A.M.’s Comments (group member since Jul 09, 2020)

A.M.’s comments from the DUCKS reading support group group.

I think I'm going to give it a day or two before I write down my final thoughts here.

End bits:
We get a sweet little map of the lioness’s journey from Appalachia to Alligator Mound (and, incidentally, what must be a drawing of those sugar cookies).

The Glossary is the type of thing I’m not good at looking at at the best of times, and I didn’t cross-reference while reading, but looking at it now, here are some abbreviations (“sanitized for your comfort!”) that stand out for me:

BBR
BLOTUS
CAF
DARVO
ECF
F4J
GOTMFV
IACIYAD
IDK
IOKIYAR
KIND
LAH
MFOL
MFSOB (wonderful sanitisation)
OBR
PND
POTUS (you won’t regret looking)
RACDHR
SWAG
SYG
TWC
UAE
WWJD
YTA

The Appendix is concerned with the themes that have run throughout the book: animals living wildly, humans taking advantage of nature, humans fighting and killing not only animals and the environment but also each other—but also bridges, and self-referential work, and memory, and pies.

The referenced works are:
- Jubliate Agno, Christopher Smart
- Ohio Annals: Historic Events in the Tuscarawas and Muskingum Valleys, and in Other Portions of the State of Ohio
- The Navigator, Zadok Cramer
- Domestic Manners of the Americans, Fanny Trollope
- My Life and Hard Times, James Thurber
- Emily of New Moon, L M Montgomery
- The History of Tuscarawas County, Ohio
- Letter to Major Edward W Winkoop from Silas Soule
- The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker, quoting Tsutomu Yamaguchi
- The Bridge, Hart Crane
- Mansfield Park, Jane Austen
- Edith Wharton, from her journal (which is quoted in her biography by Hermione Lee)
- 'Note on Painting', Robert Rauschenberg, from Pop Art Redefined, J. Russell and Suzi Gablik
- Bottom-crust fruit pie recipe, from Tarts with Tops On by Tamasin Day-Lewis (reproduced here in Recipes, too)

Bottom-crust fruit pie (serves 6)

This is a classic, American-style fruit pie with a free-form rough crust that you wrap unsymmetrically and messily around a pile of sugared fruit.

It involves no crimping, primping or decorating. It simply and unshowily displays the talents of the ingredients, fruit and pastry, and brings them together, making a virtue of inelegance.

You may use any fruit or combination of fruit you choose, though I think plums, damsons and greengages are pretty damned fine.


1 lb 10oz/750g fruit, plums, damsons, greengages, gooseberries, blackberry or apple
Shortcrust pastry made with 8oz/225g flour and 4oz/110g unsalted butter, or, better still, half butter, half lard
2.5-3oz/75-85g sugar depending on the sweetness of the fruit
Egg white to glaze and a little extra sugar
Cut plums or greengages in half and remove the stones. Damsons should be left unstoned; gooseberries should be topped and tailed; apples peeled, quartered, cored and cut into chunks.

Heat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6. Roll the pastry out into a large circle, about 12in/30cm in diameter, and flip it from the rolling pin into a greased baking tin. Tip the fruit into the middle of it in a reckless pile and sprinkle over the sugar.

Fold over the edges of the pastry as far as they will go without stretching them - fatal to pastry that shrinks by nature. The edges should very definitely not meet in the middle. Brush the pastry with egg white and scatter over a little more sugar, demerara if you prefer.

Bake for 20 minutes, then turn the oven temperature down to 180C/350F/gas mark 4 and bake for a further 25-30 minutes until bubbling with juices and golden brown.

Shane
The Apartment
Kramer vs. Kramer
The Bridges of Madison County
Julie & Julia
It’s Complicated
The Graduate
Some Like It Hot
The Wizard of Oz
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
There’s Always Tomorrow

Obviously I couldn't stop reading today, so now I'm posting the last full section a day ahead (or 6 days behind, however you look at it).

We are starting today, unusually, with the lioness, now at the zoo. She has been put in an enclosure next to her babies, but they cannot touch. Nevertheless, she is delighted to see them, and enjoys watching them. Eventually the zookeepers let them reunite, and it is absolute bliss for everyone: the lioness, the babies, and us, the readers. What a pleasure.

We’re back with Narrator, and she is alive, thank goodness. (In a minor parallel to the lioness story, an eaglet has been rescued and successfully returned to its parents too.)

Birds, she says, considering how scared they are of everything, are actually pretty brave. I think this is true of Narrator too, and the rest of this story proves it.

That douchebag Ronny came in and accused her in front of her kids of leading him on, when all she had ever done was try to get rid of him. It turns out he had been spying on them for ages, too. He said he was pissed off that she never invited her in, and then he had the nerve to come in and start eating her COOKIE DOUGH with her SWORDIE and then SHOT HER KITCHEN TIMER, and I have never wanted to punch someone fictional quite this bad in my life.

Of course he says he’s a Nice Guy. Yeah, they all are, Ronny. He then shoots up Narrator's house, but then Stacy saves the day, what a mensch, a human being. I’m delighted to find out that she learned a LOT from that self-defense book, and I’m getting some Revere Ware, stat.

Wait, was this whole book a Revere Ware advertisement?

It turns out the kids knew that Jim was with the Cherokee tracker, and they had been trying to keep that news from Narrator! And all of the neighbors and vendors are being so kind to the family. And Stacy gets to menace Willy, too, and Leo has even booked tickets to go to see the eclipse at the Elephant Sanctuary, and they’re letting Gillian do the Indian Mud Run, and Stacy is getting to see the lioness at the zoo, so it’s a happy ending all around . . .

. . . kind of. Oh Narrator, you’ve had such a terrible time for so long, and you’ve been such a good mother, and brave too, yet you still don’t believe in yourself. And now you’re traumatized. And the boys and Leo are traumatized, too, for sure (though the girls might be ok?). And Ronny may not even go to prison. And Frank wants to be back on the scene.

Gillian Watch: she gets her 8th birthday, but Narrator does still call her Ginnie accidentally (in her head).

PHEW what a story, and what an ending. I'm not sure any ending I've ever read has left me simultaneously as fulfilled and as conflicted as this one.

Reading to THE END.

Carmen
The Ring Cycle

The Fugitive
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Thunderball
North By Northwest
Gloria
Witness
Airplane!
Bigger Than Life
The Bridges of Madison County
Ryan’s Daughter
Twelve Angry Men
Psycho
Oklahoma
An American in Paris
The Music Man
Fiddler on the Roof
Singing’ In the Rain
Miracle on 34th Street
Hannah and Her Sisters
Shane
Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House
Fargo
Stepford Wives
Dr Zhivago

We stopped yesterday deep in the heart of The Fugitive, so that’s where we start again today, this time thinking of similarities with it and other films. (And these little recaps are getting longer, as more and more is happening.)

Narrator is struggling with her worth as a mother and housewife; she has started family therapy and thinks it’s just someone telling her what a lousy mother she is. She thinks about Amish women again and how they are happy with what they do because they are valued—

—meanwhile, one of her vendors, Peekaboo, owes her for TWENTY TWO pies, which would be enough for me to say NO MORE PIES. And it is for Narrator, too. Just thinking about Peekaboo is enough to make her pretty angry, and her stomach gets upset and she realizes she’s depressed and she starts crying. She thinks about all the things that have upset her recently, from a documentary about breast implants to seeing a guy yell at his wife for letting the dog put its paws on his trousers. Touchingly, Jake comes to the bathroom where she is and asks her if she is ok.

Then: the lioness. She seems to be coming closer and closer to humans, wandering around suburbs looking for her babies. Jim is still with her. They are both hungry.

Back to Narrator. She has been to family therapy with Stacy. First the therapists told her that they won’t be talking about Narrator’s dreams, which has got to be a blow for this woman, honestly. Then Stacy went and said that Narrator and Leo got married without her permission and then took Stacy’s playhouse away and gave it to the chickens. On the face of it, yeah, ok, that looks bad, but the context! The context!

Narrator pleads innocence to herself—she just can’t remember the stuff Stacy wants to talk about, and family therapy is about looking at stuff you’ve done in the past, which we know is not Narrator’s strength.

Despite that, she does start thinking about the past, about how lovely it was having Stacy, and how they used to visit Abby (staying at a local inn). She admits to herself—not for the first time—that when she got together with Leo she left Stacy out and assumed too much that because Leo was a great guy it would all be fine.

Narrator thinks about her parenting skills and says, yeah, I left you out a bit and made mistakes, but I didn’t, like, drive you off a bridge or anything, and anyway, you say you need your mom, but you certainly don’t act like it. She thinks again about her relationship with her own parents, and what they would make of her life now.

When Narrator told the therapists about Frank, Stacy went quiet, and it occurred to Narrator that Frank might have lied to Stacy about their breakup. Anyway, apparently both Narrator and Stacy couldn’t get out of family therapy fast enough, and they got to the mall as fast as they could.

Jake said that he saw the lioness the night Jim went missing. Narrator is horrified by the idea that it could have been there, and she wonders if it ate Jim. She knows the shelter will never let them adopt another dog. The authorities have hired a Cherokee person to track the lioness (well, half-Cherokee, and he grew up Italian in the Bronx, and he’s a wildlife officer).

Speaking of the lioness, we are back to her now. She’s having some crazy dreams about calling the rain down and controlling the lake that results from it, killing all humans where possible. I mean, I get it. She’s still got Jim; they’re hanging out now. But as they are continuing their hunt for her babies, the Cherokee wildlife officer shoots her with a tranquilliser dart (the previous shot was an actual bullet, I’m starting to think, since she is still injured by it—but maybe she was just injured by the crash), and, when Jim protests, gives the dog an affectionate scritch.

In Narrator’s world, she’s back on the local history and environmentalism, and Peekaboo still hasn’t paid up for those TWENTY TWO pies! What a bunch of jerks.

Still, there are worse things that can happen—and Narrator runs us through them in gruesome detail: murder, child murder, baby murder, racially-motivated murder, rape, fraud, domestic murder, and then she gets into a real rut: everything is stupid, and there is no room in the whole of Ohio for her needs, and she wants her Mommy.

Cut to lioness. She is caged by humans, whom she loathes, but to her surprise they do not hurt her, but instead try to feed her. She detests them still. Fair enough!

Narrator, meanwhile, seems a little brighter now, and she is relieved that the lioness has been caught. Is there something in the fact that Narrator’s Daddy and Stacy, both the family members she has the most complicated relationships with, were born during thunderstorms? maybe. And then the lioness is called Mishipeshu, meaning “underwater panther”—she was also caught in a storm.

Heeeyyy but guess whaaaat! The lioness is going to the Big Cat division of Columbus Zoo, which is where her babies are! (And just to summarise the next little lioness interlude, she is at the zoo and she haaaaates it, she hates the people, and she feels unsafe and alone.)

Narrator sees Jim in a news clip with the Cherokee tracker. She doesn’t think she should claim him: he looks ecstatic to be with the tracker. Instead, she thinks, maybe they should take one of Cathy’s dog’s puppies.

Toward the end we get a bunch of Narrator’s dreams, as ever, but one is particularly interesting to me: there is an isolated mountainside community dreaming up ever more arcane ways to avoid getting bored. Narrator thinks their clifftop life should be exciting enough, but they are all used to the danger they live in. Narrator herself, of course, is isolated and constantly keeping herself busy to avoid too much emotion, though at the same time she also thinks the precariousness of modern parenthood should be enough to keep her on her toes. Then, indeed, she runs through a litany of things that can happen to kids: lions eating them, toddlers getting accidentally killed, toddlers getting deliberately killed, kids in terrible accidents, kids in deliberate “accidents”, kids killed by accidental hammer blows, etc.

Ronny comes back; Narrator tells him she’s busy (she's being Domestic and making Lion Cookies with the Children which I believe is Important for this part) and he huffs off. BUT THEN HE COMES BACK IN WITH HIS GUN AND THIS IS WHERE WE ARE ENDING, WHAT!

An aside: Is the “dog do hanging in trees” thing a genuine US experience too? This is a thing that I see a LOT in the UK and which is referred to a LOT here, but I never knew it was a thing until I came to the UK. Then again, I’m from a rural area where dogs do whatever they want wherever they want, and nobody is going to be picking it up, tying it in a plastic bag, and throwing it into a tree. So I suppose Yankees may have a different experience.

Homework: Ryan's Daughter was mentioned once, briefly. Why not read Ryan’s Daughter: the inside story?

Stopping at "and instead she ends up in the sticks having to smell gangrene all the time," which is right before a lion interlude.

Lee wrote: "Leo had a troubling thought, 'Leo thinks pollution might have diminished everybody's brain power, the fact that it's a terrible thought, that maybe we're all operating at reduced capacity, we're dumber than previous generations'."

Oh yes! Triple yikes. It's probably true. If so, we can expect the least-polluted, the Scandinavians, to rule the world in 50 years' time—which, yes, fine.

Lee wrote: "but our oldest will be doing his sophomore year at Central virtually, though he'd rather be in person, but a crowded public high school and teens reluctant to wear masks doesn't sound promising, so no go."

It's a shame that he can't go in, but, yes, it's for the best, for the reasons you say. I personally would have loved to have done high school virtually, the whole damn thing. But I know it's not for everyone!

Rory wrote: "I am not a latin expert, but Tenebrae is also a service that happens on Good Friday about the passion of Jesus (where candles are slowly extinguished)"

Interesting point. My friend also said that tenebrae can also mean ghosts. Or I think he did.

Lee wrote: "Narrator had an outright optimistic and sunny bit in this section, which stood out for me given her (and my) usual general anxiety"

I noticed this too, and I wondered if it is just her appreciation of the springtime. Maybe she's particularly morose in the dark winters?

Re: whether kids would be sent home because of a cougar sighting: it's hard to say! Maybe in suburban Ohio.

Lee wrote: "That novel made such an impression on me I planted ten baby trees in our backyard from the Arbor Day Foundation after reading it, nine of which are alive and growing still!

This is wonderful! I will put it on my list.

No-Bean Chili

INGREDIENTS
2lbs ground beef
1/4 cup chill powder
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp all-spice
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1 bay leaf
1 oz unsweetened chocolate (important: the chill is no good without it)
2 cans beef broth
1 can tomatoes
2 tbls cider vinegar
1/4 tsp cayenne

METHOD
Brown your spices and meat, then simmer everything together.

Crab-Stick Sandwich

INGREDIENTS
Crab sticks
Raw Garlic
Jalapeno
Ginger
Celery Salt

METHOD
Assemble sandwich, eat one or two. Please note that crab sticks need celery salt; do not substitute.

The Accidental Tourist
There’s Always Tomorrow
Witness
Deception
It’s Complicated
The Apartment
Bigger Than Life
All The President's Men
The Graduate
To Have and Have Not
To Be or Not to Be
Die Hard 2
Rebecca
The Contender
Bambi
Barbarella
Barefoot in the Park
My Fair Lady
The King’s Speech
The Fugitive
Hope Springs

We’re all about the dogs and ducks at first, but then we get back to Willy. The cops won’t do a damn thing about him, #defundthepolice, which has made Leo spitting mad. Stacy is also extremely worried and keeps checking on the cats.

Gillian Watch: Narrator dreams about a second chance to give a little girl a good upbringing. The little girl is called Stacy, and Gillian doesn’t even exist in the dream!

A few bits in here that give me pause: Narrator refers to “Frank” instead of “Fred” in one tiny moment talking about There’s Always Tomorrow, and then in thinking about the film she thinks how Fred is up to no good and the kids suspect but his wife doesn’t, and how husbands always end up shooting wives or having affairs with old flames, hmmm. I mean, we know Leo isn’t the gun type, and we also know he’s very popular with the women he works with . . .

After the typical meandering thoughts of animals and the environment and so on, we get another lion interlude. The mother lion has been shot with what seems to be a tranquilizer dart, shut into a cage, and put into a vehicle. That vehicle, though, has a terrible car accident, and the back hatch of the car opens in the crash. She limps away.

Back to narrator. It turns out that Fresia has nixed the idea of a playdate for James with Ben, what a cow. Ben is, of course, hurt by this. Narrator thinks through the plots of Deception and, of course, her old favorite, It’s Complicated. We learn that there is a $10,000 reward for bringing the lion in alive . . .

. . . and then another lion interlude. The lioness rests for a while, then begins her search again in earnest. She finds a house with a chicken coop outside, and a little dog tied to a tree nearby. The lioness cannot get to the chickens and disappears into the trees. The little dog frees himself from his collar and follows her like a shadow for days.

And back to Narrator again. And guess what: that little dog was Jim, and the chickens were Narrator’s chickens. We find that out after Narrator thinks about how her life is so much different from her mother’s and Abby’s lives, and how much she dislikes tattoos, and about chili, and about her dream of Ronny—no, Narrator—and about how she can’t eat food with seeds anymore, or raw fruits and vegetables.

Narrator is sad that Jim is gone, but not too cut up about it, really. They did go out looking for him, with no luck, of course. Stacy was more upset, and now is sitting in the house watching The Fugitive, which Narrator thinks about in real time while also thinking about various injustices, from Ohio making D&Cs illegal to flight attendants giving people hassle on airplanes.

At least the reward money has been withdrawn from offer now, and the driver of the car that crashed with the lioness in it survived. The lioness has meanwhile achieved folk hero status.

Homework: Have a look at the incredible Longaberger basket building and the newer basket monument!

Fun fact: I share a birthday with Tommy Lee Jones.