warned me, I am dangerously out of touch with contemporary culture.  (Today the guy bagging my groceries commented on the young lady on the cover of People.  I looked at the magazine, which I was actually purchasing, and had absolutely no idea who the woman was.) (I just went into the kitchen to check.  The cover says she's Tori Spelling, which tells me nothing.)

The point is, time is limited.  I love to read, and so sometimes I read nonsense for relaxation.  People, for instance.  Other people like movies. (I do, too; I just have no energy for going out on the week-ends.)  A lot of people seem to like Oprah.  (I have no idea why they like the show, but the magazine is sort of interesting. )  And a lot of people enjoy big parties much more than I do.  There are many ways to spend what little free time we have, and I'm not sure that reading fiction has to be one of them for everyone.

On a related note, I have a child getting ready for the college application process and, because she and her friends are interested in the arts, I'm just realizing how many college film programs there are.  Maybe film is taking the place of reading for a large segment of the population.  Not a bad thing -- I caught up on In America, Mystic River, and The House of Sand and Fog last week-end, and they are all tremendous. 

What's the point of this little ramble?  I have no idea.  I guess it's just this: I couldn't survive more than an hour or so without reading, but if other people can, well, that's okay by me. 

Sand Castles

 

I saw this on the beach late in the afternoon and, to my surprise, it was still there the next morning, our last in Florida.  No one in my family builds sand castles anymore -- all the more reason to wait hopefully for grandchildren.

My kids used to spend entire afternoons creating elaborate castles in the sand -- always so close to the water, though, that they would be washed away at high tide a few hours later.  I think that some of the most pleasant afternoons in existence are spent relaxing and talking with a friend as young children work on their outdoor projects.  My friend, the author of Journey to China, has just written about an acrobat show that her group attended last month in China, which reminded me of one that we saw with our children years ago.  Our boys then spent several days out on the porch, stacking up everything they could get their hands on so they could climb on top, where they expected to be able to balance plates.  Thankfully, no broken arms.

Another friend has just returned from a camping trip with her boys.  We did that a few times when ours were small, too.  Everything was so exciting -- frogs, salamanders, roasting marshmellows, swimming in lakes.  Eevn a short Saturday afternoon walk in the woods was an oppotunity for fort building, with energetic children running arouind collecting sticks and small logs while parents relaxed on logs too large to be carted away.

I really miss those times.  Older teenagers are asleep most of the time that adults are awake, awake when we're asleep, and frustrated or cyncial for a large percentage of the short time we're functioning in common.  Even when they are content, they seldom experience the delight in the world around them that they felt as children.

Walked: 4 miles.

 

Florida Fun

http://birdsofsanibel.free.fr/

Florida is a great place for a beginning birder.  There are a lot of big and colorful birds down there, which makes for easy recognition.  Roseate spoonbills, swallow-tailed kites, painted buntings, storks -- they're unmistakable birds, and a newbie can impress herself with her newfound identification skills pretty quickly.

Until last month, I had, however, seen exactly one reddish egret in my life.  I don't think that there are that many of them, and they tend to stick to the southern half of Florida.  But one spring, when I was visiting my grandparents in Vero Beach and taking one of my frequent walks through the Jack Island Preserve, I came across a bird running around on the mudflats as if it had lost its mind.  It raced and jumped and dipped and circled; I thought it was a great blue heron that had become ill.  Extremely ill.

When I described it to my grandmother later, she asked me if it had been behaving as if it were drunk.  That was a bizarre question from my fairly straight-laced grandmother, and about a bird yet, but when I nodded, she pulled out her Peterson's field guide and pointed to the short description of a reddish egret.  As I recall, he said that one of its chief identifying traits was its tendency to race around as if it were inebriated.

(I have since learned that this behavior is a hunting technique.  By spreading its wings wide, the egret creates shadows over shallow waters, which schools of small fish mistake for safe havens under overhanging trees.)

It's probably been 25 years since I saw that bird.  I always hoped for another one, but since we spend most of our Florida time in the northern part of the state, I knew that another encounter was unlikely.

And yet...on my last morning in St. Augustine last month, as I walked far down the beach, there, fishing in a small tidal pool, was a large bluish bird with a long reddish neck, too small to be a great blue and too large to be a Louisiana, too placid to be a reddish egret, and yet: "You've got to be kidding," I said to myself.  But sure enough, a reddish egret it was.  I snapped several photos, all of which were terrible, but they were adequate for making a sure identification when I got back to our condo and my bird book.  (The photo above is reprinted with permission from a tremendous bird photographer.)

I've had a print of a reddish egret on my kitchen wall for years, a celebration of that afternoon on Jack Island.  Now I can add a St. Augustine morning to my store of birding memories.

Walked: 4 miles.

Grown Up

Sometimes it's hard to believe that the little twins who played at the edge of the ocean grew up.  I miss them today; France and North Carolina seem far away.

More on Stuff

OK, so I lied. There are a few more things that I want. Yesterday, for instance, I bought two books.  Having quoted one of my favorite passages, the one from The Outermost House and having, in the processs of looking it up, discovered that the book had been recently reissued in paperback, I decided to read the whole thing.  And as long as I was in that section of the bookstore, I happened upon Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, by Terry Tempest Williams, one of my favorite authors, so I decided that I needed that, too. (For anyone who hasn't read it, her first book, Refuge, about the destruction of Great Salt Lake habitat as the water rises dramatically, in the year that her mother is dying of cancer in a land made more hazardous by weapons testing in the desert, is a beautiful and powerful testament to our oblivion about our relationship to the earth.)

Yes, I know.  I need a 12-step program for book buyers.  No question about it.  I do want books.

But on the subject of larger items:  one of the changes that I find happening as I age is that I am increasingly aware that things, things like houses and cars and clothing and lawnmowers and, yes, even books, require care.  And I want to spend as little of my limited time as possible taking care of things. 

I happened to have an opportunity to think about this when I went kayaking a second time in Florida.  I've always enjoyed looking at yachts and imagining a life of luxury on the high seas, but now I also imagine the effort that must go into maintaining such a vessel:

Big Boat

A kayak, on the other hand, sleek and slim, can be loaded onto the top of your car, plopped into just about any body of water, requires no engine mainetenance or fuel, and insists that you carry as little as possible with you:

Little Boat

It isn't that I'd object to taking a cruise -- especially to Alaska, if anyone's offering.  But I've been on cruises, and one of their most attractive features is that someone else takes care of things.  In my own real life, I would like to extract as many of those things from my orbit as possible. 

OK, I admit it -- I've caught myself in another lie.  The truth is, I would like a kayak and a stack of books -- ok, several stacks of books -- to go along with my cottage on a puddle.

Walked: 3.5 miles.

Week-end Assignments (#11 and #13)

I enjoy John's week-end assignments; I really do.  So I decided to go back and catch up on what I missed while I was in Florida. 

One thing that I missed, and I'm thinking everyone else did, too, was Assignment #12!  I got a little compulsive and started added numbers to all my week-end assignment journals and lo and behold -- I don't think John ever posted a #12.  Could that be?  Or I am just incapable of finding it?  Either way, I can only find two that I missed, so I'll do those.  If someone can find #12, let me know where it is, ok?  Here goes:

Number 11 - Summer Songs:

Summer in the City by the Lovin' Spoonful and A Summer Song by Chad and Jeremy.  The first one immediately takes me back to the summers of my early adolescence, parts of which were spent in my grandmother's small house in the heat and humidity of Cincinnati, sitting out on the kitchen porch, listening to the radio and longing for a summer when I would be old enough to go out and dance all night in the city streets.  The second one -- well, didn't we all dream of a wistful end to a sweet summer romance?  Mine all seemed to end more abruptly and painfully, with autumn leaves crashing rather than falling, but the song does evoke a nice fantasy.

Number 13: Founding Fathers:

Mine would be Patrick Henry.  He was the one, with his "Give me liberty or give me death!" speech, who always inspired me when I was a little girl.  I soaked up several biographies about him, and couldn't wait to visit Patrick Henry sites on trips to Virginia. I'm going to be teaching American history to 8th graders this coming year, so I'll have a chance to get reacquainted with a childhood hero.

So........bring on Number 12!

What I Want

Ruddy Turnstones

Pamela has expressed her surprise on more than one occasion that I have had so much to say about the natural world.  So, some ruminations on that:

I've had some time to think about what I want, from a material standpoint, lately.  (All this walking is good for thinking.)  The answer?  Not much. 

Oh, I would like a better camera.  I've been doing photography for decades and, now that I'm getting the hang of digital, I'd like a camera whose potential matches that of my SLRs.  I'd like to do some more repairs on the house.  As my online friends know from my endless griping, a 90-year-old house has a myriad of surprises lurking around every corner, none of them good.  I'd like to paint the living room and dining room, which have had the same wallpaper for 20 years, wallpaper that now makes me want to scream.  What I'd really like is to trade my house in for a much smaller one on some form of water.  Any water. 

I guess that's about it.  A better camera and a cottage on a puddle.

What I really want for myself is to be outdoors.  I want to soak up everything that's going on out there, from the first streaks of sunlight in the morning to the past-midnight moon.  I grew up far out in the country and, while I didn't begin to learn much about the natural world from the standpoint of cataloging and ecologizing until I was an adult, my life has always been informed by an awareness that there is a universe of which we are only tangentially a part, and even less less aware:

Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928)

That is the world with which I am seeking to connect when I walk each day.  That's the lens through which I see my rather ordinary suburban life.  It's true that I'm walking to get into better shape.  But I'm really walking because I need to be outdoors.

Walked: 4 miles.

Walked this past week: 27 miles.