Growing Up is Hard to Do

When did you consider yourself an adult? 

That’s one of the questions asked when discussing The Weird Sisters by Eleanor Brown, a story about three very different sisters, each with big issues, who come home to ostensibly help their parents deal with their Mom’s breast cancer.  Quoting Shakespeare, integral to this family’s story, is an interesting way they all avoid communication.  It makes growing up a bit more difficult for all.

In our discussion, many thought it was having children that made them feel like adults.  One person went as far as to say she sees the difference between her two children and how the one with a child was more adult in her opinion.  I was okay with that until she then made some comment about how she wasn’t sure everyone in the room was an adult.  That not only caught my attention, it got my inner Bridget Jones dialogue going.  I kept hearing the lines about ‘smug marrieds’ and ‘tick tock, tick tock’ while I struggled to keep my big mouth shut.

Did that mean that the rest of us, those without children, are not yet adults?  Honestly, I’m feeling inclined to shake my rattle in protest.  How many people are out there who have had children and are far from mature?  I don’t want to point fingers but you know who you are.

But I digress.

What is it that makes one an adult?  Perhaps it goes back to something my father said when I was young, responsibility; being responsible for your own choices, good or bad and not blaming others when they haven’t worked out.  My dad stayed with me recently and that visit got me thinking that it was also about acceptance.  Accepting those we love for who they are and the decisions they make, even if we don't always like their choices.  That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop nagging him about drinking more water and walking a little more.  I’m stubborn that way.  Why do you think the guest room is on the second floor?

Then there’s doing the right thing, even when the right thing is a lot more challenging.  Like standing side by side with my father while we jointly made the funeral arrangements for my mother, or knowing when it is time to take one’s beloved animal companion to the vet for the last time, or even just honoring a friend's choice on their preference to keep their fatal illness private.  Hard stuff but all are part of being an adult, at least in my opinion. 

Do I think the three weird sisters became adults over the course of the story?  No, not really.  I think they’re still lacking in maturity but I do think they begin to make better choices on their journey to become so.  Like all of us, they are a work in progress.

While writing today, I’ve had that old Peter Pan song about never growing up in my head and almost feel a need to sing it out loud in my very off key voice, if only it wouldn’t scare the cat.  Yes, I do consider myself an adult but I also occasionally slip up.  Especially when someone else buys Oreo cookies and I end up eating way more than my share (yea, yea, I’m talking to you Pop).

And of course, I’ll always still slide open the cookie and eat the cream stuffing first…

Ella

A Passion for Art

A friend said he thought it was important that people be passionate about something.  While I agreed, it had me wondering about just what that might mean to me.

Shortly thereafter, I found myself spending time relishing the brilliance of Dale Chihuly’s art at both the new Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum in Seattle and the private studio where they put some of the pieces together.  Seeing both, especially the studio, brought to mind my fascination with how glass artists reign in the passions of fire to create amazingly beautiful pieces of art.

Passion!  It’s what makes life more interesting and colorful.  It also is what inspires and adds joy to one’s very soul.  Color is one thing I have always felt passionate about.  It stimulates my brain and lets me find artistic inspiration everywhere, especially in nature; the textures and tints of the trees, how flowers add touches of visual surprise.
 
This ardor for color and art drew me to Clara and Mr. Tiffany by Susan Vreeland; that, and my book club.  The book had a slow start and it was a little too long so I hadn't finished it by the discussion last spring.  After my Chihuly visit, I decided to pick it up again, but this time it was through the eyes of an artist that I read.  For I found I could relate to the enthusiasm with how Clara saw the natural beauty in life and then incorporated it into stunning art. 

The book is a fictionalized story of the woman who ran the women’s glass department at Tiffany’s.  In reading some other historical accounts, it’s speculated that she may have been the actual creative genius behind many of the Tiffany lamps associated with Louis Comfort Tiffany. 

Louis was an artist and a great lover of beauty, though he had his shortcomings, pun intended.  While he employed women to be artisans at a time when no one else would, he also had some onerous stipulations, like the fact that once married, a woman would need to give up her job and income.  He is also depicted as an extravagant spendthrift and somewhat of a narcissistic tyrant, especially to his family.  Yet he did seem to nurture and encourage creativity in his artists.

Life in the late 1800s/early 1900s New York is depicted.  It’s a bit bleak as there’s a lot about the hard life and poverty of recent immigrants as well as the plight of women in the arts trade.  Though Clara was well respected and seemed to live reasonably well, life was not easy for many.  Even Clara herself had a few challenges to deal with.
 
I don't know that I would have made the same choices as Clara, the woman, but what kept me with the book this time was that I loved being inside the mind of Clara, the artist.  It intrigued me to see how she took beauty and interpreted it through the colors and textures of glass.  It is also why I love Chihuly’s art.  He does the same.

I know that I may never be the artist that Clara was or Chihuly is, but I also know that I will always appreciate and feel the joy and passion in each piece created.  And that may be enough for me.  

After all, I am, if nothing else, a passionate being with at least the soul of an artist…

Ella

Not Scared of the Dark

On an absolutely beautiful summer day followed by an equally spectacular evening, instead of being out enjoying the wonderful weather, I found myself inside a local bookstore.  Carlos Ruiz Zafon was being interviewed by local author, Garth Stein.  While I certainly enjoyed and would recommend Stein’s book, The Art of Racing in the Rain, it was for Zafon that I was in attendance.  The big man, with the small spectacles, dressed casually in a green and blue striped rugby shirt and jeans, was there to discuss The Prisoner of Heaven, his newest novel. 

How to describe the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafon?  Dark, gothic and mysterious are all fairly accurate words; dank, gloomy, bleak, sinister and shadowy would work too.  Recurring characters (themes?) include the older sections of Barcelona and labyrinths.  Then there's the biggest labyrinth of them all, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. 

For me, it all started with Shadow of the Wind.  At a very basic level, it is a boy’s coming of age story set in 1950’s Barcelona.  Daniel’s father, a local bookseller, brings him to the mythical crypt of books and allows Daniel to choose one book.  Thus begins the dark adventure of the rare book that was chosen and the illusive tragedy of its author.  Good gothic stuff with love, mystery and perhaps even a touch of the supernatural.  What can I say?  I liked it. 

  

It was with anticipation that I picked up the second book, The Angel’s Game.  Maybe it was the fact that I was listening to it in my car in the already oppressively dark month of December in the NW, but I found it to be so much darker than the first and perhaps, for that time of year, a bit too overwhelming.  It too is set in Barcelona with overlapping characters and themes from the first book, but this one takes place earlier, beginning in the 1920s.  The story is about David Martin, a troubled writer, who is approached by a shadowy figure to write a book which promises to bring him fame and fortune.  The question is, is he selling his soul to the devil?  It certainly felt like a spiral to hell.     

This is not the Barcelona of the cruise ship stops.  It is an older more menacing version, with crevices of darkness and decay.  Unlike the spare clean edges of the dark world found in the Scandinavian crime novels, the world in these books is much more pungent and perhaps more ominous.  Cemeteries, death, murder and deceit; it felt like the insanity could be contagious, just by listening.  

Why would I pick up the third?  

The answer is, though bleak, the books are beautifully written.  Between the artistic writing and the layers of intrigue, it is also because I have a masochistic need to understand how it all fits together.  For fit it will, even if it takes all four books.  Unlike a traditional series, these will fit into their own elaborate labyrinth; connected like a crafty puzzle that doesn't seem to work until it all clicks into position and then you wonder why you didn’t see it in the first place.  

It is the intrigue of that puzzle that drives me on and makes me willing to walk again through that darkness to find the solution.  

The Prisoner of Heaven brings us back to the 1950s and Daniel and his family's bookstore.  A mysterious figure enters the shop and then writes an intriguing inscription in an illustrated copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, 'To Fermin Romero de Torres, who came back from the dead and who holds the key to the future'.  The inscription from the author on my copy is not quite as cryptic as that but it was still worth the wait in line. 

And so, I begin my next adventure into the enigmatic world of Carlos Ruiz Zafon.  After all, if I do get scared in the dark, at least now I can get a reprieve by stepping into the warm sunshine and blue skies of the NW summer…

Ella

London Calling

The trials and tribulations of the Olympic hopefuls are upon us and I find that London is calling me.  Unfortunately, I have an Olympic-sized yard project I’m working on so my London visit must be virtual one.  It would be great if they gave out medals for moving rocks and shoveling sand; I’d be shooting for gold.

 

Many of the books I’ve read lately have been set in London, the most recent being Christopher Fowler’s Peculiar Crimes Unit series with Bryant and May as the star detectives.  One has to suspend a little reality when reading this series because the elderly team of Arthur Bryant and John May have been solving crimes in their own wonky way since WW II. 

 

No matter, they make you want to believe. 

Arthur is, as Fowler puts it, “as rumpled as a mariner’s map” and he could easily be considered insane by most.  Among his informants, there are various esoteric individuals he consults as well as those with years of knowledge from the research annals of the British Museum.  Arthur himself taps into the full study of history and the occult with his overwhelming collection of books, papers and just plain junk; then there are all his weird little oddities and experiments kept both in his home and office to help him solve crimes from his own uniquely different and eccentric perspective.    

John, his partner, is a well dressed ladies man who is the relatively normal face of the team.  He generally follows the more usual lines of police detecting and works well, or should I say better, with others.  He also keeps Arthur somewhat in check.  Of course, how normal can he be when he’s been working with Arthur for his entire career?  

Along with the various members of the Peculiar Crimes Unit, and in spite of their current digs in an aging dilapidated warehouse with a shadowy past and within which one finds many cryptic items, the team manages to have a better closed case ratio on a smaller budget than the more normal policing teams.  Which is a good thing since there are those who would shut down this particular unit; so far they've been unsuccessful. 

Abnormal crimes are what this team solves.  In Bryant and May and The Memory of Blood, number nine in the series, it appears that a frightening antique Punch puppet (of Punch and Judy fame) has managed to somehow kill a baby and throw it out a window.  All done in a room locked from the inside and without any normal residue crime scene evidence that a living person did this.  How can this be?  

But Bryant and May are on the case and all will be revealed...at the stroke of midnight...in a London dungeon.

Those who enjoy London with its deep historical, and sometimes mysterious, roots will enjoy suspending their “truth” meter for a while.  For even if there really is no Leicester Square vampire and most unexplainable crimes have more mundane solutions behind the smoke and mirrors, it is a fun visit.  So, drop a coin into Madame Blavatsky's fortune telling machine, sip your cup of tea and enjoy the peculiar world of Bryant and May, along with your fortune.

Me, I’m just hoping to finish my Olympic-sized project by month’s end to be ready for the release of the next book, Bryant & May and the Invisible Code, in early August.  Then I'll award myself a gold medal, or at least a gold star, by reading and relaxing on my new patio with a nice glass of something. 

Perhaps I'll ask what Madame Blavatsky sees in my future.  A real visit to London would be nice...

Ella

Food for Thought

A beloved but simple minded man dies in the working class neighborhood of Lambeth and it is to Maisie Dobbs that the local costermongers go to help solve what they believe is a mysterious death.  This is the basic premise of Elegy for Eddie, the latest installment in the series by Jacqueline Winspear.  It isn’t long before Maisie realizes that yes, this is murder, but also that there are much greater forces of power involved.  This is, after all, London in the pre-war period of the 1930’s, and though they don’t know it yet, life will be changing dramatically in the not too distant future.   

  

Maisie Dobbs is having a hard time.  No part of her life seems to fit and she’s struggling for identity.  She doesn’t quite fit into her old neighborhood nor is she comfortable in her beau’s upper class world; a world where she comes across many powerful and influential people and just possibly even some connections to her case in Lambeth.  Furthermore, though a recent inheritance has greatly improved her circumstances, she’s uncomfortable with the money and tries to use her new found wealth to help those she loves.  Even that backfires.   

We watch as Maisie grapples with reconciling the various aspects of her life into the woman she is now. 

I understand that.  In the last few weeks I have also encountered a few different elements of my own life.   One weekend I was camping with friends here in Washington and the next was spent hanging out in with old high school and college friends in the other Washington.  

It was a bit surreal, this stepping back 35 years in time.  I recognized the person but the skin didn’t quite fit the same.  The time went by so fast that I was home before I knew it and I found it all a bit disconcerting.  I felt a little like a kaleidoscope; turn the dial for the picture of pieces and colors of who I am today, turn it again and it will show a slightly different me tomorrow. 

One thing that brought both worlds together was that in each, there was much conversation over meals.  I noticed that happened in the book as well.  Food is a common bond.  We meet people for a beverage or a bit of lunch and it brings us a little closer together.  

Personally, when I'm feeling a little out of sorts, I frequently turn to cooking for friends; it is one of the ways I work out the dichotomies of my life and attempt to figure out who I am, at least for the moment.   

Of course, it’s a crap shoot as to what I’ll make, or if it will be any good!   

Sometimes I’ll make up recipes on the fly, like the chicken surprise I made recently for a friend.  It was an experiment based on some odd bits and pieces in my fridge which turned out surprisingly well (hence the name).  Other times, I may actually look in a cookbook for fun ideas.

  

My current favorite new cookbook, The FOOD52 Cookbook by Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, has seasonal recipes for each of the 52 weeks of the year.  Looking at the summer weeks, figuring that if I pretend it is summer, summer will come to the NW, I am contemplating whether I should go with the watermelon and goat cheese salad or the corn salad with tomatoes and snap peas.  Peeking at a few entrees, there is spicy shrimp or eggplant parmesan or even smoky pork burgers.  It all sounds good.  Then there’s the peach cake.  Yum!  Oh, and did I mention they have some fun cocktails as well, like ginger sangria? 

Okay, now I’m hungry and need to invite a few friends over.  And I've gone completely off point! 

Getting back to the book, Maisie does solve the basic mystery but her life questions are not as easily resolved.  The more she contemplates it, the more complicated it gets.  I think there are many of us who also haven't solved our life mysteries by the end of the book either.  Yet a chat with good friends over a tasty meal does somehow make it all a little easier, especially if some wine is involved.  

So, who wants to come over for dinner?   I’ll cook and even try to use a real recipe, though I’ll still probably start with my latest experiment, veggies served with some Sriracha mayonnaise.

After all, if I’m going to figure out who I am, I do want to play a little along the way…

Ella

Paradise Lost

Beaches, especially tropical ones, are among my favorite places to be.  I associate the beach with the people and aspects of my life I’ve loved.  There is the great open beauty, the white sand and even the shells.  Then there’s that something extra, the way the waves suggest a wild independence and freedom, especially once I learned to dive under them without getting hurt.

My one very brief visit to Hawaii confirmed how much more I'd like to explore it someday.  Not just the beauty but the history as well.  Still, it was with some reluctance that I finally picked up and read Moloka'i by Alan Brennert.  Though it was not in time for our book group’s discussion, it was that very discussion that actually drove me to read the book.  For Moloka'i was once where those with Hansen’s disease, then called leprosy, were banished to when it was discovered they had the disease.
  
The book is a fictionalized account of a real colony.  While it does include a few real people, the main focus is on a fictionalized child who was diagnosed with the disease around age 6 and sent alone to live on Moloka'i.  Rachel’s youth is probably the main reason I put off reading the book; it turns out she is also the main reason I found it so compelling. 

Gauguin went to the South Pacific in the late 1800s, roughly the same time period where this book begins.  What I learned at a recent exhibit was that his famous paintings were more fantasy than reality.  He was about 100 years too late for what he was looking for; he expected the old ways and what he found was a more structured society that had been influenced by the missionaries and other foreigners who had come to the islands.  It is said Gauguin died of syphilis but is there mention of how many others may have died as a result of his being there?  Perhaps not. 

Hawaii appears to be a bit similar to other tropical islands.  The influx of outsiders took over their world and changed it.  Old ways and religions were shunned and even surfing was disdained.  The missionaries brought their version of religion and the U.S. government brought its version of how life should be.  Like many remote places, the locals, known as the Kama'aina, had no immunity to the diseases also brought in by the foreigners.  As a result, a large portion of the local population died.  Leprosy was just one more disease carried in, only since it was more biblical and visual, I think it scared people even more. 

By the time Rachel is sent to Moloka'i in the 1890s, the living conditions, while still lacking, were much improved over earlier times when people were simply dumped off the boat and had to swim to shore to then forage their own way.  There were now safer places for children to stay and lead a relatively ordered life. 

The dichotomy is that though they were in a paradise, it was also their jail.  People couldn't leave and connections to the outside world were limited, especially in the early years.  How much would I love my tropical beaches if I could never leave or see those I love?  Fortunately, I don't have to make that choice.

There is a lot of heartbreak, people do die, but there is also a lot of love, compassion and spirit in the souls who lived there.  And there is humanity.  This disease doesn’t discriminate; it affects the old, the young, those with a good heart and those who are filled with darkness.  You even have to laugh when teenagers do what teenagers do, sick or not; they sneak out for a dance, drink a beer or indulge their curiosity about sex.   There’s also baseball, horse-racing and of course, there’s surfing.  Community develops.  People laugh, and yes, they even fall in love.
 
We watch as Rachel grows from a small child into becoming a woman with friends and family, her Moloka'i’ family.  Through her eyes, we see how the colony changes over the years, and sadly, we also feel her pain when those she loves die. 

This book is about the strength and fortitude of the people who lived on Moloka'i.  Rachel's character shows us one woman’s recalcitrant stance against the disease.  Recalcitrant is a word that makes me smile because it means stubbornly deviant and it describes Rachel’s attitude perfectly.
 
The reality of it is that people may have gone to Moloka'i to die but there was an awful lot of living going on along the way.

Something to think about the next time I walk along my favorite beach…

Ella

M is for Murder, My Love

I’m in love.  He’s tall, dark and handsome; he’s even rich and with a name like Dante, you know he’s hot.   Too bad he’s also a gangster, especially since he and his organization, and I use that term loosely, are in the crosshairs of the tenacious private detective Kinsey Millhone.   

I’ve read all of Sue Grafton’s novels but V is for Vengeance is one I’ve enjoyed the most.  Here, Kinsey has unwittingly stumbled into a large retail shoplifting operation while doing her least favorite thing, shopping.  Being her usual self, she’s like a dog with a bone.  Once Kinsey gets her teeth into a case, she doesn’t let go, even if her client asks her to, and trouble always follows. 

The book has some of its usual characters along with a few blasts from the past, though it is the satellite characters, Nora and Dante, I like best.  Nora is the bored wife of a wealthy and powerful lawyer, who is currently cheating on her; Dante is a loan shark and head of the family business.  As I watched them circle each other, I just knew an affair between them would have challenges.  Yet, I found I was cheering for them, even though I knew it was against the odds. 

Dante reminded me of how I felt about John Travolta’s character in Pulp Fiction; yes, he was a killer but I did feel a little sad when he was killed.  Dante is a much different character yet I still really hoped he would make it through alive and well.  How does it work out?  For that, you'll need to read the book. 

It does have me wondering what Sue Grafton will do once she publishes the last book in the alphabet.  I’ve read all of them, beginning with A is for Alibi.  What will happen to Kinsey in the end?  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned. 

Since I couldn’t warm myself with Dante, I decided to warm myself with another series, a cozy set in Quebec by Louise Penny.  It is here that I found another who captivated my heart. 

Unlike the gorgeous Dante, Armand Gamache is a happily married, middle-aged man with a little extra weight and warm trusting eyes.  He’s also the head of homicide for the Sûreté du Québec police force in Montreal.  Gamache has the uncanny ability to make sense out of murders that have none.  His theory is that it made sense to the murderer and once he figures it out, it will indeed be logical to the rest of us.  Part of his charm is his low key trusting manner.  People talk to him and end up sharing way more than was their intention. 

Of course, there’s one or two who don’t like him and with an old case still haunting him, he may be just a little too trusting.  

Three Pines has a problem, people keep getting murdered.  This brings Gamache and his team into their midst.  In the first of the series, Still Life, it is the nicest person in town who is murdered, which makes it challenging to find out why someone felt inclined to kill her.  In the next, A Fatal Grace, it’s the nastiest person in town, and this time, it’s a challenge to find someone who didn't want her dead.   

Three Pines has its own assortment of eccentric characters.  There is the very sweet Clara, a gifted but insecure artist, married to Peter, a more successful one.  Clara has the gift to see what others don’t, and more importantly, to see the best in people.  While I do admire that in her and would love to say I did as well, given that I am a bit of a cynic, you know I can't say so with a straight face.    

That brings me to the character at the other end of the spectrum, the very irascible Ruth Zardo, an old, contentious, rude woman who doesn’t care to see the good in anyone.  Nevertheless, our scotch drinking old lady is a poet; one that Gamache admires.  Her words are quite gloomy:

Who hurt you once so far beyond repair

That you would greet each overture with curling lip?
It was not always so. 

Don’t you just love it?  It’s so, bleak, so melancholy.  Or am I just showing my dark side?  

There are plenty of other interesting characters to be found in this quaint little village and each one adds a little color and depth to the picture.  It is with their help that Gamache ferrets out the mystery and solves the crime. 

Small quaint village, charming eccentric people, a good detective with something haunting him; these are essential ingredients to any good cozy mystery.  Still, with enough murders to make it a series, how cozy can this village really be?  On that cheery note,  I'll leave you with another Ruth Zardo poem, from A Fatal Grace:

When my death us do part

Then shall forgiven and forgiving meet again,

Or will it be, as always was, too late?

Perhaps I should have stuck with Dante...

Ella