Sixteen Years - Sixteen Happys

My cursor says “Happys” is not a word, but what does it know? Sixteen years ago today we drove into Hattiesburg having chosen it as our home. To tell the truth, this was not my idea. I was perfectly happy where we were in Leesville, Louisiana, but Al had always wanted to return to his home state for retirement. Since he picked the state, I picked the city – not that we actually reasoned it out. 

I’m listing sixteen things I’ve found to like in honor of the anniversary.

1.      We start with a 70s ranch house with enough windows that I feel like I’m outside even when I’m inside taking advantage of the air-conditioning.

2.      The yard has something blooming year-round.

3.      The population of that yard includes rabbits, turtles, a fox, armadillos, lizards, scads of butterflies, bumblebees, and birds. (The snakes aren’t happys.)

The de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection comes in for several items:

4.      I found a story to write for Highlights Magazine for Children there.

5.      They selected me as the researcher for the 50^th anniversary edition of The Snowy Day.

6.      I wrote the script and selected the pictures to be used for the video on the 100^th anniversary of Ezra Jack Keats’s birth at the book festival’s Keats Awards Day.

Likewise, I have several items from the Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival:

7.      The pure joy of attending for sixteen years counts for one, especially when I can be the volunteer driver for book people guests who come.

8.      I wrote the script for the formation of the story-telling event named for Colleen Salley, chuckling often as I wrote. How could you do otherwise if you knew Colleen?

The community has many other offerings:

9.      OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) has classes to take and teach, field trips, and friendships.

10.  I’ve taught creative writing to elementary and middle school students at the Frances Karnes Center for Gifted Studies.

11.  In less than two hours, my writer friends and I can be in New Orleans for the monthly critique meetings of the LA/MS branch of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

12.  I am a friend of two libraries and can check out books in either!

13.  The music department at the University of Southern Mississippi has more excellent symphony, faculty, and student performances than one can take in – many free!

14.  The Carey Dinner Theatre hosts a couple of light-hearted performances every summer with home-cooked meals.

15.  There’s University Baptist Church that welcomes everybody and has given us opportunities to worship, serve, and form fast friendships.

16.  Our newest happy in Hattiesburg is our youngest son’s family with two preschoolers who pop in and out and three big kids who come to visit from college. 

Truthfully, I could go on, but I will just say the promising portent I saw as we drove into town sixteen years ago with a triple rainbow ahead of us was an accurate omen. Should you be looking for a good place to live, come on down!

Hazel Brannon Smith

In his book, Hazel Brannon Smith, Jeffrey B. Howell reveals the complicated status of one moderate white woman during the Civil Rights Era. His secondary title, “The Female Crusading Scalawag,” accurately portrays her life both before and after the apex of the period.

Born in 1914, Hazel fit the pattern of the time to become a beautiful wife and hostess to some successful business man or politician, but she was having none of that. Instead, she did the unthinkable and bought first one and then several local newspapers in rural Holmes County, MS and its surroundings. Her first journalistic crusades sought out bootleggers and corrupt politicians. For almost fifty years she wrote an editorial column “From Hazel Eyes,” in addition to carrying local news with more attention to the black community than was normal for this area.

The book pictures her own personal growth from a strong supporter of Jim Crow segregation to becoming an ally in the black struggle for social justice. In doing this, it also brings light to the spectrum of both white and black views of the Civil Rights movement, to the change that often occurred as people gained insight into the issues, and to how people like Hazel often found themselves on the wrong side with intense advocates from both groups.

Howell quotes her toward the end with a philosophy that kept her in the business long after she had put herself in impossible debt trying to hang on, “There are already too many jellyfish in the world. We don’t need any more in the form of editors. But if the whole world turns against you, and sometimes it may, you still have your own self-respect.” She died in 1994, having lost her property to her lenders and her memory to Alzheimer’s Disease, but with her self-respect still intact.

The book is a good read for those who enjoy biography and an enlightening read for those who are interested in seeing that neither white nor black people in the Civil Rights Era can be painted with one swipe of a single brush.

Claiming Kin

One of the things I like about the South is how quickly we can find a reason to claim kin with people. Mama excelled in this to the point that Daddy said if she found out that your grandfather’s dog crossed her grandfather’s cotton patch, that was sufficient to make you relatives.

I “take after” her which has caused me to renew interest this past week in the Miss Mississippi pageant. I probably haven’t bothered to watch for ten years, but this year I’ve claimed kin to one of the contestants, Miss Southern Magnolia. She is my daughter-in-law’s second cousin or first cousin once removed, depending on which count you use. Obviously, I’m kinfolk since that’s much closer than dogs crossing cotton patches.

Her double name, evidently as much a requirement as a drawl to enter the Mississippi pageant, is Mary Margaret. “Mary,” like “Ann” in my Virginia Ann substitutes in Southern culture nicely as the equivalent of “junior” for sons. Her mother is Margaret, as mine was Virginia.

I felt family pride in her platform of organ/tissue donation in honor of her mother and in memory of her grandmother who set the example in being a donor and a recipient. The donation gave her grandmother several extra years of life.

Social media and my daughter-in-law kept me up on the preliminary events all week as Mary Margaret enjoyed each segment and didn’t blink an eye during her talent segment but kept right on playing the piano and singing while the faulty microphones were fixed by little guys hovering across the stage about midway through her performance. In the final, Saturday night on TV, she was easy to spot as the only contestant with her hair up so we could say, “There she is!”

Mary Margaret didn’t win, but we were proud of her enthusiasm all week and her graciousness at the end. And there’s always next year. Right, cousin?

Ruined Stones

Ruined Stones by Eric Reed will do little to educate your mind or edify your soul, but it will take you away for an adventure to another time and place for a little while. Now and again – just what you need. 

The book is set during the 1941 Blitz with mysteries to be solved first of the death of an unidentifiable woman which leaves much speculation for a motive and then another of a man hated by enough people to create a cast of suspects. Both bodies are left in a backwards swastika formation. Are they related or is there a copycat in place?

Grace Baxter, new constable for Newcastle-on-Tyne, gets assignments that reflect the dismissive attitudes of her superiors toward a new rookie – and a woman at that – until she takes it on herself to start following leads.

Plenty of possibilities for the perpetrator exist with one man who is Dutch (or is he German?), one who works outside under cover of night while the rest of the village observes the blackout inside, and any of the group of people who are interested in the spirit world. The setting with a ruined Roman temple and a church in close proximity adds to the tension. Grace questions whether her own ability to sense the spirits of the dead, inherited from her grandmother, will help her find the culprit and wrestles with whether the murderer is the same for both victims.

I received this adventure that will be published on July 4 in an ARC from Net Galley and enjoyed a trip away and back in time. One helpful hint: Flip to the back matter before you begin reading to get an explanation of the Geordie dialect and definitions. While Reed writes with enough context to figure out the words he uses, knowing the terms will save some time and distraction.

The Morphing Wedding Dress

Ah, June! Anniversaries abound, including mine. Pictures of events from various decades posted on Facebook bring on an urge to tell the story of THE wedding dress.

Fortunately, its origin was in an era of the fullest skirts imaginable. I made the original version with twenty-five (yes, 25) yards of lace. The trick to getting all that fabric into the skirt was to take huge darts at the top and then gather the rest as tight as possible. I loved the dress as well as the guy I was marrying.

I didn’t get to see the next two versions since the Army had us too far away (New York City and Paris) to get back to Mississippi in days before one just hopped a plane for any occasion. Mama took the skirt off with plenty of fabric to play with and turned out two different versions for the next two sisters, Beth and Gwyn.

Being a little nearer (Fort Knox, KY) and with sheer determination not to miss all my sisters’ weddings, I made the last one. Mama transformed what looked like the last pieces of the lace once again for Ruth, the final sister. We were amused when news reports and pictures of Julie Nixon’s wedding dress came out shortly after the wedding and showed a version from some big-name designer. Mama could have sued for copying Ruth’s dress.  

The dress was not the only thing we had in common. Daddy performed all four ceremonies, and Papaw, the only grandparent we ever knew, gave us all away. The marriages, none of them perfect, all took. (My sisters are free to correct this assessment if they feel the need.) Two lasted more than four decades before completing the “until death do us part” promise, and the other two have passed their golden wedding anniversaries.

There were a few scraps from the wedding dress, passed on to me as the family hoarder. When our daughter began to plan her wedding, I asked the sisters for permission to use the last of the lace. They readily agreed, and I scrounged enough of the still beautifully white fabric to cover the bodice of her wedding dress and enhance the train and sleeves.

The one thing lacking in this tale is a good set of pictures. Three of us had photography issues. The best I can do is this offering of my picture where you can see the full skirt, taken by a cousin’s new black-and-white camera they had just bought for the bank where he worked; one of my daughter in her dress with the final relics of the lace, and a picture of the final version for the youngest sister hanging on my closet door, passed along once again to the family hoarder.

Having passed more than its projected points of usefulness, the time has come for that morphing wedding dress to disappear into the sunset. This hoarder bids it a nostalgic goodbye.

In less than an hour from my post, I do have a correction from a sister, but not about the perfection of the marriages. Beth made her own modifications for her dress (which I should have known) and sewed a fragment of the lace into a handkerchief for her daughter's wedding.

Midnight Without a Moon

An intriguing title can pull a reader into parting with some money in the bookstore. When that title treads a theme throughout a story taking the reader back into another time, it feels like a promise kept. The title, Midnight Without a Moon and the story from Linda Williams Jackson’s debut novel, fulfills that promise. In an interview on her website, she cites conversations heard in her family followed by her own “what ifs?” as the beginning for her narrative.

Thirteen-year-old Rose Lee Carter can’t wait to get out of Mississippi and follow the Great Migration as her mother and aunt have done. Living with her sharecropping grandparents, she begins to hear adult arguments over the NAACP and voter rights. A wide spectrum from sharecroppers who want to play it safe and not muddy the waters to the activists who want to go door-to-door insisting on voter registration accurately portray the times and feelings within the community. Mixed with big issues of the adult world is Rose’s own discouraging image in the mirror of skin so dark it is like “midnight without the moon.” With tensions already at a peak, an African American boy named Emmitt Till is killed in the next village over, supposedly because he whistled at a white woman.

Linda Jackson’s ability to create multi-dimensional characters, portray an accurate historical time period, and give the spectrum of feelings and reactions to trouble in the air reminded me of Mildred Taylor’s series that includes Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

I didn’t want to close the book at the end, but Linda Jackson did skillfully what few authors do so well. She brought a satisfying close to the book while leaving a door wide open to the sequel, A Sky Full of Stars, scheduled for January 2018. I have it on my wish list for an ARC from Net Galley and am hoping that Jackson’s Carters will match the number of Taylor’s Logan family books. With any luck, I may get the sequel ahead of time. If I do, I’ll be sure to share another review.

Bookjoy!

Pat Mora coined the word “Bookjoy” and shared it with the audience at the 2017 Fay B. Kaigler Children’s Book Festival. I wished I had thought of it myself, but she gave me permission to use it. It fits an agenda important to me. Rather than giving kids rewards or points for reading as though it was something repulsive they have to be conned into doing, I would like to make the case that reading should be the reward. Bookjoy!

Pat’s word made me think of a picture in my stash sent by my daughter-in-law who heard someone reading as she did the laundry. With only a three-year-old and two-year-old in the house, she was puzzled. The picture shows the reader she discovered as Benjamin “read” the book he’d memorized because he loved it to his little brother – Wendell and Florence Minor’s If You Were a Penguin. Bookjoy!

I had a couple of methods of creating bookjoy as a parent and as a teacher. If a child got himself/herself off to bed on time without trauma, said child could leave the lamp on to read. I’ve taken many a book fallen on a child’s chest as he lost the sleep battle, put a bookmark in the place, and laid it aside for the next morning where it might be read again alongside breakfast cereal. And there was the summer night when my junior high mathematician son borrowed my book from my kiddie lit class. Finding a fellow math lover in Carry On, Mr. Bowditch kept him up all night. Bookjoy!

In a similar manner, my second-grade students who finished their work could read anything they chose for any time we were not involved in classwork. They brought their favorites, magazines, comic books, and hurried to be the first to read the treasures from my desk – Amelia Bedelia, Ramona, Stuart Little, All of a Kind Family . . . Bookjoy!

This week I had to close Midnight Without a Moon when the technician called me back for bloodwork at a routine doctor’s visit. She looked about the age to have a middle-schooler so I asked. She confirmed a daughter that age who shared her love of reading. I recommended the book and she put its name in her phone. “I’ll look for it,” she said, “I like to get her little ‘happies’ now and then.” Bookjoy!

Of course, my latest efforts are concentrated on a couple of grandsons. I just realized this second picture is also a Minor book, How to Be a Bigger Bunny. The boys have books from other authors, but Wendell and Florence are favorites with the preschool set.

I invite you to join Pat Mora and me in spreading Bookjoy!

There, There

Let’s just say you are looking for a picture book that children will enjoy and the adult who reads aloud will not be sick of after the thirty- fifth reading. I have such a book for you – There, There, written by Tim Bieser and cleverly illustrated by Bill Slavin.

Hare whines and paces, sick to death of all the rain. Other problems ensue. His friend Bear, in an effort to cheer him up, keeps repeating, “There, there.” As you might imagine, Hare fails to be comforted. 

Eventually, Bear gets enough and drags Hare outdoors to teach him a lesson. He shows him the blind earthworm whose only friend is his other end. Hare gets the message that life could be much worse, and they return inside.

The “lesson” loses its moralizing character as the earthworm, left in his own habitat, reacts to being used in such a fashion. The tongue-in cheek ending will delight the adult as well as the child.

Clouds - Again

A long week of rain has made me rash

Sending me to my photo stash.

Sunnier pictures from some time ago

When I needed the world to slow.

The clouds recalled childhood with a friend

When we watched, playing just pretend.

 What do you see in this fluffy stack?

A turtle with cotton balls piled on his back

 What could this scattering mean to you?

Fish in the sea with a shark coming through

 How about this one causing suspense?

Will the dog on the left leap over the fence?

My cries, “Enough water,” are to no avail

And conjure this mermaid set to sail

I hope her farewell comes without fail

As she blows a kiss and waves her tail.

So there you have it. This is what happens when my brain gets waterlogged. Sun is promised for Wednesday. 

The Unexpected Life of Oliver Cromwell Pitts

Now and again, I run into a foregone conclusion when looking through the Net Gallery offerings of ARCs to be read and reviewed. I enjoy discovering debut writers, but if Avi is the author, my request is automatic. This master of historical fiction in The Unexpected Life of Oliver Cromwell Pitts evoked another favorite author (Charles Dickens) and another favorite Oliver (Twist). The book begins with a tempest sweeping through his home and gets steadily worse from there.

Oliver, in 1700s England, left to his own devices after his father goes to London to seek his sister, finds his father’s unreadable note sodden from the storm. The note might have had some useful information – not that his father had been much help even when he was present with only repeated promises to be a better father next time.  

In Dickensian tradition, Oliver goes from worse to much worse. As he describes his life about halfway through the book, “If you have followed my story – and I hope you have not skipped a word because I have labored extremely hard on each and every one – you should have noted that every time I move forward, I am thwarted by an adult.”

Avi has never disappointed me with a good read, including this book. The one difference? He’s left an enticing lead to a sequel. Naturally, I had to check and see when it would be coming out. According to Avi's blog, the next book is “pretty much done” although he was talking to the editor about changing a word.

Don’t I hate waiting for the sequel to a book that’s had me turning pages?

Unidentified

Titles on Marvin Kendrick’s photographic art do not exist. The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute group gathered for their gallery showing’s opening reception of his works and a Q and A with the artist. He explained that he didn’t want to limit perception with his own ideas since he’d rather leave his photographs for the viewer to interpret the tale told by the picture. As I looked around the room, I liked that idea since I could see room for a story behind each of his pictures.

He is allowing OLLI to choose one for permanent display. That may be the hard part with beauty in each photograph, especially since he has left the door open for personal story interpretations. With the live wires at OLLI, I’m sure there will be strong preferences among the members of the Art Committee.

I’ll jump in right away with my choice, not that it counts for anything, and the story it told me. This photo was taken in New Brunswick, Canada along the shore of the Bay of Fundy. I saw a rock that dared to be different. Of course, it stood out with the background of all the blues that made its orange seem even more intense. Oddly, the orange made the blues more intense as well. (To prove my point, cover the orange rock and just look at the blues.)

Within the range of its influence, a couple of smaller rocks seem to be taking on the hue. Are they gaining courage to become who they really are instead of reflecting the crowd around them? Before we lose interest in the crowd, it’s their very similarity that makes the orange rock pop. And even as their similar color makes them fit together overall, they also have their differences. A bit of time will reward the viewer with the unique that lies even in the members of the crowd who seem so similar at first glance.

When it comes to any form of art, I’m the little dark blue one in the middle bottom. I like to think that my appreciation makes the orange ones like Marvin shine a little brighter.

Salt Houses

In Palestine, Salma reads her daughter’s coffee dregs on the eve of her wedding, but only tells Alia part of what she foresees. The rest she will find out soon enough. Salt Houses, Hala Alyan’s debut novel, covers three family generations.

The first uprooting and loss comes with the Six Day War of 1967. The book follows the family through a series of relatively peaceful times intercepted by war for the next fifty years. Bit by bit and war by war, the family scatters to Kuwait City, Beirut, Paris, and Boston with different levels and approaches to how much they assimilate into their new cultures and how much they hold onto the old values and traditions.  

She describes the war times – electricity cutting out every few hours, adults forbidding children to leave the house or even to go out on the balcony, men yelling at the television when it was on and shaking their heads, news reports with streaks of smoke from the airport, and planes dropping bombs “like eggs from their abdomens.”

In between, life resembles a normal pull and tug as children grow up wanting to stretch their wings and throw off old restrictions, as parents worry and disagree on how to handle the young ones, and as grandmother recalls the old ways or helps the young ones circumvent the rules. Normality lasts only until the next conflict.

The theme of the book is in a paragraph near the end. “What they say never changes. There is a war Alia knows. She understands this intuitively; in fact, it seems to her the only truth she holds immutable. There is a war. It is being fought and people are losing, though she is uncertain who exactly.”

Salt Houses sheds light on a question I’ve often asked when I’ve seen those reports of wars that seem interminable, “How do people live in that kind of atmosphere?” and puts a human face on what seems far away and can be forgotten once the newscast goes off.

Speechless

Laryngitis, about the only thing with the power, has rendered me speechless. Like many other things, it has also brought memories of one of Daddy’s favorite jokes.

A customer comes into the ice cream shop and requests a cone of ice cream. The girl behind the counter rasps, “What would you like? We have chocolate, vanilla, and Karo pecan.”

The customer asks, “Do you have laryngitis?”

“No,” the girl answers, “Just chocolate, vanilla, and Karo pecan.”

We heard the joke every time we got laryngitis growing up. I heard it the most often since I end every illness with a round. In fact, Daddy used to say if I broke my toe, the last part of the healing would be a case of laryngitis. But he didn’t just save the gag for us.

Once he was traveling back with a friend to the seminary when he was recovering from a bout of his own. The friend sympathized with his losing his voice, which was equally as painful to him as it is to me, and Daddy told him the yarn.

His friend remarked that Daddy made jokes about everything and he fully expected him to rise up and tell a few at his own funeral.* The friend finished with the proverb, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”

Daddy retorted, “Are you calling me a pill?”

*Daddy didn’t rise up and tell jokes at his funeral, but those who came to the visitation brought their favorites from his collection to share.

The Artist's Sketch

Should you have a need for a coffee table book with a fascinating story and beautiful paintings, I have a recommendation. The Artist’s Sketch by Carolyn Brown sheds light on an artist who was known in an entirely different way in Holly Springs, Mississippi, where I graduated from high school. Teenagers whispered about “the cat lady” as they passed the overgrown yard of Kate Freeman Clark. Neither kids nor adults at that time had any idea of the treasure she had created that was stored in New York until her death.

Carolyn’s research uncovered a child of privilege in a small Southern town. Her lawyer father, elected to the Senate while they were living in Vicksburg, traveled to Washington but turned ill and died before Kate and her mother could join him. Mother and daughter returned home to Holly Springs and for the next eight years lived with her grandmother, Mama Kate, for whom she was named and who took her in hand to produce a genteel young woman. 

Moving to New York with her mother, Kate began a life in art, studying the plein air technique and shining as one of its finest practitioners. They spent time in the New York and its surroundings and in DC and were eventually joined by Mama Kate. She seldom did official shows since her mother thought that was unseemly for a young woman, and signed her paintings “Freeman Clark,” perhaps for the same reason. She did enjoy her companions and mentors in the art community and a bit of romance.

First her grandmother and then her mother took ill, and after their deaths, she moved back to Holly Springs where she lived for the last quarter century of her life. She gave a few art talks and participated in the life of the ante-bellum Southern town before becoming the reclusive “cat lady” with the overrun yard.

Only after her death and the reading of her will did local people learn of her immense talent. Her paintings, warehoused in New York, were left to the city of Holly Springs. In addition to her fascinating story, the book contains a wealth of photographs of her art. And if you’re like me, it will inspire a desire to return to Holly Springs to see them in person in the Kate Freeman Clark Art Gallery.

Gotta Call It Something

As Al marks another anniversary of his birth on the day of my blog, it seemed only right to do honor to who he is.

I’ve been searching for the right description. I’ve seen many people classify their spouse or significant other as their “best friend.” Well, that seems a bit warm and fuzzy for a loveable curmudgeon.  While it’s true that I confide in Al and tell him stuff I wouldn’t tell anybody else, “best friend” seems a little off.

Then there’s “soulmate” which kind of insinuates way more agreement than we’ve been able to achieve. That proverbial glass that he sees half-empty always looks half-full to me. Not to mention our method of leaving a gathering to come home when he can be out the door and have the car cranked within thirty seconds, and I’m prone to linger and chat until everybody goes home. And when we ride together to the voting precinct, he turns right while I turn left.

So does this relationship leave me in bad shape? Hardly. Even before he heard the Army slogan, he applied the “Be all you can be” to me. As a very poor typist before the days of computers, I had two years left on an English degree when we married. I worked ahead, handwriting all my papers, and left them with him for typing while I commuted to Ole Miss. He typed in breaks (72 words a minute with no mistakes on a manual typewriter) while he ran the family country store, kept my gas tank filled, and paid my tuition. Mama said my degree should have read “Mr. and Mrs.”

Several years later when I decided to take enough classes to get certification to teach kindergarten and elementary school, he insisted that I reach a bit farther and get my Master’s in Early Childhood Education. The day that diploma came, after I had to take my comprehensive in Germany and have it mailed, he asked, “So when do you start your doctorate?” I assured him I was through filling in squares. He still chides me about that decision since I’ve taken enough additional hours to have completed one.

A major requirement when we bought our house in Hattiesburg was a big kitchen since we both cook. He has a system for that, too. If I cook, he cleans up. If he cooks, he cleans up. It works for me.

And there’s my writing. Always my first reader, he apologizes if he finds anything wrong or unclear. (I’m thinking, “Like why did I give it to you to read if I didn’t want you to spot a problem?”) He is sure the only reason I ever get a rejection letter is because they didn’t read the submission. He usually proofs my blogs, too, but in case there’s a mistake, I didn’t let him see this one ahead.

So what label do I give him today on his birthday? Beats me. I had given up on finding him a label when I overheard some words of wisdom as we passed Chick-fil-a on our daily walk in the mall.  Devon Dollar said, “Sometimes things just work out the way they should.”

Happy birthday to the guy who’s helped make most of my life work out the way it should.

The Radium Girls

Be forewarned. The Radium Girls by Kate Moore is both repulsive and compelling – like a scab not quite ready to come off. Once started, the reader is drawn back again and again to read what she’d rather not know. The publisher fittingly describes it as “The dark story of America’s Shining Women.” Unfortunately, it is nonfiction.

Set during the time of World War I, young women get a dream job of painting numbers on clock faces with radium to make them glow in the dark, first for the military and later for public use. As early as 1901, scientists knew the dangers inherent in radium. This account begins in 1917 when those dangers were being ignored and denied. To make their brushes produce exact tiny lines, the “Radium Girls” dipped the brushes into their mouths to make the points sharper. Bits and pieces of the substance fell onto their clothes or parts of their body, making them glow eerily and beautifully in the dark. For a time, the ingredient enhanced the girls’ beauty for party going as they sometimes added extra touches of leftovers here and there. All was well until, one by one they began to get sick.

The radium attacked their bones and teeth. The company denied all charges that radium was the cause. Intrigue, lawsuits, and lies filled the days as the young women sought justice. In a saga that stretched to 1938 with one step forward followed by two steps backward, the Radium Girls pursued the truth. The impact of their battle reaches forward into safety procedures that protect our world today.

I highly recommend this book and think I see the prospects of a movie inherent in its story.   

#33 - Who Knew?

An AARP Bulletin recently proposed fifty ways to enhance health and lengthen life.  Some fell into the category of “Why would you want to live longer if you had to do that?” Things like eating less, giving up sugar, or moving to California lacked appeal to me. Some gave me an excuse for habits I already hold – drinking that extra cup of coffee, reading, and staying married. 

None held a candle to # 33. They conceded that having responsibility for grandchildren every day might be stressful. On the other hand, they suggested that being with grandchildren on a regular basis could lower your risk of dying by a third and add up to five years of life. The researchers speculate that caring for grandchildren gives the grandparent purpose and keeps them mentally and physically active. In the next issue, Lillian Carson, author of The Essential Grandparent, says being with the younger generation literally beefs up the immune system.

On an April 3, 2017 segment of CBS Morning Show, Leslie Stahl said this regular relationship benefitted the grandchildren as well. A vague reference to studies she’d read said children with grandparents were more confident, were not as troublesome at school, and were more rooted in family history. (This could be because grandchildren show interest in the family stories that brought on eye-rolling in their parents.)

We are blessed with ten, yes that’s 10, grandchildren (all brilliant, polite, and hardworking). Until this past August, all of them lived far away – Arizona, Texas, and Maryland. As military brats, our children who are now their parents had traveled long distances to visit their grandparents once or twice a year – or longer if we were out of the country. This lifestyle evidently seemed normal to them.

I’m not even going to guess how many of these helpful statistics our youngest son and his wife knew when they made the decision to move here to Hattiesburg last August. Nor am I going to guarantee than any of these positive outcomes will happen. But I will attest that life is a lot more fun when you see grandchildren more times in a week than you used to see them in a year!

I saw a Facebook meme shortly after I learned all of this. It said, “Grandparents don’t babysit. They have playdates.” I think that’s about right.

Beartown

I was introduced to the work of Fredrik Backman by a surprise delivery of A Man Called Ove from our daughter who had seen a strong resemblance between Ove and her father and thought her parents should read the book. That touched off one of those word-of-mouth promotions that soon had a number of people in my church entranced with Ove, a showing of the movie in fellowship hall, and an ongoing watch among these friendly bookreaders for the next Backman work. Imagine my delight when Net Galley offered his newest novel called Beartown as an ARC and my even greater delight when the publisher accepted my request to read!

My first revelation involved gaining understanding that in some communities ice hockey can rule the public psyche as much as football does here in the South. The beginning of chapter 16 reflects the theme of the book, “Pride in a team can come from a variety of causes. Pride in a place, or a community, or just a single person. We devote ourselves to sports because they remind us of how small we are just as much as they make us bigger.”

To be up front, since I can’t leave out things that bother me, I almost stopped reading about a third of the way through in chapter 17 when there is a series of pointless lesbian jokes. I am offended when any group of people is held up to ridicule since I live with an understanding that people who are in some way different from me are still my fellow travelers on the road of life. I have some understanding that Backman was characterizing the people who were making the offensive jokes, but still.

The real challenge for Beartown arises when the star hockey player rapes a young girl in a drunken after-party. Personal reactions of community members follow – the coaches and fans, the girl’s parents, the perpetrator and victim, their friends, and the outside onlookers. Like A Man Called Ove, the book gets more riveting as it goes along with the reader wondering if anything good can come of this dreadful situation.

I’ll not spoil the ending except to say, I’m glad I didn’t stop at chapter seventeen.

Look Again

There’s a line from The Hundred Lies of Lizzie Lovett about “life looking different depending on where you were standing” that seems to apply at my parents’ first meeting. Appropriately enough considering their future together, my parents met on a Sunday at Sturgis Baptist Church. (Not the famous Sturgis in South Dakota where they have the motorcycle races – the village in Mississippi that few people have ever heard of) 

Daddy had come to church with pseudo-cousins and was immediately smitten. Whether it was love at first sight, he never said, but he told his cousins over Sunday dinner that he had just met the girl he was going to marry. 

Mama must have been standing in a different place. She also had a comment at Sunday dinner around the long table with her parents and five brothers and sisters. “I just met the ugliest man I’ve ever seen.” Before you get disturbed at what this did to Daddy’s ego, he is the one who told this story the most often and laughed the loudest at the punch line. I think he took it as a personal triumph that he won her over. 

In the unbiased view of his oldest daughter, I would say he was neither handsome nor ugly but had a distinctive look. His abundant hair, that never grayed or turned loose in his seventy years, had a deep reverse “V” on either side like an extended widow’s peak, his tie was crooked in every picture he ever took even after he and Mama married, and his eyeglasses were ever-present. Mama evidently took a second look from a better angle and changed her mind.

Eighty years ago, on this date, they “slipped off” to get married at their pastor’s home. They were twenty-six and twenty-four years old, doing a quiet wedding in consideration for my grandmother who was already dealing with health concerns that would take her life the next year. They returned immediately after the wedding to my grandfather’s place to announce the good news. Mama’s eight-year-old sister ran into the house to tell my grandfather. “Daddy, you’ve got a new son-in-law and a preacher, too!”

Their marriage, like all the other marriages I know much about, was not perfect, but it lasted until Daddy’s death forty-five years later. In many ways, they were complementary opposites. In one of the most important ways for the longevity of the marriage and the life they needed to live, Mama’s steadying influence on Daddy was balanced by the humor he uncovered in whatever life handed out. 

I’m pretty sure my three sisters and my parents’ eight grandchildren join me in being glad that Daddy had a clear view through his glasses and that Mama took another look. Maybe even the thirteen great-grandchildren who didn’t know them are grateful. They have heard the family stories!

Liver and Onions

There are only two ways to look at this dish, I think, beginning with the family into which I was born. You love it or you hate it. Daddy and I loved it. Mama and the other three girls hated it. Mama’s prejudice was so strong she could barely stand to be in the room where it was cooked.

Country church members knew how much Daddy liked the dish and saved him a share of the liver when they killed hogs. Naturally, it was one of the first dishes I learned to cook when I was about nine years old. Daddy and I savored the deliciousness while Mama and the girls were stuck with a piece of ham or some sausage to go with their mashed potatoes and vegetables.

Moving forward to the days when I was grown and stayed with my parents while Al finished basic training, we came to a day when Mama had an all-day meeting. Daddy had seen fresh liver in the grocery store and planned a treat. He answered a knock at the door in the living room as I sliced the onions in the kitchen. I heard his fellow pastor say, “I can’t stay long. I have some errands to run.”

Thinking Daddy would be through in plenty of time for lunch, I went right ahead braising the liver and paring potatoes. I enjoyed the preparation and the aroma, anticipating sharing the dish with a fellow liver aficionado with no disparaging remarks from Mama or my sisters. Daddy’s visitor lingered and lingered.

Finally, not wanting my treat spoiled, I went into the living room and said, “Brother Benefield, we’re having liver and onions for lunch. Would you like to join us?”

 He said, “I smelled them. I was waiting, hoping you were going to ask.”

When Mama’s Alzheimer’s Disease required her to move into a care facility, we passed along what she had always told us – she would eat anything but liver. When it was on the menu, they carefully prepared something else for her. We knew the disease had taken her memory when one of the caregivers apologized one day that she had been given liver by mistake. She had eaten it without comment.

The picture for this blog comes from the public domain and, unfortunately, is not mine since I no longer cook it but looks much like mine. We’ve given it up. Shortly after I convinced husband Al that liver and onions was a treat, somebody discovered that it also raised cholesterol significantly. And just when we thought it was good for us!