Growing Up

by Russell Baker

This was an entertainingly written book (a Pulitzer Prize winner) about the author’s childhood to young adulthood.  (He was born in 1925.)  He didn’t have an easy childhood but the book wasn’t a pity party, either.

Quotes

“Sitting at her bed side [his mother with Alzheimers], forever out of touch with her, I wondered about my own children, and their children, and children in general, and about the disconnections between children and parents that prevent them from knowing each other.  Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity there is no parent left to tell them.  If a parent does lift the curtain a bit, it is often only to stun the young with some exemplary tale of how much harder life was in the old days.”    p. 6  ¶2

“Uncle Charlie gave me my first real education in politics.  From Uncle Charlie I first heard the word “socialism,” a doctrine so evil, he gave me to understand, that it could destroy our country.  America, he told me, had been built with initiative and hard work.  Socialism, he told me, discouraged hard work and destroyed initiative.  And socialism was what Franklin Roosevelt was practicing.  Didn’t I ever look at the newspaper...?  Didn’t I realize that millions of people were being given money by the government for doing no work at all?”
    p. 109  ¶2

“The changeover from knickers to long pants was the ritual recognition that a boy had reached adolescence, or ‘the awkward age,’ as everybody called it.  The ‘teenager,’ like the atomic bomb, was still uninvented, and there were few concessions to adolescence, but the change to long pants was a ritual of recognition.  There was no ceremony about it.  You were taken downtown one day and your escort—my mother in my case—casually said to the suit salesman, ‘Let’s see what you’ve got in long pants.’”     p. 159  ¶7

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This TIme Next Year We'll Be Laughing

by Jacqueline Winspear

Excellent!  I loved it.  Winspear grew up in the late 1950s and 1960s in England.  I love the detail about picking hops, oast houses, her parents’ time living in a gypsy caravan, and the other memories she shared of her own childhood and youth.   

Her parents taught her to work and that work would take care of many emotions – anger, sadness, unhappiness.  She had surgery on her eyes when she was young.  Her face was black and blue after the surgery.  When her father saw her, he held her close and told her, “This time next year we’ll be laughing (p.157-8).”  I love the subtle admission that now is rough combined with the strong suggestions throughout the book that things will get better in the future.  The optimism!

Quotes

“We are, all of us, products of our family mythology.  Stories are not only passed down, but nestled in every cell.”    p. 5  ¶2

“Martin Parsons, founder of the Research Centre for Evacuee and War Child Studies at the University of Reading, England, suggests that it takes three generations for an experience of war to work its way through the family system.”    p.30  ¶1

“...It has only been since I began to write this memoir that I have reconsidered the power of storytelling on so many levels.  Of course, we know a story can change even a nation—the stories told by politicians, especially tyrants, dictators and despots, have sent young men and women to perish on battlefields for millennia.  Countries and peoples have been brought to their knees by stories, and equally they have been given the strength to rise up, to endure and to show strength beyond measure.  But as much as stories bring warmth to our days, help us find our voices or work things out, stories—even the ones considered entertaining—can also damage, create doubt, cause an aching distress or a wounding humiliation.  Words have the potential to cause such pain, it’s a wonder the dictionary doesn’t come with a government health warning.”    p, 138-139

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The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Written by Margaret Renkl 
Illustrated by Billy Renkl

I think Margaret Renkl could be considered a patron saint of nature!  This is a beauty of a book, from the writing, to the topics, to the illustrations—all are wonderful.  Renkl writes with poignancy and grace about the wonders and delights of the natural world while not ignoring the sorrows and challenges plants, animals, and insects face.  Her writings have encouraged me to slow down, be more observant, look more closely at the outdoor world, and be appreciative.  The essays follow the seasons, a few pages for each.  Each essay is accompanied by a beautiful collage.

This is a sampling of Renkl's beautiful use of words.

In writing of the remnants of snakeroot plant flowers, she called them “fluffs of botanical celebration.”   p.xv ¶2

“ I fell in love with the way the peeling bark and bare limbs of the sycamore reveal a ghost tree reaching for the sky....”   p. 30 ¶3

It “might have been snow in the diamond air” of a winter morning.   p. 35 ¶1

“In the avian world, a grub is an engagement ring.”   p.l48 ¶1

Who knew?!  “Just a whiff of it [the wet soil of the drenched garden] will flood you with a feeling of well-being.  The microbes in freshly turned soil stimulate serotonin production, working on the human brain to same way antidepressants do. ”   p. 78 ¶2

“... In a wet world, deadfall and soil erupt into fungi.   Delicate whorls of polypores make a bouquet of fallen pines.  Bright elf cups are scattered across the leaf litter as though a parade has passed by.  Glowing angel wing mushrooms fruit on the hemlock like a bridal veil trailing along the path.   Chicken of the woods make yellow and orange ruffles fit for a square dancer’s skirt.  Oh, their marvelous fungi names!  Firerug inkcap, turkey tail, witch’s hat, stinkhorn, jelly fungus, shaggy scarlet cup!”   p. 162 ¶4

An insight on an aging body:   “The accruing indignities of a body that is no longer predictable makes it hard not to ponder what other burdens might lie ahead.”   p. 190 ¶2

"Autumn light is the loveliest light there is.  Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world a brightened dream.  Dust motes catch fire, drifting down from the trees and rising from the stirred soil, floating over lawns and woodland paths and ordinary roofs and parking lots.  It’s an unchoreographed aerial dance, a celebration of what happens when light marries earth and sky.”   p. 203 ¶1

On growing older:  “Now I understand that every day I’m given is as real as life will ever get.  Now I understand that we are guaranteed nothing, that our days have always been running out.”   p. 204 ¶3

“In light, the horizon extends before us, a tableau of endless possibility, while darkness allows all manner of doubts to burble up....  How much easier it is to give in to gloom, even dejection, when it is the darkness that feels endless.”  
p. 252 ¶2

Enjoy!
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