Dean Robertson's Blog, page 9

Blogs, Reviews, and Edits–Oh, My! Is Writing Always Writing?

 
  Writing a Book

February-October 2014    

Looking for Lydia; Looking for God 

The actual writing of the book–which never started out in my mind as a book at all, just some writing I seemed to be doing–happened in a white heat over a period of about seven months. I wrote all day; I wrote half the night. I didn’t sleep much, and I existed on Vigo Red Beans and Rice and Diet Coke. As I neared the six-month mark, I began to realize that the work on my computer, each piece a separate document, just another journal entry, was getting longer, taking on heft and weight, all those separate pieces fitting together into something like a whole. But I never used the word “book,” even to myself. Eventually, I had to call it something, so I settled on “manuscript.”

Writing Book Proposals, Cover Letters, Queries, and Click-Bait

October 2014-January 2015   

I decided there wasn’t much excuse not to at least send my work out for a trial run. The first agency I chose wanted a formal book proposal for which they provided a template. I occupied myself for quite a while writing that proposal which weighed in at 10,000 words. I soon discovered they wanted everything “included in the body of an email.” No attachments. I had no idea how to do that (I have since learned). I never sent the manuscript to that agency. I did, however, send it to ten other agencies and a couple of publishers, committing myself to one submission a week.

 

Meanwhile I had made contact with a student from thirty years ago who had just started a political satire “page” on Facebook.  While I waited and fretted and wrote letters and proposals, he let me write “click-bait” pieces for his new site.  I wasn’t very good at it, but I learned a lot about writing 500-1000 words to deadline, and that was the beginning of what has turned into my weekly blog posts.

 

I wrote about an Episcopal Bishop who ran down a young man on a bicycle; I wrote about Pat Robertson and Sarah Palin.

 

I wrote about Joel Osteen.  It was fun. I just never got the “click-bait” part down.

An Author’s Questionnaire and Pages for a Website

February 2015     Koehler Books

Through a series of unlikely events, Koehler Books and I found each other. And the contract was signed. At that stage, I had done the actual writing; I had written the gargantuan book proposal; I had written cover letters, query letters, summaries, and a marketing plan. I had shamelessly promoted myself. I had, it seemed to me, used every cliche I’d ever known.

My first job after signing with Koehler Books was to fill out an author questionnaire which included a synopsis of the book; an “elevator speech,” that is, what I could say in a short elevator ride to convince my fellow traveller to rush out and buy the book; an author bio; and a book description for the back cover.

I wrote text for all the Pages on this website–the story behind the book; the story of the writing of the book; discussion questions. My story.

 

 

 

Writing a Blog

March-May 2015     Lawyers  and the first blog 3/26/15

On  March 26 2015  I posted a blog about all the different kinds of writing I was doing, having completed a book and signed a contract.  I wrote that blog because right after I signed the contract with Koehler Books we entered the two and a half months that I now call only “The Lawyers,”  during which I didn’t dare write about what was actually going on. But I really wanted to write something on my brand new blog.

Rewriting

May-July 2015        Seven days to make it legal

Once we had come to a compromise that satisfied nobody, I sat down to rewrite the book.  I gave myself one week.  For legal rather than literary reasons, I had agreed to delete two, possibly three, of the women in the book. Each of them was threaded throughout the story; it wasn’t as simple as just cutting isolated sections. And so, on May 23, I began.  I wrote a blog every day of the seven,  beginning with one I called “This Is the First Day of the Rest of the Week,” and ending with “Sometimes the Ashes; Sometimes the Phoenix”:

 

 

This seemed like a real test: writing deliberately–without inspiration– effecting necessary changes, hacking vital characters and sections from the book while maintaining the integrity of what I had written.  This seemed like the real test of whether I was, in fact, a writer.

I brought it in ahead of my deadline.  Today I can barely remember the book before the surgery.  There was one woman, whose daughter–after over two months of lawyers saying whatever lawyers say to each other (and I had a wonderful attorney!)–decided to get her own lawyer.  I just knew we were looking at months more of waiting, so I simply took her mother out of the book.  That one broke my heart.  Otherwise, the book is good, and I passed my own test: can I write to schedule, independent of the Muse.

Let the Blogging Begin

A Party at the Slover Library

Travel Blogs, Guest Blogs, Book Reviews

On September 12 2015,  the new Slover Library in Norfolk hosted a fabulous book launch/book talk for me.  Over a hundred people attended. I talked about the book, sold books, signed books, and ate good food.  I think everyone had a good time.  I wrote two blogs about that event, with loads of photographs.

After that, I hit the road.  I wrote a blog for every trip.  The traveling was exhausting, and to this day I have no idea how many books were sold.

Several of the authors with whom I have connected on the Internet have written guest blogs for me, and I have written introductions to each of those blogs.  My cousin, Jane, in Texas and Alison Daniels in Norfolk, have co-authored blogs with me; I have written guest blogs for other authors’ sites.

I have blogged about grief, about a former student who makes art, about Julian Bond’s death, about dreams, about the shootings in Charleston and Roanoke, about Valentine’s Day.

And then there are the book reviews.  I decided it would be fun to write two or three book reviews; I was learning to manipulate images by then and just generally getting better at using the WordPress site, so I made the offer in a couple of the writers’ groups I had joined.  I counted this morning: I have reviewed sixteen books and still have three in the queue. A random sample:

Is all this really writing?  Have I run out of steam for a second book?  Am I a one-trick pony?  Am I destined to be a blogger, an editor, and a reviewer of other people’s books?

 I don’t have an answer for that.

Meanwhile, I will continue to write because, having started, I don’t seem able to stop.

 

The post Blogs, Reviews, and Edits–Oh, My! Is Writing Always Writing? appeared first on Dean Robertson.

Writing My First Book at Age Sixty-Nine: My Turn as a Guest

This post was published originally on

judgingmorethanjustthecover

Writing my First Book at Age Sixty-Nine

This is a guest post by Dean Robertson.

I wish I could say, as I know many authors can, that I started writing as a child, that I wrote little stories which I read to my parents and my best friend. I wish I could say I have shelves of journals I kept in high school or college. I wish I could tell you I kept a writer’s journal during my three decades of teaching, meticulously recording conversations overheard in restaurants or descriptions of a woman’s dress or a man’s hat.

 

 

 

I did none of those things. In the late 1970’s—before I started teaching full time—and in the early ’80’s—in the first years in the classroom, I wrote and published four essays. After that I must have realized that I had only so much passion in me and that mine was ignited in front of a chalkboard engaged in lively discussion with teenagers about literature. The only writing I did was to complete a good many essay assignment along with the students.

Over the years, I have occasionally had what I now recognize were really very good ideas for long essays—the experience of recording books on tape; keeping bees; raising llamas. I did research, took notes, made outlines, but I never wrote those essays. I lacked the energy, or the interest, or the discipline required for sitting down and doing the job. For a long time I kept all that material in an old four-drawer oak file with brass labels from a railway office. Somewhere along the line, I misplaced the folders with the research, the notes, and the outlines. It would be difficult to reproduce them now. I gave the file cabinet to my son when he started his first teaching job.

In 2006, I retired from teaching. I did not spend the next eight years preparing to write a book. I spent them catching up on old New Yorkers, reading the New York Times online, re-reading my favorite nineteenth-century novels—Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire and George Eliot’s Middlemarch—and a few more modern favorites—Faulkner’s The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom, and “The Bear”; Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels; and Margaret Drabble’s early ones. I’m sure there were many more. I read, and I discovered the guilty pleasure of naps.

But one morning in March of 2014 I woke up early, as I always do, made a cup of tea, sat down at my laptop, and started writing. I wrote all day and into many nights—not eating well and certainly not sleeping enough—for about seven months. Friends worried; cousins called more often and threatened to visit; everyone was alarmed. I only talked to the few who wanted to hear about what I was writing.

Sometime in October, Looking for Lydia; Looking for God appeared— over two hundred pages in my computer files. I had to admit it looked a good deal like a book, although I never once used that word until the day in January of 2015 that I signed a contract with a publisher.

In a television interview on a local news station, I was asked, “What preparation did you do for writing this book?” On the YouTube video of that interview, I look puzzled for a minute before I smile and answer, “None.”

I don’t know if that is strictly true. I spent my life reading very good literature. Although I didn’t write stories as a child, I read them. I was a compulsive reader; if I didn’t have a book, you could find me pouring over the back of the cereal box at the breakfast table. I have never been able to not read. My best memories of my father are of his reading to me at bedtime. There is a passage in Looking for Lydia:

“Stories are meant to be heard and felt. One of my fondest memories from childhood is my father’s reading to me at night. I only wanted to hear one book, an old volume of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books. We lived on two hundred acres of North Georgia woods, and my fantasy life consisted almost entirely of becoming Mowgli, the child raised by wolves, the child whose best friends, Baloo and Bagheera, were a great brown bear and a sleek and dangerous black panther. I read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” and I longed for a mongoose. I remember very little about my father, a kind but distant man who died when I was sixteen, but I can still hear his voice, half a century later, reading those stories.”

There was a guest post on Amber Gregg’s website that caught my attention:

“You’re Not a Writer if You’re Not a Reader.”

 

Maybe I did prepare for writing my first book at age sixty-nine.

 

Dean Robertson is a retired English teacher; she is approaching seventy. She spent thirty years teaching literature in independent secondary schools and small private colleges. When she retired, Dean cut off her schoolteacher’s bun and headed to the Tidewater region of Virginia. In 2013 and 2014, she had a bad fall, convalesced at the Lydia Roper Home, bought a co-op, and wrote a book. In 2015, she found a publisher for that book and had her first grandchild. In 2016, she is writing a weekly blog, supporting other writers, and working on her next book.

Looking for Lydia; Looking for God is a memoir. It is a spiritual memoir. It is a confession. It is a family saga and a cameo of life in a southern city after the Civil War. It is the mystery of a nineteenth-century woman, come from Philadelphia to Norfolk, Virginia, the year the war ended, and the story of the mysteries that don’t get solved and the questions that don’t get answered. It is a study of the Bible that began in the Lydia Roper Home and has grown outward in the most unexpected ways. It is a story about growing older and a story about beginnings. It is a story for everyone.

 

Looking for Lydia is available at:

amazon.com  AND

barnesandnoble.com

You can read more about Dean Robertson or contact her at her website:

pdrobertson.com OR by email at: pdroberts1@gmail.com  

Dean answers all emails and enjoys getting them!

Read her author pages and connect with her on:

Facebook

Twitter

Goodreads

Amazon

My great thanks to Amber Gregg for asking me to write a guest blog for Judging More Than Just The Cover

Amber Gregg

847-975-5220 | ambercgregg@gmail.com

Owner, Judging More Than Just The Cover

www.judgingmorethanjustthecover.blogs...

 

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Book Review~~War and Growing Up Danielle A. Dahl: SIROCCO

 

In the nineteenth chapter of Sirocco, titled “My Story,” Danielle A. Dahl writes:

“By age twelve, I desperately wished composition were more important than calculus. If so, I’d really shine. I enjoyed writing short paragraphs on topics the teacher assigned in class and often wondered how authors came to spin whole stories. How they managed to whisk me away to unknown places, introduce me to extraordinary characters, and coax me into becoming one of them. By what sleight of words did they move me to laugh, cry, hope, and despair?”

 

 

On the homepage of her website, where this photograph is flanked by the cover of Sirocco and a synopsis of the tale it tells, Danielle A. Dahl has this note:

How to write a great memoir?

Dig deep. Resign yourself to guilt of things done and regrets of things left undone.

Know that anguish and sleepless nights will go away. In time. And, above all, don’t spare the laughter.

About herself, she writes:

I was born and brought up in Constantine, Algeria, where I came of age during the war of independence of that country from France. On the eve of Algeria’s independence, a week before I turned eighteen, my family and I left our home, place of work, and life as we knew it until then. Destitute, facing a bleak future, we took refuge in France. Eight years later, hoping the soil of “L’Amerique” would be better suited to a happier life and proud owner of a single suitcase, I moved to the United States. There, I studied commercial art at the Art Institute of Boston and worked in Filene’s art department.

Later, I met my husband. Together, we lived in Washington D.C., Pennsylvania, Illinois (where I studied sculpting at The Art Institute of Chicago) and finally retired to South Carolina where I recently completed my memoir, SIROCCO.

In her collection of photos on Facebook, I stumbled on this photo with caption:

Sirocco launch party photo

Possible title(s):

“This Author Ain’t Got No Respect” or

“What’s Loretta trying to say?

Two portraits of the same vintage as the official author portrait suggest that there are more Danielle Dahls than the woman in that rather dour photograph.

Danielle Dahl grew up in and grew away from the war-torn Algeria of the 1950’s.

The great strength of this moving, often frightening, memoir is in its careful weaving of the details of the daily life of a family with those of the Algerian war going on around them.  As they try to maintain something resembling normalcy in this dramatically abnormal situation, we are reminded again that what matters, after all, are those individual lives, those family relationships, even those clashes that often seem unimportant against the backdrop of nations clashing and lives being lost.

Sirocco: A French Girl Comes of Age in War-Torn Algeria–a story all too real with the details of a family living in and, ultimately, escaping a nation at war– moves toward its finish with a dream from which Danielle wakes, sensing herself as “unfathomable silence lost in a petrified abyss of primary colors ….”

That dream, so seemingly out of place in this terrible landscape of reality, is the embodiment of a reality that has become, for the author, both “dream” and “nightmare” as the family makes final, surreal preparations for their “journey into exile.”

“In spite of the previous month’s spring cleaning, Ma decided we must give our home the proverbial “coup de balai”—the sweeping one gives to a house, which also referred to the resolution of pending matters before starting anew.

We moaned and groaned but picked up brooms and rags.

‘But Ma,’ Zizou argued, ‘We already cleaned the house. Why do it again, when we are not going to live here anymore?’

‘Oui,’ Yves said, ‘why should we clean for the guys who are going to steal our house from us?’

‘We don’t want strangers to see our dirt.’

I almost laughed at my mother’s absurd assertion, but her dignified stance sealed my lips.”

 

At the end, she watches a reality pared down to fragments, waiting for the writer that young girl has become to “spin a whole story” from them.  We no longer wonder, with her,

“How they managed to whisk me away to unknown places, introduce me to extraordinary characters, and coax me into becoming one of them. By what sleight of words did they move me to laugh, cry, hope, and despair?”

Danielle Dahl has beyond any doubt become “one of them.”

“My brain snapped shots of inconsequential details—a couple holding hands, an old man’s careful steps, a suckling newborn, children chasing each other in a game of catch ….

In a daze, I lost all sense of time as family groups gathered on the hot tarmac—piles of sand waiting for Sirocco to scatter them across the globe.”

 

Available at

The Booksmith

283 Market St, Seneca, SC

www.thebooksmith.com

(864) 885-0872

Also available online at Amazon.com

BN.com and in multiple eBook formats

from most major retailers

www.coffeetownpress.com

www.dadahl.com

 

Contact Danielle A. Dahl through

D.A. Dahl-The Official Website

Facebook

Twitter

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Classic Movie Review: Hollywood Relations

Classic Movie Review by Ellen Bunton
(and her eager assistant, Meatball)

                                     

A Regular Monthly Feature
  The first Wednesday of the month.
Wednesday March 2 2016
 2016   

Science and Spirit: “The God That Says I Am” J. A. V. Simson

 

Joanne Valentine Simson is a biomedical scientist, world traveler, author, mother, and grandmother.  

She has written a book about God.

 

“God said to Moses, ‘I AM who I AM.’ He said further, ‘Thus you shall say to the Israelites, ‘I AM has sent me to you”” (Exodus 3:14).

“He saw a bush that was burning but not consumed.  .  .and the flaming bush answered in a phrase (YHWH) that is virtually impossible to translate with complete accuracy, ‘I AM,‘ or ‘I-Am-That-Which-Is’ or ‘I-Am-All-Being’ or ‘I-Bring-Into-Being-All-That-Is'” (Simson, 9).

I AM: The Bread of Life (6:35); The Light of the World (8:12); The Gate for the Sheep (10:7); The Good Shepherd (10:11); The Resurrection and the Life (11:25); The Way, the Truth, and the Life (14:6);  The True Vine (15:1)   (The Gospel According to John).  

 Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM”  (The Gospel According to John 8:58).

 

From J.A.V. Simson’s  blog: a post about her trip to Russia

“After that, we visited the cathedrals inside Kremlin Square – an impressive aggregate of white churches with gold domes. We went into the Cathedral of the Dormition, with its large, thick, circular pillars supporting arches high above the floor, layer upon layer of frescoes covering the walls and pillars, all telling some story, now lost on most viewers. The cathedral was built in the late 15th century, and it is the church where the coronation of tsars and emperors took place. A throne of Ivan IV stood before the iconostasis, crowded with silver-bordered icons. We were not allowed to take photographs.

We did not go into any of the other churches.”  

 

Joanne blogs at joannevalentinesimson and Solo Women at Home and Abroad. 

 

The God that Says I AM first caught my attention because of the title.  Thirty years ago I wrote, and have since taught, a course I called “The Hebrew Bible as Literature,” and central to much of that text is this business of naming.  It is a powerful ritual in ancient cultures, and in some ways God’s response to Moses’ question boils down to “None of your business.  I just am; get on with your job.”  This is a scene in which Moses is devising one excuse after another for not getting on with the job God has assigned him–to liberate the Israelites from bondage in Egypt.

The same dynamic is evident in one of my favorite stories–Jacob Wrestling With the ‘Angel.’  Or, in some translations, ‘a man.’  In any event, clearly a Divine presence of some sort.  When Jacob asks for the man’s name, the response is not unlike the one to Moses, “Why is it that you ask my name?” (Genesis 32:29).  And, in fact, Jacob knows exactly who this man or angel is, for he says, after he receives his own new name, Israel, “I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.”

The God of the Torah, and the God of Joanne Simson’s book, is a God of No Name and a God whose name is Everything.  I AM.  I am reminded of another famous tale of God’s response to the demand that, in some way, he identify himself.  In the Book of Job, the demand is that God prove he is just and fair.    When he finally appears, out of a whirlwind, he doesn’t even give a nod to Job’s questions. What he says,  in effect, is “I AM.”  Questioned too closely, he once again confronts “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth. . .when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy? (Job 38:1, 7).  I AM.

It is evident from the first page of the prologue that Ms. Simson knows her Bible.  It is equally clear that this is a scientist, wed in a comfortable union to the scientific method of inquiry–and yet, she qualifies:

“My approach will be that of an introspective scientist, a biologist who has long been interested in the ‘numinous’ . . .”

This author, like her subject, is not going to be easy to name.

Joanne Simson explores several paths through the realities that surround us on every side.  She confesses, early on, that

“. . .reading and experiences have broadened my vision bur have not settled the issue that has plagued me more or less constantly since about the age of ten: Is there such an entity as God, and if so, does It, in any manifestation, influence human existence?”

The scientist, the scholar, the theologian and student of world religions, the linguist, and the woman whose “credo” has been a “relativistic theistic agnosticism,” all bring their determination and their considerable intellect to bear on this probably unanswerable question.

Simson frequently begins with categories and questions that introduce and frame her inquiry.  Then, under subheadings  like “Perceptual Intensity and Spiritual Experience,” she asserts her belief that

“the internal experience I have of being, of consciousness–that part of me that say, ‘I AM’–is, I believe, at the core of the spiritual dimension of my human experience.  Many have called this experience ‘the presence of the Holy Spirit’ or the ‘God-within,’ or a conscience or the sense of the ‘numinous.'”

“The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21).

As it turns out, Simson soon shrugs off any “voice” of pure scientific research and tells us more than a little about herself.  In writing about God, she has become transparent and her conclusions are crystal clear and not at all provable scientific evidence of anything–let alone God.

For this author, the true spiritual experience is about connectedness, about relationship, and ultimately about love.  For her, “love has been among the keenest forms of spiritual experience.”  She writes about peyote and other hallucinogenic drugs in an open and inquiring way and ends that discussion with a question: Can they facilitate the dissolving of boundaries necessary for a spiritual experience?  She considers that they might but far prefers Reality–where truth is likeliest to be found.

You will find, in this small gem of a book, an entire chapter on worship in which Simson considers some of the rituals–Western and non-Western–that can involve.  There is a chapter in which she defines and discusses religion and its companion, theology.

Attached to the end of the book is an exhaustive Glossary intended to clarify the exact sense in which she uses words like faith and miracle, love and meaning, worship and sin.

Two short sections conclude what Simson simply calls “The Final Chapter.” The first is ‘Where Do We Go From Here?” in which she poses this question:

“And what happens to our internal reality when we die?”  

I believe it is worth including here the first paragraph of the last section of The God That Says I AM–‘Where Are We Now?’

“It is possible that some natural force ‘out there’ represents what humans have tried to connect with spirituality throughout the millennia. If so, it is a Reality we can never completely understand, and one we cannot (and should not try to) bring under control. We can be content to live on Earth in such a way that our lives are of worth and value to ourselves, to others, and, insofar as possible, to the universe as a whole, by striving to be creative and not destructive. Every life changes the world around it; the universe is altered irrevocably because each of us has lived.”

 

Find out more about Joanne at:

http://spiritandscience.net

https://www.facebook.com/JAVSimson

j a v simson twitter

She blogs at:

joannevalentinesimson 

Solo Women at Home and Abroad

 

Look for Korea, Are You At Peace? Tales of Two Women Travelers in a Troubled Land.    amazon.com korea

 

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Tumblehome Learning: Revisiting Dr. Pendred Noyce

 

 

 

 

 

On December 13 2015 I published my first book review on this blog. It was a review of Dr. Pendred Noyce’s fascinating book for high-school and college students, Remarkable Minds: 17 more pioneering women in science and medicine. This lovely book is the second of two volumes of a history of women accomplished in areas of expertise where they are, even now, just being recognized. The direct link to that review is at “Remarkable Women”.   A copy of the first volume, Magnificent Minds, sits on a table in my living room, sent to me as a gift by its author.  It never stays there for very long, because most of my friends have asked to borrow it on the spot.  

 

Penny and I have become friends, one of these odd relationships that starts in an unlikely place like Facebook and spills over into daily life.

I have discovered in the months since that review that Penny has another identity. She is co-founder, with two other scientists, of the small publishing company they call Tumblehome Learning.

 

 

 

 

Scrolling through a few of my Bookmarked items one day with an eye to a bit of tidying up, I saw the logo, and the sketch, for Tumblehome Learning.  I did a double-take at the sketch, decided it couldn’t be Penny–a trifle silly for someone with her credentials–but then saw the name and really couldn’t believe there was more than one “Pendred Noyce” in the book field.  I mean, Pendred?

Tumblehome is publishing books for middle schoolers designed to introduce science embedded in well-crafted short novels of mystery and intrigue, and they have produced a remarkable number of these clever books, some written or co-authored by Penny, some–more and more often–by other authors.  There are three distinct series and, when I expressed an interest in reading a couple of books and writing about the company, she asked me to choose from among them.  I said, “Surprise me!”

The result has been a delightful reading experience.

The Walking Fish begins, appropriately, with a ‘hook’:

“When you get right down to it, I only discovered the Walking Fish because Grandpa got sloppy with a chainsaw.

Had he been more careful cutting down the maple tree, he would not have lost most of the fingers of his right hand. ‘Four of my favorite fingers,’ he said. Without them, fishing was a bit of a struggle.”

And  the short opening section that follows sets an idyllic scene between an obviously bright young girl and her “punning” grandfather.”

They are in “his little fishing boat,” floating desultorily on a lake on a “sunny fall day,” and discussing in a comfortable familiar way whether our narrator will be willing to serve as hook-baiter for her grandfather whose hook-baiting hand can no longer handle the wiggling worms.

This is a book suited for children. The introductory scene-setting happens in fewer than two pages, and in that short space, those eight-year-olds are already invested in characters, scene, and story.

The truth is that this seventy-year-old reviewer was reading with more than a little curiosity by this point.  I like this sharp, nearly-adolescent girl, trading puns with her endearing grandparent; I like her quite a lot.

By the end of Chapter Two, she has been assured by her father, a high school science teacher, backed up by an environmental scientist and a neighbor at Glacial Lake, where they spend their summers, that although the Fish and Wildlife people have attempted to stock the lake, fish just don’t seem to survive,”something about the minerals in the water.”  The absence of fish, of course, means that the grandfather we met a few pages back isn’t much interested in joining the family for the summer.

The chapter’s last scene finds our intrepid explorer flat on her belly beside the lake, having abandoned for the moment her search for frogs, gazing into the settling water at

“a creature like nothing I had ever seen.  A fish! And it appeared to be standing on little legs and waving up at me.”

And there we have it: an appealing and believable young girl, her parents, a lake house, a grandfather who fishes, a father who teaches science, a “lake neighbor” who is an environmental scientist at a local college, a lake where the fish are dying, and a mystery.

Authors Rachelle Burk & Kopek Burk, MD, have created an irresistible, tightly crafted book that fulfills every purpose for which Tumblehome Learning exists–and they have done it by the bottom of page 8!

Tumblehome’s website sets out that purpose clearly:

“Tumblehome Learning helps kids imagine themselves as young scientists or engineers and encourages them to experience science through adventure and discovery. We do this with exciting mystery and adventure tales as well as fun experiments carefully designed to engage students from ages 8 and up. Each book we publish comes with a set of physical and ultimately online activities that allow readers to reproduce and extend the science they read about.”

Having almost romped my way through The Walking Fish, I was eager to tackle the second book Penny sent, The Vicious Case of the Viral Vaccine, part of a series Tumblehome calls the Galactic Academy of Science (GAS).  Here is how they describe the series:

“ Each book of the series follows a model, with different subject matter and storylines, and some different characters along the way. All GAS books feature a group of middle school children (usually a boy & girl pair) from diverse backgrounds, facing an impending science fair project or other school or personal challenge. Suddenly, the kids are faced with a perfidious present-day crime that needs historical knowledge of science or engineering to solve it.

Under the guidance of a Dude or Dudette (‼️) from the Future, the kids use a special device to travel through time and visit pivotal scientists of the past, gain key knowledge, solve the crime, ace the science/engineering/math competition, and become inducted into the GALACTIC ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, or GAS.”

And so we have The Vicious Case of the Viral Vaccine, and let me say at the outset that my one real complaint about Tumblehome’s books is that I don’t have the leisure to sit down and read, self-indulgently, through all three series, possibly stopping at lunchtime for a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of tomato soup.

Viral Vaccine is co-authored by Pendred Noyce and Roberta Baxter, and Dr. Noyce has written “Discussion Questions” and “Suggested Activities” for the book.  These are standard fare for books in the GAS series, and include questions that both check the reader’s comprehension of basic details and challenge her to consider how the book might apply to her own life.

For this book, Dr. Noyce first asks, “What are Clinton and Mae arguing about in the beginning of the book?  How do they use evidence in making their arguments?”

And, a bit later on, “What immunization shots have you had in your life?  Discuss the infections these shots were meant to prevent.”

It is important to note that most of these books, from the foundational GAS series to Remarkable Minds have received multiple awards from school systems and science and educational organizations, and Dr. Noyce, before founding Tumblehome, was renowned  throughout her home state for leading the drive to improve science and math education. As head of the Noyce Foundation, named for her father, Dr. Robert Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit and founder of Intel, she was in the forefront of a decade-long campaign whose outcome was that Massachusetts became the top-scoring state in the US.

 

As with the two books I’ve read, and those I have only read about, The Case of the Vicious Viral Vaccine starts with a bang, dropping those seventh and eighth graders into a spell they won’t easily escape–the lure of science and mystery, with two children as the heroes.  In the case of this particular volume, add a currently controversial subject–vaccines:

“‘That vaccine could make people, really sick,’ Clinton burst out.

Mae clutched her current events report and looked out at the class, ‘It won’t. My mother worked on this vaccine, and it’s safe. Only crazy people think it isn’t.’

‘Now, everyone settle down,’ Ms. Timilty, the long-term substitute teacher, said as she tapped on the desk. ‘Let Mae finish her report.’

Clinton Chang leaned back with his arms crossed behind his head and glared at Mae. She continued her report.”

One thing Mae and Clinton learn quickly is that, no matter their differences on the subject of vaccines, they can pull together to defeat the threat of greedy and misinformed scientists.  Once they’ve determined they have a common cause, they hang out together regularly, plotting their strategy.  

In addition to the separate questions and activities for this book, there are images and information embedded in the text.  I found a terrific drawing of a virus attacking a cell and, along with a sketch, a biography of Dr. Jonas Salk.

 

 

 

 

 

My enthusiasm for Dr. Noyce and for what she and her colleagues are accomplishing at Tumblehome Learning should be evident at this point.  The books are wonderful, but  Penny Noyce doesn’t stop there.  Not only does she conduct workshops for teachers and other professionals, she walks into those classrooms herself.  She is Tumblehome Learning in the schools.

 

 

 

 

You can connect with Dr. Noyce on her website or on Tumblehome Learning’s Facebook page.

Tumblehomelearning.com

tumblehomelearningfacebook

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tumblehome Learning’s Galactic Academy of Science Series

When I asked Penny about the name of the company, this was her response:

“First and most important: Tumblehome was the name of my mother’s boat. The tumblehome is the part of a boat’s hull that slopes upward and inward. Coming upward in cross-section from the keel (looking from the bow or stern), a boat slopes out, and then back inward toward the deck. that inward slope is the tumblehome.”

And she continued in what seems to me the final, amazing word on this venture in publishing for learning:

“In the spirit of Robert Noyce, the inventor of the integrated circuit, original founder of Intel and one of the fathers of Silicon Valley, we want every child to know that they too can change the world through their exploration of science. They too can ‘go off and do something wonderful.’”

 

The post Tumblehome Learning: Revisiting Dr. Pendred Noyce appeared first on Dean Robertson.

Book Review: D.A. Spruzen “Not One of Us”; Wiegenstein “On Violence”

 

 

Not One of Us: A Summing Up

“Rose, a widow and mother of three adult children, is a founding member of the Salton Symphony and one of a group of seven volunteers who call themselves the ‘Symphony Slaves.’  As the story opens, she is in the hospital recovering from a concussion after being found unconscious outside her friend Judy’s house.  Rose cannot remember how she got there, although she remembers finding Judy bludgeoned to death.  This is only the first of several murders that rock the normally dull Salton, a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C.

 

Alternate chapters comprise segments of the killer’s journal in which she recalls her childhood and reveals the warped logic that enables her to eliminate those who threaten her hard-won lifestyle. . .

 

This psychological suspense, the first of a trilogy, focuses on the characters’ inner lives and the social constraints that bind them.”  

A Question for D. A. Spruzen:
How did you decide to make your main character a serial killer?

“I have always been fascinated by how killers tick. What goes on inside their heads? I can’t imagine driving a fist into someone, let alone a knife. How does that warped behavior come about? The death of empathy? This is why I chose to format this way, so the reader can see how and why she became a killer, and how she rationalizes it.”

Steve Wiegenstein “On Violence”

“There are violent moments in my novels. In Slant of Light, there’s an axe killing, a hanging, and a fair number of gunshot deaths. This Old World keeps up the shootings, along with some stabbing and arson. I try to make those moments surprising, repellent, and true to their characters and contexts. I never want anyone to enjoy those scenes, but I do want them to feel that they are necessary. Violence is a part of human existence, so we can’t write away from it. If you enjoy those scenes, I’m doing it wrong.”

Not One of Us begins:

“Pansy made her first kill at fourteen, albeit with the best of intentions.  But I’m not Pansy anymore. I became someone quite different, despite all the obstacles placed in my path by others, circumstances that forced my hand and made a few more casualties inevitable.

I need to write everything down now–the things I had to do–and try to show  the sense of it all.  When people read it they will understand that I had no choice and not think so badly of me. After all, I never had anyone to stand up for me, I had to solve my own problems the best way I could.  My solutions might be considered somewhat extreme, I know, but I couldn’t lose everything I had always dreamed of and worked for. 

I wanted a good life in a normal place doing normal things. I wanted respect. That meant a good job, a good husband, and a nice home. . .”

 

Readers of this first novel in D.A. Spruzen’s Flower Lady Trilogy will have no trouble agreeing that, indeed, Pansy is not one of us.  

Pansy is a killer; Pansy was a killer at fourteen.  She is Other–mentally ill, a sociopath, a psychopath.  She is damaged goods.  She was molested as a child and watched her sister abused.  She killed her sister to protect her from more of that abuse.  She blamed her father, who was arrested, convicted, and sent to prison, where he was murdered.  Pansy learned that killing solved problems.  She believed it.

Crazy.

Certainly not one of us.

Nevertheless, we have a good bit of trouble avoiding the fact that, starting with that provocative title, this author is pushing us hard to ask the question

“Is Pansy one of us?”

Steve Wiegenstein “On Violence”

“So many books I read take an entertainment approach to violence. Either it is portrayed as heroic, with sympathetic characters dispatching villains in oh-so-many creative ways, or it’s portrayed as an element in the creation of the hero’s character.”

One reviewer writes about Pansy’s character:

“I’ve actually read this book twice! The second time was a refresher read before launching into the second book of the trilogy.  I enjoyed it both times!  I appreciated the non-traditional protagonist killer. . .She is an admirable anti-hero as the reader will sympathize with her and get some satisfaction from her criminal behavior. . .”

At the end of Not One of Us we are, I’m very much afraid, left with the question that her creator has thrust at us from the beginning of this novel of murder, mayhem, mystery and–yes-meaning: Is Pansy one of us?  I am more confident that most readers will have reached their own decisions about where D.A. Spruzen’s serial killer fits into Steve Wiegenstein’s musings about violence.  I know this reader has.

Not One of Us is the kind of novel, hanging deliciously on a slowly unravelled mystery, that won’t allow passages from much further in than the early chapters.  Too much would be revealed.  But from the very first chapter, I have risked a bit of a clue:

“Too many people knew me in New York in spite of all the time and money I spent on hairdressers and cosmetics to change my look–red hair in a short pixie cut and Cleopatra eyeliner one year, and a nylon ash-blond wig and false eyelashes (a strange 60’s fashion fad) the next.  Each time I changed jobs I changed my look, my apartment, and often my name, too.  New everything. . .”

 

Lily Takes the Field: A Teaser, not a Spoiler

Volume Two of D.A. Spruzen’s Flower Lady Trilogy is called Lily Takes the Field.

 

Another ambiguous title.

Lily=a flower, a woman’s name?

The Field=a grassy acre? an agricultural plot? An arena for action?  A group of people competing in the same activity?

Lilies took over a field devoted to the winter’s bean crop?

A single lily was so beautiful it eclipsed everything else planted there?

Lily, a Standard Poodle, won first prize among all others in her field, at the dog show?

From Amazon, Discretely Edited

“Now known as Lily Porter, she answers an ad for a room to rent in the home of Hilda, an elderly British widow, telling her she is a widow recently arrived from Manitoba. Hilda and her best friend Magaly become fond of Lily, and—to her surprise—she of them. Lily enjoys exploring Toronto, but her newfound contentment is short-lived. A pedophile is abducting and killing little girls and Lily, now working in a local bookstore, suspects that one of her co-workers might be the culprit. When the child of another employee, is abducted, Lily knows she must act; given Lily’s background and proclivities, one almost feels sorry for him. Other complications ensue as some aspects of Lily’s former life come back to haunt her.”

Connect with D.A. Spruzen at:

daspruzen.com

Buy your own copy of Not One of Us at:

amazon.com

 

The post Book Review: D.A. Spruzen “Not One of Us”; Wiegenstein “On Violence” appeared first on Dean Robertson.

Book Review~~Having Survived: John Fahey, Volume Two

 

 

 

 

Readers of my blog have met John Fahey, author of the memoir, Survival, which I reviewed here on January 6 of this year.

Book Reviews-Memoirs

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He is now well on the way to completing the second book, Arrival, which will continue to mark, for his readers, the path of his determined march out of struggle, out of pain, and into the clear light which his determination and his intelligence made possible.  Arrival will take John Fahey’s story through his successful studies in chemistry culminating in the awarding of a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1972 and a position with a research laboratory in America.  Mr. Fahey expects this second volume of his memoir to end in the late 1980’s when he became Director of Clinical Research at the Community Research Initiative in Manhattan at the height of the AIDS crisis in this country.

These are stories of a painful childhood, a struggle for survival, a hard road out, and the freedom to which John Fahey won through.  In these first pages, John describes his growing love affair with science, his discovery of a gay community, his acceptance of the tremors in his hands and the scars on his face.  Already this new book holds out hope on many levels.  It is a story of success and happiness.  It is a story of the road out.

John has trusted me with the first fifteen pages of the new book, the second volume of what is intended to be the narrative of a painful childhood, a hard road, determination, intelligence, purpose, and peace at the end.  Today, I received an email from John telling me that he would be spending the day in his gardens.

Arrival: Chapter One

“I knew my flight to New York was to be a one way journey. I was leaving England behind, putting an ocean between me and my father, taking my memories with me, reflecting on this sudden change in my life, wanting so much that I’d find what I was looking for. As the TWA flight lifted from the runway and I saw the ground fall away beneath me I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. I was not on a coffin ship with cholera aboard and sharks following the sails across the Atlantic for the dead bodies thrown overboard. That much was certain. Though as the plane broke through the clouds and sunlight came in the windows I thought of my cousins who had never been born, more than a century past, resolving to myself that I’d treasure this opportunity I’d been given. I’d do my best with this chance to do well.

 

I was relieved that Patricia was safe with Billy, though still living dangerously close to our father, sadly still suffering the daily tensions and anxieties of memories of Derby Street. We both needed to continue in our path combining work with night school, constantly learning, trying to recover, with the knowledge that Mary and Tom and Terry were still back there. We had to show them the way to escape. We had to convince them keep reading and keep hope for a better future as part of their lives.

 

It was a TWA flight direct from London. I felt a happy elation that I’d made it this far, constantly looking at and reading over and over again the letter offering me the position of Assistant Scientist at the Warner Lambert Research Institute in New Jersey. I kept shuffling it with my Irish passport and the temporary green card authorization, as if I let them out of my sight they would vanish. At my interview in early December I’d been nervous that they could tell I was working class, from a slum, and had escaped to St. Andrews University after my father battered me and raged that he would stop me. But somehow they had not seen that in me. Dr. John Shavel had been much more interested in how I’d combined night school with work for Imperial Chemical Industries in order to pass the examinations to get me into the chemistry B.Sc course of study. He’d been intrigued that my third class Honours degree was not good enough to get support to do a doctorate. He had amazed me when he offered me the job and an enormous salary, telling me I could continue night school for the doctorate while working for them and it would all be paid for.

I still had problems. My head and hands would tremor under stress. The scars on my face from my teenage road accident still troubled me. But I was coping well enough with them. I knew a couple of pints of beer in the evening would suppress the tremor. My new American friends who I’d met in Amsterdam the previous summer had assured me that in America I’d be viewed as having rugged good looks. I also had to deal with the fact I was entering a virtually unknown world. I hadn’t even met my first gay person until Amsterdam. I didn’t know anything about that world, only that British newspapers and magazines had shown me a horrible world, of blackmail, and jail, and suicide. I had a lot of things to learn, changes in my opinions on learning new facts, a perilous path ahead. I also had to deal with the fact that Arthur wanted me to be his lover. He wasn’t the Hephaestion I’d been looking for, he was ten years older, but he had a car and could drive, had furniture and knew how to get a flat. I smiled to myself at that thought. I’d have to adjust to calling a flat an apartment.

The stewardess came around and I took a beer and stopped worrying. There would be time enough for that. I picked up my science fiction book and began to read.

I’d thought a lot about what the American girls had told me on the flight through Iceland to New York when I thought I was only going for a holiday; that England and America were two countries separated by a common language. I was familiar with the power of words, knew the phrasing of a sentence could change intent, that select tenses and adjectives could carry emotion. During my short holiday in New York I’d eagerly soaked up American words for familiar things. At that point I’d thought it would be a relatively easy task to learn and substitute alternate words for those things. What I didn’t know was that it would take me on a journey of reflection in the decades ahead.

One thing I was quite sure about. I did not like to be identified by a common word; I did not like to be given a label. With the same instinct that was within me I knew without doubt that my father was indeed my father as he battered me throughout my teenage years, calling me a bastard, giving me every reason to wish another man my father, to want it to be the Norwegian man my father accused my mother of causing her pregnancy, during the time he had gone missing, being brought back when I was over seven months old. My father was my father. His father in Ballybohan, Roscommon, was my grandfather. Though now my grandfather was long dead his love of me burned within my heart, his words and memories of him sustaining me, giving meaning to my life.

Even though I loved Ireland I’d had a strange feeling living in England, during my teenage years, on Tees-side, when the English labeled me ‘Irish’, as though that defined me, gave them reason to like me or scorn me. I only wanted to be known as a Fahey, my grandfather’s true eldest grandson, of a proud lineage. It was to be decades before I was to find out what he told me as a child, warmed by the turf fire, within his arms, after the rosary had been said for the poor hungry children of the world, was indeed my identity, needing no label, nor scorn by others. And though I did not know it then, tradition records that the Fahey were the last of the Gaelic clans of Connaught to submit to the Earls of Ulster; with centuries of conflict, and seven hundred of the clan killed at the second battle of Athenry, on the tenth of August in 1316. That was who I was. That is what burned in my heart; that is all I needed.

So in that sense I wasn’t comfortable with the label ‘gay’, didn’t like it, just because it so happened I wanted to be in love with another lad. The love I wanted was the love of Alexander and Hephaestion, of Achilles and Patroclus, a warrior love, holding honor and dignity, learning, guiding others, and bringing great works to life, as my standard.

The week before I was to report to work was a hectic daily confusion of activity. Arthur had already packaged a lot of belongings into boxes strewn around his apartment. He had maps and train schedules and had worked out that it would actually be easier and more comfortable to commute to work on Wall Street from Morris Plains in New Jersey than his current place in Elmhurst. There was a train service from Morris Plains to Hoboken and then a short subway ride under the Hudson River to Wall Street. He explained to me he was a broker’s assistant and worked two evenings a week in Macy’s on 34th Street selling LP records. That pleased me. He had ambition. We talked constantly, getting to know each other, and I shared with him my dreams of fidelity and achieving many things, of honor and looking to a better future.

The most immediate task was to get an apartment in Morris Plains. So that first Saturday morning we set out in his Chevrolet car, through the Lincoln tunnel, with me marveling at the length of the tunnel and the lights overhead, thinking of the men and machines that had built such an engineering wonder, then out on Route 3 west. It was a cold day with light snow but there was a lot of traffic and the road was clear. The journey took only about an hour after we passed through the tunnel, switching to Route 46 at one point which was to take us almost all the way to our destination. We laughed and talked all the way. I was giddy with excitement, calling out the names of towns we went by, knowing they would become familiar to me. Dr. Shavel had told me I would be able to find a flat near the research Institute, grinning in friendship at me in using the English word. He was right. We found a really nice one bedroom apartment In Mount Pleasant Village, high on rising ground, told it was high enough that a person could see the Manhattan skyline on a clear day. It was called a garden apartment though I saw no gardens and it certainly wasn’t my idea of a village. They were long tidy brick buildings with a front door for each set of lower floor and upper floor apartment, stairs ascending to the upper apartment with its own door. We had been given several choices by the man from the rental office. Lucius Beebe was his name and he was very pleasant, giving us plenty of time to choose. We picked an upper floor apartment at the edge of the ‘village’, looking out over trees descending down into a broad valley that reached outward toward where I estimated the Warner-Lambert Research Institute was located, about a mile away and I thought would be a nice walk. Arthur had told me he would teach me how to drive but there was time enough for that.

I was beginning to realize that generally speaking Americans were a very friendly and helpful people, having no pretensions or putting on airs. I detected none of the code words or phrases denoting class or social status that I had been accustomed to in England and Scotland. I’d already noticed that in the shops the person serving me almost always had a big smile and cheerful greeting. That was a refreshing change from the preponderance of shop assistants in England who ranged from unsmiling efficiency to downright supercilious attitudes. But then in England my voice gave me away that I was working class, north east England working class at that. In America that didn’t seem to matter. On that alone I’d begun to love this new country I was to live in.

On my first day of work I awoke to a warm feeling of belonging and walked out into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, looking around at the furniture, out the large picture window in the living room, seeing a blue sky and promise of wonders to come. The move had been accomplished easier than I’d thought it would be, with a huge rented moving van and many of Arthur’s friends giving helpful tugging and lifting heavy furniture, carrying many filled cardboard boxes, helping with laughter and teasing and joking.

After we had each taken a shower, and I was getting used to that luxury, we had a breakfast of bacon and eggs with toast. Arthur had a monthly commuter ticket, the lease on the apartment was for two years, we both had good jobs; it was still so new and amazing to me that at times I’d stand still and draw a deep breath, thinking of my brothers and sisters, wishing I could project my thoughts and feelings across the Atlantic, letting them know I was happy, I’d arrived, I was alright.

It was only a ten minute drive to the laboratories. I walked up the short driveway to the reception lounge as Arthur continued down the mile to the train station. I assured him I would have no problem walking back to the apartment at the end of the day on the path through the woods we’d found the previous day.

Dr. Raymond Wittekind came down to get me and took me to the laboratory to meet my co-worker Tom Capiris who had a Masters degree in Chemistry, and Nelda who was the woman who washed the glassware. There is always a lot of glassware in use in a chemistry laboratory and scrupulous gleaming cleanliness is very important. I’d never had anyone to clean my glassware and that was a step up in my life. I set to work exploring the cupboards beneath my lab bench, cleaning the fume cupboard to the right of my desk, shelves above, the door to the corridor to my left, Dr. Shavel’s office across the hallway. Tom offered to help me but I told him no need, I knew what I was doing, I had lots of laboratory experience. I felt ever so comfortable that morning, immediately liking the people I was with, liking the fact that Nelda was an integral part of the laboratory, included in conversations, treated with respect.

As I was to learn in the years ahead there are good and bad people to be encountered in life, puzzling me why they would be so, wondering if it was my growing awareness of the world around me, if perhaps my own determination to survive the battering from my father obscured observation of other people. I could only rely on my instincts. Dr. Wittekind, or as he told me later that day to call him Ray, Tom, and Nelda were kind to each other, very much as I was to find in many of the Americans I was to meet. I liked them.

That first day was to bring back memories of my first day as a child in Ballybohan, and the first day when I was sixteen and starting to work for Imperial Chemical Industries in Billingham, that in meeting kind people with gentle voices, would make me feel the daylight was clearer and the air fresher, my senses and feelings responding to them, making me stronger and happier.

Later that morning Tom took me down the hallway to the personnel office to complete employment paperwork. The lady helping me fill out the forms was an middle aged woman but gave me the impression she was much younger, telling me I reminded her of the Beatles with my long hair and accent, seeming to be in delight with me, not at all serious with me, giving me advice. At one point she pushed a cheque across her desk at me. Later I was to learn to spell it check but it was the same thing. I looked down and was stunned to see it was for about what I’d calculated would be my first month of salary. As I stared at the amount, confused, I heard her say “this is for your first month, for a motel, while you find a place to stay”. I looked up and felt myself flush and pushed the cheque back across the desk telling her I already had a place in Mount Pleasant Village and had moved in. She pushed the cheque back toward me and put her hand on top of mine and smiled and said “welcome to America”. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, still flushed, feeling my heart beating, falling in love with America even more. The rest of the time was for me to fill out medical insurance forms and to have my photograph taken out in the hallway for the company newsletter.

 

It wasn’t until Ray and Tom took me to the company cafeteria for lunch that I found out why I’d had to fill out such complicated medical insurance forms with choices to make. I was shocked and horrified that such a modern advanced country would have a health care system based on what you could pay. I could hardly believe my ears when they told me that people without medical coverage had to go into debt or on charity or even not get medical care. It caused a gut wrenching feeling in me, losing my appetite, pushing my plate away from me with food still on it, a rare thing for me. I felt like crying when I asked them what would happen if a young lad was injured and went to an emergency room by himself and couldn’t get a coherent answer to my questions. I was thinking of my trips to the Bowesfield Lane emergency room after my father injured me and the care I got at Middlesbrough General Hospital after I was hit by a car. I explained about the National Health System in England and my accident, the hospital, and visits to the doctor on Norton Road and the UV radiation treatments and the ointments and how it didn’t cost anything. I didn’t tell them about the emergency room after my father injured me. They didn’t seem to understand the point of my questions and left me with an uneasy feeling for hours afterward, a feeling that would grow more intense in the decades ahead, that such a wonderful country with such kind people would be so blind, would be so unfair, would help the better off with good jobs, would inflict such cruelty on the poor and impoverished.

 

It was to be another influence on my life, just as much as when Patricia and I sat on borrowed bikes on Mile House Road, looking up at the grey ominous fever hospital, knowing we were too young to be let in, told by our father that our little sister Mary was going to die of scarlet fever, anguish and unshed tears, determination that one day I would find out some way to fight back against such a foe; now this cruelty would be a problem I would take on as an enemy.

 

Our parents had not gone to visit Mary. She did eventually recover and was brought back to Derby Street. She was always there for me, looking out for me, thought of that grim fever hospital giving me reason to keep reading, keep learning, trying to forge weapons for my fight against disease.

 

That afternoon, my laboratory bench and fume cupboard clean and ready for me, my exploration of the glassware in the drawers beneath the bench complete, I sat reading the research papers Ray had given me. He had explained to me my assignment was to synthesise compounds that would be analogs of a well known antihypertensive agent called Clonidine. It was also known as Catapres. Scientists in other companies had made hundreds if not thousands of Clonidine analogs, alterations in the molecular structure, seeking more potent, better, more precise biological activity. Their work had been published in scientific journals. Now it was my turn. Ray had explained that Clonidine had numerous side effects and that was why Dr. Shavel and his superior, Dr. Robert Meltzer, head of the research department, had decided a project to synthesise more analogs, looking for one that would not have, or at least have fewer, side effects would be a practical use of my time.

 

The afternoon went by quickly, sunlight slanting in the windows, Tom busy on his side of the laboratory, Nelda washing glassware, Ray working on paperwork in his office. Apparently only Tom and I would be working making new compounds. By the time came to go home my head was filled with lots of thoughts about what I was reading and I wanted to keep reading, many research publications as yet unread, so I asked Ray if I could take some of them home with me, assuring him I’d bring them back to work with me the next morning. He wouldn’t let me do it, telling me to think on what I’d read and come back the next day refreshed and ready for more reading.

 

There was a small narrow stream running along the back of the research buildings. It was just a stride to cross it and I was on the track through the woods toward Mount Pleasant Village.

 

It was a cold day, drifting clouds overhead, fallen autumn leaves on the dirt track through the woods. I was glad Arthur had bought me a down jacket. I was in a good mood as I walked, thinking of the research papers I’d read, looking at the trees I passed, some bare of leaves, others a deep green of fir and pine. I wanted to know the names of the trees. I wanted to know everything. The sounds and flights of birds and the occasional scurrying of some small animal running from my footsteps made me feel as though I was at one with nature, a peaceful feeling, an awareness that this was such a new country, a country that had accepted me. I reflected that I’d have to learn to call autumn the fall. Several times that day I’d used words that caused amusement and questioning, needing explanation, my wanting to talk like them causing merriment. It had been a good first day.

 

I had almost an hour to watch television before Arthur arrived home. The apartment was clean and tidy. The news channel I switched to was disturbing. America’s war in Vietnam had taken a bad turn. During my final weeks in England, busy getting myself ready for leaving, excited at what was ahead for me, I’d read in newspapers about events in Vietnam but it had little impact on me. Now, waiting for Arthur to get home, steaks defrosting on the kitchen counter, a hot cup of tea on the coffee table in front of me, I realised that two weeks before my arrival a devastating military offensive by the North Vietnamese army and Vietcong against towns and cities in South Vietnam had stunned the American and South Vietnamese armies. It was the Tet offensive, started on the Vietnamese New Year, January 30, 1968. I watched the news channel with a chilling foreboding. I needed to learn about this. I wanted to know everything. My head was filled with images and thoughts, imagining burning towns and bombs and people fleeing, horrors that raised an anguish in me. I didn’t know the history that led to this. I turned the television off as soon as I heard Arthur come in the door. I already knew he didn’t want to talk about this. He was a veteran. I’d not asked him about his time in service. I didn’t want  to upset him. Our relationship was too new; we had a lot to learn about each other. I had to deal with that as well as the problems I had and objectives I was accepting, tasks I wanted to achieve or fight. I’d been given great opportunities. I had to keep looking into the future, using my experience to make the world a better place.

 

We watched movies on television after dinner, my mind still occupied with burning towns, companionship and being tender toward each other. I won’t dwell on after we went to bed since I thought then, and do now, feel it to be unseemly to write or talk about the most private of intimacies between lovers. It’s sufficient to say that we were both vigorous and red blooded, hot with passion, warm with body heat, holding each other gently and with care, exploring the intimacies that we found comfortable. I fell into a deep sleep afterward and didn’t wake until the alarm sounded in the morning. In those early exhausting nights of our lovemaking my nightmares seemed to be gone, replaced by deep untroubled sleep. They were to return later but for that first year I had relief from my memories of Derby Street.

 

The next morning was again cold and sunny. As we had breakfast Arthur explained to me that we had to go shopping for winter clothes for me. I was intrigued with the thought that people had to have different clothes for winter and summer. In England the temperatures didn’t change that much and all winter meant was putting on an extra layer of a sweater and a coat. Apparently in New Jersey that was not sensible. I’d thought the green down jacket he’d bought me was enough. He laughed at my innocence and told me we couldn’t do it that night because it was one of his late nights selling LPs in Macy’s but the following night we’d go to the shopping mall on Route 46 where we would have fun.

 

On the drive down into Morris Plains I talked to him about the research I had been assigned. He smiled and let me talk, clearly not understanding but very affectionate in listening to me. I’d have to cook dinner by myself and he told me he’d call sometime in the evening from work just so that I wouldn’t feel too lonely.

 

As I sat down at my desk that second day to read more research papers on Clonidine syntheses I felt a tremendous sense of pride that I knew what I was doing, that it seemed so familiar to be in a laboratory again, planning experiments. Dr. Wittekind, Ray, had ordered bottles of the particular chemical compounds I’d need. Throughout the day there were constant interruptions of scientists from other laboratories in the corridor wanting to be introduced  and welcoming me, even young women sent by the personnel woman from the offices, giggling and laughing at my accent, all wanting to give me advice and help adjust. I let it all flow by me. I couldn’t possibly remember it all, especially since so much of it was connected to locations and shops and how to say things. So we just laughed and talked as I wanted to get back to my desk and continue reading, thinking it would take at least another day of reading before I could set up my first experiment. That was something I was looking forward to, doing what I knew best.

 

By the end of the working day I’d already written out the first steps, taken from the experimental sections in the research papers. I’d have to react an imidazoline with methyl iodide in isopropanol to produce the substrate that I would be reacting with primary amines. It looked very straightforward and the reported yields were high. The reaction would be the new research.

 

Ray and I sat and talked in his office before I left for my walk through the woods. He was surprised that I knew how to properly lay out an objective in a notebook, heading it with the objective, the structural reaction written beneath, molecular formulae and molecular weights below the structures, then the procedure section where I’d write the details of each step, making sure I wrote in a verb tense that something was done and observations were made. We talked about the work I’d done in my years at I.C.I. and the research I’d done for Dr. Kathleen Watson at university and by the time I walked out the back of the building and stepped across the brook for my walk through the woods I had a feeling I’d impressed him. I wasn’t a regular young scientist just after graduating. I had experience, years of experience, knew how to do and record experiments and keep records.

 

I decided to have another breakfast for my dinner. I thought it too extravagant to defrost a steak. So I made bacon and eggs with baked beans on buttered toast. In England I’d have walked down the road to a fish and chip shop. Arthur had taken me to a fish and chip place just before we moved to New Jersey but it wasn’t the same. The fish was alright but it didn’t taste like the cod I was used to. As I finished my meal I was still hungry for the taste of cod and chips, with salt and vinegar, knowing I’d have to get over it. I’d been almost six feet and 10 stone eight before leaving England. They didn’t use the stone measure in America so I’d have to get used to thinking of it as 148 lbs. I felt sure the steaks and the pizzas would put some weight on me so I’d have to watch that.

 

I’d begun to watch the news channel on television, all about the war in Vietnam, when I was startled by knocking on the door of the apartment. That shouldn’t be so. The downstairs door needed a key as well.

 

I’ve been fortunate to live in different countries, in different cultures, speaking English of one kind or another, observing how people use language, reflecting on how some words can amaze me. The knocking on the apartment door opened up another learning experience. There were two middle-aged well dressed women with straw baskets on their arms filled with colorful leaflets, bright cheerful smiles, eager and friendly. “We are the welcome wagon,” they declared, almost in chorus. I was nonplussed. I didn’t have a clue what to say. I had visions of the covered wagons I’d seen in cowboy films on television when I was in Scotland. Soon my hands were filled with leaflets and they were gone.

 

I sat looking at the leaflets, still watching reports on the war, thinking with wonder of the generosity of America. One leaflet promised a 30% deduction on a first purchase at the local Shop-Rite supermarket. The women had told me to make sure I made a large purchase, stock up as it were.

 

When Arthur got home I was excited to share news of my visit with him. Though we both had good jobs I was still frugal and wanted to be careful with money. He was in a good mood and had brought several Beatles LPs for me, told me he got a discount at Macy’s from his part time job. He laughed at my enthusiasm and pointed out that that most of the leaflets with Free prominently displayed actually meant a second one free. So the hamburger place on Route 10 would give a second hamburger free if you bought the first one. That didn’t mean free to me at all. Half off maybe or half price but certainly not free. And the ones that had Save in large letters was not my understanding of saving. I wasn’t going to be putting money in the bank with those leaflets. I was going to be spending money.

 

So I added those new meanings to my vocabulary. We had a late night dinner and a talk show and went to bed, enjoying the pleasure of passion and talking of plans and intentions, falling into a deep and untroubled sleep.

 

And so my life settled into a routine, walking back to the apartment through the woods at night, seeing the trees begin to leaf out, hearing the scurrying of small animals as I walked, wondering and thinking all the time of this new country I was living in. Tom Capiris became a good friend. On days when there was snow or rain he would drive me back to Mount Pleasant Village. One sunny cold lunchtime he asked me to help him as he did something to the engine of his car. He sat me in the driver’s seat as he opened the hood. He had laughed as I called it a bonnet and told me the American word was a hood, pointed out the gas pedal and told me to step on it when he called out. That was another word I’d already added. As a chemist I knew what a gas was and the petrol I’d seen Arthur put into his car was certainly no gas. As he called out now I put my foot down on the gas pedal and the car roared with power, Tom yelling out stop. I was shaken as his face appeared by the window. That was how he found out I didn’t know how to drive a car. I pleaded with him not to tell the other people in the laboratories, telling him Arthur was teaching me on the roads in Mount Pleasant Village, feeling ashamed I could not drive, thinking it identified me as coming from working class poverty, never having even thought I’d drive a car let alone own one. He was amused and agreed. I thanked him and he said “you’re welcome”. That was a phrase I was beginning to adopt, finding warmth in it, friendship, unlike the thank you in England which could be genuine or indifferent or even sarcastic, dependent on social status.

 

I’d made several hundred grams of the methylthioimidazoline hydroidide using the procedure in the research papers and stored the yellow powder in a large amber glass bottle in the refrigerator. The next stage of reacting small amounts with a primary amine had to be set up in my fume cupboard where the ventilation fan would suck away the methanethiol gas given off in the reaction. At that time, as I reached my 24th birthday, venting the gas off into the atmosphere was not considered a bad thing to do, seeing that it was a fairly innocuous gas that would quickly dilute into the air and decompose in sunlight. It did smell though, not too unpleasant, a persistent thiol smell, which could cling to my hands and clothing so I did what I could to minimize any gas escaping outside the fume cupboard.

 

I’ve found it difficult in my life to explain the sheer joy of seeing a new compound come into existence, a molecular substance never made before, an advance in knowledge, produced with a plan and careful attention to every detail. I have conveyed that joy and love of organic chemistry to many since but at that time the joy was mine alone, done with my hands and seen with my eyes.

 

I set up the apparatus. The reaction vessel was a three neck round bottomed glass flask which could contain fifty milliliters to be half filled. A magnetic stirring bar, buried in a half inch white oval non-reactive polymer coasting, placed at the bottom of the flask, would stir the reaction mixture. It is a tactile pleasure to handle such glassware, precisely made with the neck joints able to exactly connect to other glassware. In my work as a laboratory assistant in the Standardisation Laboratory at Billingham Imperial Chemical Industries Mr. Redman and Dave Nicholson had trained me, a young teenage boy from the slums of Stockton, to keep my glassware scrupulously clean, sparkling clean, and to be particularly precise in measuring solids or liquids. I thought of them as Nelda gave me the clean glassware. I saw she had done a good job as I held them up to the light to check. I’d calculated, based on their molecular weights, a reaction of the methylthioimidazoline with the primary amine on a one to one basis. I folded a small glassine sheet into a ‘boat’ and weighed out the several grams of the methylthioimidazoline I’d calculated, precise to a milligram, and tilted it into a glass funnel fitted into the central neck of the reaction flask, falling to the bottom of the flask.

 

At that point I was in a world of my own, totally focused on my work. In the following steps I removed the glass funnel and replaced it with a three foot reflux condenser, water running through the coils for cooling, top open for the ventilation exhaust, placed a dropping funnel in one neck for the introduction of the primary amine, a gas bubbler in the other neck that would dip below the reaction mixture to help expel the methanethiol gas with a flow of nitrogen. It was a very modern fume cupboard with a tap connected to a nitrogen line at the back. I’d set up the entire assembly on a stand with clamps, the reaction vessel partly submerged into an oil bath set on top of a squat wide metal stirrer hotplate. I was ready to begin and I drew in a few breaths. I looked around me, the sunlight slanting in the windows, nobody watching me, everybody busy, Tom with his own experiment, Nelda at the sink near the windows, Ray on the telephone in his office, and I triple checked everything I’d done and my molecular calculations. I was confident and careful, putting fifty milliliters of isopropanol in the reaction vessel through the dropping funnel, turning on the hotplate, starting the stir bar rotating the mix of substrate and isopropanol, watching as the temperature rose, looking for the point at which the substrate was dissolved, as I weighed out the precise amount of liquid amine into a small beaker.

 

At that point I poured the amine into the dropping funnel, adding a couple of milliliters of isopropanol to the beaker and pouring that in making sure every milligram was transferred, doing it twice, then opening the tap on the dropping funnel so a stream of the amine fell into the stirring solution. I added more isopropanol to the dropping funnel. Again twice to make sure every milligram of the amine had reached the reaction mix, equimolecular with the substrate, I turned the tap closed on the dropping funnel, turned the heat up on the hot plate, began nitrogen bubbling through the solution, watched until it began to reflux up into the condenser, adjusted the heat so that it was refluxing only to the lower part of the condenser. I didn’t want to lose any reaction mass, just wanted the methanethiol gas to be vented off.

 

I was reasonably confident it would work. I’d followed the experimental procedures I’d read in the research papers with similar primary amines and now I’d have to wait to see what would happen. I let the reflux continue for two hours, turned the heat off and let the reaction flask cool. I turned the bubbler down to a slow rate, reduced the magnetic bar to a lazy rotation, watched it for an hour from my desk, reading more research papers, said goodnight to everyone, and walked home though the woods, my mind in a fervent of anticipation and hope that my experiment would work.

 

A light rain had fallen that afternoon so the wet autumn debris on the path and the occasional puddle I had to jump over made my walk less enjoyable than usual, mud splashing over onto my shoes, my mood descending into a gloom that was never far away, fight against it as much as I tried. The joy at working in a laboratory again had faded and I was thinking of my sister Patricia. She had always accepted me as her brother, ignoring my father’s accusations that I was a bastard sired by a Norwegian man, him vanishing when my mother told him she was pregnant. Patricia had been attacked and verbally abused too, accusing her of being a whore even while she and her boyfriend Billy kept their faith and were staying pure for marriage. Our father spewed lies and sowed doubts among our relatives and there was nothing we could do about it. The air was fresh with breezes shaking the branches of the trees I walked beneath, sometimes falling drips landing on me. I lifted my face to them as if the rain would cleanse away the damage on my face, would bring me relief. I wanted so much for the doubts of my heritage to be abolished. I imagined that one day definitive blood tests would prove my father totally wrong, that I might have documented proof on paper that I could give to my sisters and brothers and aunts and uncles. I just knew in my heart that scientific progress would get to that point and I’d just have to wait. My shaking under stress and the fear I had a mild case of Parkinson’s disease drove me to achieve as much as I could in the laboratory, making my own contribution to the progress of science, hoping I could bring that day closer, and if not arriving while I was still alive at least helping other boys in the future accused of being a bastard by their father.

As I reached the grassy slope I had to climb up to the concrete path along the front of the apartments. The setting sun had broken through the clouds, and as I looked back I saw a rainbow and the fringed and flaming colors of the clouds. I took that as a good sign and my mood lightened and I shook off my gloomy thoughts, abandoning them on the muddy path behind me.

 

I was slightly apprehensive as I saw a young couple sitting at the top of the two brick steps in front of the open apartment door, drinking beer out of bottles, then relaxed as I realised they must be the young couple who lived in the apartment below us. We’d nodded at each on mornings as we all left about the same time, walking to our cars in the parking lot about fifty yards away. I looked forward to having conversation with them. As we began to talk, I was offered a beer and the wife, Gwen, went back into their apartment and brought out a bottle of Coors beer, while her husband Bill was telling me he was a veteran recently back from Vietnam. His wife was a primary school teacher. I sat with them enjoying the setting sun and the fading rainbow and we got to know each other. They were both about four years older than me and were fun to talk with, laughter and joking, pleasing me that my neighbors were making me feel so comfortable. They were of English and Scots ancestry and looked it, asking me many questions about where I’d lived before arriving in New Jersey. I ached to ask Bill about Vietnam but didn’t ask, sensitive that it could be a troubling conversation, putting it off until a day in the future. As the sun set and we stood up I was invited into their apartment and was amazed to see a length of one wall caged off and a very small monkey inside. Bill brought the monkey out and explained how he had smuggled it back from Vietnam and built the cage to give it lots of room with climbing bars and water and food, thick newspaper along the floor of the cage. It was a very friendly monkey but I didn’t want to hold it, just stroking it tentatively, seeing their fondness for it, thinking it such an odd thing that people would keep a wild animal as a pet. As I went back upstairs I reasoned to myself that Bill had rescued it from a war zone. I’d not thought of that before, just thinking of the people fleeing bombs and burning villages, but now I added imaginary images of frightened and wounded animals in the fields, terrorized by fire. It raised incoherent angers in me and I didn’t put on the TV news, just played music until Arthur got home. He had an amazingly large number of LP albums.”

 

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Did you get those little candy hearts for Valentine’s Day?

 

 

The Ghost of Valentine’s Days Past

In 1951 my family moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to Cedartown—population 10,000—sixty miles northwest, and I entered the second grade in a new school.  Of the many agonies of that move, one in particular–one that recurred once a year for what seemed many years, was the long, long school day that came around on February 14th, Valentine’s Day.

 

On that day, all other activities were eclipsed by the hourly rush to collect and count how many heart-bedecked cards and-above all-how many sweetly inscribed heart-shaped candies we had received from friends and, even at that tender age, boyfriends.

 

 

 

What I remember, looking back even from this distance, is simple and terrible: I never had enough.  I never had as many as the other girls (was it only girls who received this bounty?).

The experience of not enough candy and cards didn’t last forever.  It was replaced, some time in junior high school, by the experience of not enough—or, let’s face it—no dates.  No dates in the back seats of our mothers’ cars as they drove us to the local movie theater or to the drugstore for milkshakes; no dates in the back seats of our own cars once we’d entered the one high school in town.  No dates, in fact, until I was suddenly rewarded by the gods with an unexpectedly tall, handsome boyfriend, formerly an “Alfalfa” look-alike, to whom I had remained a loyal friend through all the years of candies and cards.

 

That was the year before the Cedartown High School Bulldogs won the State Championship.

I wore his football jacket every day my Senior year.

 

 

The History of Valentine’s Day: A Few Versions

The Pagan

Lupercalia was an ancient Roman festival  conducted annually on February 15 under the superintendence of a corporation of priests called Luperci. The origins of the festival are obscure, although the likely derivation of its name from lupus (Latin: “wolf”) has variously suggested connection with an ancient deity who protected herds from wolves and with the legendary she-wolf who nursed Romulus and Remus. As a fertility rite, the festival is also associated with the god Faunus.

Each Lupercalia began with the sacrifice by the Luperci of goats and a dog, after which two of the Luperci were led to the altar, their foreheads were touched with a bloody knife, and the blood was wiped off with wool dipped in milk; the ritual required that the two young men laugh. The sacrificial feast followed, after which the Luperci cut thongs from the skins of the sacrificial animals and ran in two bands around the Palatine hill, striking with the thongs at any woman who came near them. A blow from the thong was supposed to render a woman fertile. (Brittanica Online)

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Christian

St. Valentine was:

a) a priest in the Roman Empire who helped persecuted Christians during the reign of Claudius II, was thrown in jail and later beheaded on Feb. 14.

b) a Catholic bishop of Terni who was beheaded, also during the reign of Claudius II.

c) someone who secretly married couples when marriage was forbidden, or suffered in Africa, or wrote letters to his jailer’s daughter, and was probably beheaded.

d) all, some, or possibly none of the above.

The Pagan and the Christian

The modern St. Valentine’s Day celebrations are said to have been derived from both ancient Christian and Roman tradition. As per one legend, the holiday has originated from the ancient Roman festival of Lupercalis/Lupercalia, a fertility celebration that used to be observed annually on February 15. But the rise of Christianity in Europe saw many pagan holidays being renamed for and dedicated to the early Christian martyrs. Lupercalia was no exception. In 496 AD, Pope Gelasius turned Lupercalia into a Christian feast day and set its observance a day earlier, on February 14. He proclaimed February 14 to be the feast day in honor of Saint Valentine, a Roman martyr who lived in the 3rd century. It is this St. Valentine whom the modern Valentine’s Day honors.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there were at least three early Christian saints by the name of Valentine. While one was a priest in Rome, another was a bishop in Terni. Nothing is known about the third St. Valentine except that he met his end in Africa. Surprisingly, all three of them were said to have been martyred on 14th February.

 

Valentine’s Day 2016 Norfolk, Virginia

I woke up early.  I will be spending Valentine’s Day with my nine-month-old grandson, while my son and daughter-in-law, in their mid-forties, together for twenty years, slightly stunned first-time parents, head out for a Valentine’s Day date–a secret planned by my son for his bride.

I still sometimes catch a glimpse of these two looking at each other in the same way they did in my favorite photograph from their wedding: still in love; still amazed to discover each other across a room.

 

 

At seventy, I am in love only with my grandson.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In 1866 the Necco Company,  founded in 1847, designed a machine that stamped words directly onto their candies and created the first “conversation hearts”  

In 2015, in the six weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, more than eight billion (some three million pounds) were sold.  Sweethearts make up 40 per cent of the Valentine candy market.

 

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“The Journey Is Our Home”

 

 

This blog was first published on January 6 2016 at stevewiegenstein.  

I have recently read, considered, and finally expanded it, not quite satisfied that it developed fully what I wanted to say.  I have searched for Home all my life.  It is an important subject for me.  

 

 

 

A few weeks ago a friend and I walked to the Chinese restaurant near my co-op and brought back steaming cartons of vegetable lomein, fried rice, two Spring rolls, and my favorite—roasted broccoli (enough to save for lunch the next day). The order—white cartons stacked neatly in a large white bag—of course included small packets of soy sauce and several fortune cookies.

I always look forward to the slight crunch and sweetness of fortune cookies after the salty Chinese food, but the two I grabbed that day were stale. I was on the verge of throwing them out, along with their predictions for my future, when the edge of a slip of paper caught my eye. It read:

“You will find luck when you go home.”

That piece of paper, greasy at one corner, wrinkled from its near-miss with the garbage, is taped to the door of my kitchen cabinet.

“I know that our relationship to those places we inhabit and leave and for which we search is the informing metaphor of the spiritual life in any tradition and is, in fact, the governing reality in our lives; the spirit of place is in our bones” (Looking for Lydia; Looking for God, 116-117).

I grew up in the South, in the hills of North Georgia, and so—even more than most—I have that bone-deep sense of belonging to a place, of that physical bond with land. In his small novel, The Unvanquished, William Faulkner describes the forced and hasty departure from home of two boys, with their grandmother, just ahead of Sherman’s army. They take along basic provisions—and bags of soil from the plantation.

One morning about twenty years ago, one of my cousins and I drove out to the land where I grew up. We were going to see the log house my parents built which neither of us had seen since I left for college at seventeen.

 

After the house was built, Mother and Daddy carefully cleared narrow paths into the woods and down the steep hill between the house and the “patio,” a structure made entirely of mortar and large stones from the creek bank. On the day my cousin and I were there, all those paths were completely grown over; there wasn’t a trace of them. We sat for a few minutes, looking with a kind of hopelessness at the uninterrupted woods, seeing no possibility for navigation.

I glanced back once and stepped out of the car. I walked cautiously, but without hesitation, across the overgrown yard and onto the invisible path that led by twists and turns through a quarter acre of dense trees and underbrush to the edge of Cedar Creek. Those stones and trees-or rather my sense of them-that path, buried in thick vines and roots and many seasons of leaves, are my bones.The skeleton of that land is my skeleton. I never faltered. My cousin followed. We sat by the creek for more than an hour without speaking.

There is a reason that all those houses and apartments and rooms over all those decades never quite satisfied my search for home. Not one of them, even the 1928 co-op, in the old walking neighborhood where I live now, ever will be home.  Not even that path through those beloved woods is home.

Home is not a place, not a location, neither house nor woods nor hills nor any ocean. Home, as Esther de Waal writes in her 1984 book, Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict, is a sense of being “earthed;” it is the Biblical concept of stability or steadfastness.

Of Metropolitan Anthony, “a monk and a bishop,” she says only,

“He has found his centre of gravity; he is wholly inside himself. This is the stability of the heart.”

A physical home, the particularity of place, is significant because it points always to something beyond itself.

It points to home.  It is not, itself, home.

A hymn whose name and provenance I have forgotten includes this line:

“We are all God’s children; the journey is our home.”

And, finally, this road to our real home can never be easy.

De Waal comments on Benedict’s guidelines for the reception of the novice monk:

“‘Do not grant newcomers to the monastic life an easy entry’ says the opening sentence, and the novice is to be left knocking at the door for four or five days. He is then warned about ‘the hardships and difficulties that will lead him to God’. . . If he promises perseverance in his stability after two months. . .If he still stands firm. . .he is taken back. . .and is tested again after six months, and then again four months later. The phrase used each time is ‘if he still stands firm.'”

And from the same chapter of Looking for Lydia, called “The Houses We Build; The Places we Inhabit.” this fragment of memory:

“At age seventeen, I closed the door on the house in the woods and left for college; I closed the door, looked away for only a minute, and home disappeared behind me. By the time I came back for my first weekend, my mother had rented the log house to the people who would eventually buy it, and had moved to Alabama, where her sisters lived. I have spent most of my life looking for home. I have looked in the houses I’ve owned, in the apartments I’ve rented, in borrowed rooms, in other people’s houses, in churches, in synagogues, in sweat lodges, around every corner. In these old brick buildings in the middle of a city I barely know, no woods anywhere, perhaps I have found it.”

But have I found it?  Is it, in fact, something to be found?  The legend of the Holy Grail never includes some determined knight’s finding the Grail.  The Holy Grail is a metaphor for all those things we never find, all those things for which we search.  The journey is our home.  Or, as I read on one of the social media this week,

“the detour is the road.”

Not all the questions have answers; not all the journeys are toward a destination; not all our searching leads to finding.  Home is farther away, and much closer, than we ever imagined.

“We will find luck when we go home.”

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