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The Return: Some Perspective

The Return: Some Perspective

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A rainy-day return to the office. Low light, lowered expectations; today’s goal to survive. Grateful for a certain rainy-day coziness and the quiet required to work hard and long to meet deadlines.

Just coincidentally, I was reading a passage from  Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus as I disembarked in D.C. “Girls were getting up all over London. In striped pyjamas, in flowered Viyella nightgowns, in cotton shifts they had made themselves and unevenly hemmed … They were putting the shilling in the meter and the kettle on the gas ring. … “

Ah, I’m feeling better already. I have a store-bought cotton nightgown. I have an electric tea kettle. I pay for gas by the month not the morning.

Hazzard continues: “It is hard to say what they had least of—past, present or future. It is hard to say how or why they stood it, the cold room, the wet walk to the bus, the office in which they had no prospects and no fun.”

Oh dear. Have I ever thought like this? Of course. Poor me, back from a lovely vacation to my comfortable office! Poor me, paid to write and edit!

Hazzard has put it in perspective: It could be worse, and it has been.

“Poor me” better get busy.

Summer Reading (in Tandem)

Summer Reading (in Tandem)

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Yesterday on the way home from work, I picked up a quart of local strawberries, a loaf of French bread and two books. I like thinking of books that way, as staple and delight.

When at the library I saw the poster for the summer reading program, which starts today. “Paws to Read” is the logo.

It all rushed back to me then. The lists of titles each of my girls would keep — each in her own distinctive scrawl. Our trips to the library on sultry afternoons, laden with bags of picture books and chapter books. Searching the shelves for old favorites — and discovering new ones in the process. The coupons the girls received upon completion. Redeeming them for a cookie at the bakery or an eraser at the office supply store.

I live in a different universe now, but the girls and I still trade titles and lists and favorites. We may not read together anymore, but we do read in tandem.

(Illustration: Courtesy Fairfax County Public Library)

All Aboard

All Aboard

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It doesn’t always happen this way — in fact, it usually does not — but today I didn’t so much ride the train to work as float here. I opened the novel at West Falls Church, left it out of the bag to read while waiting for the Red Line at Metro Center, and only reluctantly tucked it away when I exited at Judiciary Square.

It’s not the book itself I want to write about here, but the act of reading.

Sometimes I’m the person staring into the tiny screen of a smartphone or tapping on its keyboard. And the newspaper also has its allure. But books are the best commuting companions. They are the ones that blur the miles, that stitch home to office most deftly.

But just as books are good for commuting, commuting is good for books —100 minutes of almost uninterrupted mind space (round trip) — time to lose myself in even a boring tome, to say nothing of a moderately engrossing novel.

Landscape of Childhood

Landscape of Childhood

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In My Life in Middlemarch, Rebecca Mead writes:

“[George] Eliot found regenerative inspiration in the remembrance of the landscape of her childhood. Her love for the deep green England of Warwickshire was the foundation of her belief that the love we have for the landscape in which we have grown up has a quality that can never be matched by our admiration of any environment discovered later, no matter how beautiful.”

Mead quotes Eliot from The Mill on the Floss:

“These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird notes, this sky with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows — such things as these are the mother tongue of our imagination …”

And later, this line, which I quote in my own book: “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” 

I read these passages on a bumpy flight to my hometown, sick at heart, sick in stomach, but imagining the balm that awaited me — my own “furrowed and grassy fields.” And knowing there would be some comfort there. And as always, there has been.

Out of the Woods

Out of the Woods

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I just finished reading Lynn Darling’s Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding, a book about discovering a sense of direction in midlife.

When her daughter left for college, Darling moved to an off-the-grid house near Woodstock, Vermont. The woods were cool and inviting, a place to sort herself out. But Darling always became lost in them. So she took a survival course, learned to use a compass, acquired a topographical map. She found landmarks, charted distances from her house to a neighbor’s. Gradually she learned the nuances of wayfinding, when to trust herself and when to trust the map:

“Maps, I know now, are not static. Walk in a place long enough and you see all the mistakes that have yet to be corrected, the disconnect between the three-dimensional reality on which you walk and its two-dimensional representation. Walk in a place long enough and even the most accurate maps fail to represent what is actually there.”

As I read her book — on my Kindle — I pondered my own wanderings, the paths I’m following and the ones I am not. I thought about how important it is to stay limber as we grow older, to keep pushing ourselves in directions we have not gone before.

It took three-quarters of the book, but I finally performed my own little bit of technological wayfinding: I learned how to highlight the passages I enjoyed so I could find them later. A small achievement, but an achievement just the same. So, courtesy of Kindle’s “highlight” feature, here’s Darling again:

“Getting older is largely a matter of getting over yourself, of stepping out of your own way, the better to see the world through a wider lens than the narrow preoccupations of self had ever provided.

I wasn’t any of the things I had strived to be, or tried to escape. I was just a walker in the woods, who had learned a thing or two perhaps about finding her way, one who would get lost again and again.”

Body in Motion

Body in Motion

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Here is a brief hymn to the body in motion, a passage from the memoir Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I read the book a few weeks ago and marked this page:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs …

leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat …

feeling the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.

To which I will add … and along woodland trails, suburban lanes, the paved paths that run beside busy roads, the strips of sidewalk that show up unannounced when I least expect them — and across streams on cylinders of concrete, the water rushing beneath my feet.

Virtual Recall

Virtual Recall

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I’ve now read half a dozen or so books on my Kindle and the verdict (for me, at least) is in. While my book recall is poor enough with ink-on-paper tomes, it is almost nonexistent with the electronic product.

Night before last, at my book group’s annual book-picking, my friend Gwen proposed The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. Oh, that’s lovely, I said. And it was. I remember that much.

“What’s it about?” Marianne asked.

I pondered, I reached way back into the dim recesses of memory (nine months?) and … came up with nothing. Only that it was lovely and I enjoyed it.

Luckily, my book group friends totally understood. They have also experienced “Kindle Brain.” In fact, just a few minutes later, someone would propose a book we already read — and it would take us half an hour to notice it.

Thank God it was a book I’d read in hard copy. Had it been electronic I would be re-reading it now.

Walkable City

Walkable City

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“Walking is a simple and a useful thing, and such a pleasure,
too. It is what brings planeloads of Americans to Europe on holiday, including even some of the traffic engineers who make our own cities so inhospitable.”  — Jeff Speck, Walkable City
 It would take far more than a single post to describe all the ideas in this book, thoughts about walkability from one of the nation’s foremost experts on it, the city planner Jeff Speck. For now here are Speck’s “Ten Steps of Walkability”:
 Put cars in their place
Mix uses
Get parking right
Let transit work
Protect the pedestrian
Welcome bikes
Shape the spaces
Plant trees
Make friendly and unique spaces
Pick your winners
Speck mentions European cities throughout the book. Here are places where pedestrians rule, where public transit safely transports people to and from their destinations, where bikes are welcome and buildings create human-scaled places.
What all these features combine to create is a walkable environment, one people want to stroll through and be part of.  We need to value “moving under one’s own power at a relaxed pace through a public sphere that
continually rewards the senses,” Speck says. “We need a new normal in America, one that
rewards walking.”

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

The Bibliophiles Have Spoken

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I’d first heard the news from a friend a few weeks ago, someone who works in the Fairfax County Library system. Books were being tossed and librarians were being let go, she said. A new plan was in the offing, one with fewer librarians and fewer books, a plan later hailed as the transition “from a print environment to a digital environment,” according to a Washington Post article that broke the news last week.

When a county supervisor heard the news about the banished books, she rescued scores of good volumes from a dumpster and deposited them on the desk of a county official. The discarded books became a call to arms.

Since the news was made public, the Fairfax County Library has been told to put its new library plan on hold.

The books are safe. For a while, at least.

Big Sky

Big Sky

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It is a day of clarity and blue sky, a day that makes me dream of the West with its forever-faraway views. What would it be like to live in the open, to give up the canopy we Easterners hide beneath?

In Wolf Willow, Wallace Stegner has some answers:

Over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which on days like this sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild, a light pure, glareless, and transparent. The horizon a dozen miles away is as clean a line as the nearest fence. …

The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving. The earth is passive. And yet the beauty I am struck by, both as present fact and as revived memory, is a fusion: this sky would not be so spectacular without this earth to change and glow and darken under it.