Be Transported: Read a Book
Does “summer” make you think of reading, of lazy days, of afternoons on some porch?
We’re surely at summer’s midpoint, all varieties of flowers nodding to the heat even earlier in the day; tree frogs and crickets sounding as the sun slips down the sky and cars cruising streets in an endless buzz. At the grocery, the choice of fruits is endless, while a trip to the mall might find it deserted. Along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu or any parking area near a pool or a lake, there’s no space available. And in the evening, the cool of the grass welcomes hot, tired feet.
READING AND SUMMER
Susan Straight, author of IN THE COUNTRY OF WOMEN, recently wrote about summer…wrote about her childhood and summer reading, about hurrying to finish her chores so that she could read in the branches of a fruitless mulberry tree.
Straight is writing her MEMOIR, so she mentions some of the books she read in that tree: LITTLE WOMEN, SULA, JULIE OF THE WOLVES, books that were not about the beach—as her life in California provided plenty of beach experience. These books OPENED HER EYES TO OTHER LIVES.
She writes: My summer novels gave me places far from the sea, where girls and women were fighting to stay alive, stay free and stay themselves. For people like so many of us …novels are escapes of a different kind, whatever our age.
Books take us to different waters — rivers unlike the Santa Ana and Los Angeles, (rivers that have frozen; snowfields.) For all the kids like me, and the adults we turned into, summer reading meant transport to places we could never go.
READING OFTEN TEACHES WHAT PARENTS FAIL TO TEACH
Reading opened Straight’s eyes to things she did not know, like in Julie of the Wolves, when Straight learned that Julie, married to a teenage boy who is mentally challenged, has to deal one fateful day with his attempt to force her to consummate their marriage–rape.
I was stunned…Julie (her Inuit name Miyax) was a girl, like us. My friends and I had already endured casual attacks by older boys, but to read about it meant I felt less alone. This had happened to another girl — a smart, fierce girl like Julie who fled, with needles and knives, with her father’s lessons in her heart. Her odyssey in late summer, sleeping in frost heaves, learning to approach the wolves on four legs, eating meat they bring her, changed my thinking about what a girl could be.
We all have those moments, when the earth trembles and in a nano-second life changes:
a friend argues and walks out of your life;
another reveals her parents’ are divorcing;
another weeps because she has just learned she is adopted;
another’s brother has run away.
Some of those moments are quieter: my friend Jeanie falls out of my mulberry tree and doesn’t break anything. Then another time she awakens with pain during a sleep-over—appendicitis. AT MY HOUSE! She didn’t die, though like Susan Straight and I both knew through reading–young girls could die (Beth in LITTLE WOMEN) or could be physically and emotionally harmed—SULA.
ASSIGNED READING
In addition to wandering the creaking wooden floors of libraries, Straight and all of us have been assigned books—in high school, in college.
In her early twenties, Straight’s professor handed her: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF FLANNERY O’CONNOR—saying that Straight would respond to O’Connor whose “dark vision were perfect for a writer working on stories of place.”
Straight recalls: In O’Connor’s “Parker’s Back,” Obadiah Elihue Parker falls in love with a hard girl, with “ice-pick eyes.” Sarah Ruth carries his baby but won’t love him back because of his sin. His body already covered with tattoos, he spends two days and all his money to have Christ inked large on his back. Sarah Ruth calls the tattoo “more trash on yourself.” “Don’t you know who it is?” he cried in anguish. She responds, “It ain’t anybody I know.” “It’s him,” Parker said. “Him who?” “God!” Parker cried. “God? God don’t look like that!”
Thus O’Connor’s amazing dialogue flowed through Straight’s brain when she was in Virginia, listening to the stories of her relatives, stories about Mississippi and Oklahoma. She heard and saw how the melody of the language, the vocabulary of place colored their stories. This was fuel for Straight’s writing fire! Now she is about to complete her memoir:
I spent five years writing about the women in my family who saved their own children and the children of others, who moved across the nation to make our community in Southern California as singular and specific as Medallion, Sula’s home in that novel of the same name.
LOOKING BACK, REMEMBERING, MY MEMOIR
Written some years ago and undergoing rewriting, my memoir is also about place. Like Straight, who remembers the laughter of women who have known each other since childhood: “in that mercury mood in July,” the physical surroundings of HOME are always front and center for me.
The swing on the cherry tree is mine and now I spend most of my time on the swing. It is a place of solace, one I refuse to share with anyone, yelling, screaming when a little friend, Tigh, sits on it. My swing. Mine. From my father’s death in June to the cold autumn weather, I swing, back and forth, back and forth, my little body taut with an energy I cannot expend normally, my mind full of ideas I cannot articulate except to sing a song my father taught me over and over “Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily merrily, life is but a dream.”
I’m the swing and the swing is me—and we work our way up the dimensions of the yard day by day. The first few seconds my feet, my toes inside my shoes, can stretch to the patchy grass by the apple tree, then to the gravel car turnaround under that tree, and finally, when I’m really going, my toes touch the high branches of the apple tree and the roof of our house. I fly and ride and then I’m singing: songs that I know, songs that I’ve learned rocking myself to sleep in my bed at night or listening to the heavy old black record player that for years sits on the floor between the living and dining rooms, or songs from the musical comedies that our family loves—“Oh what a beautiful morning” and “I’m just a girl who can’t say no” (though I have no idea what the words mean) and popular songs like, “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that’s amore.” Most often I’m alone, clouds moving along the border of my sky, as if I’m seeing the very earth spinning on its axis.
PHOTO CREDIT, LA TIMES
