Gift Wrapped Memory

In lieu of the real thing, try to
summon a memory of June’s long days.
That first crop of snap peas
still freshly dappled with morning dew.
A front row seat on the porch
with a carafe of rosé wine in early dusk.
Sandals kicked off as toes
luxuriate in the squish of a creek bed.
After gardening, arms tingly
with the beginnings of a summer tan.
Unmoored, a curtain’s billow
transforming the house into a sailboat.
Freshly preened, a lone
lost feather a swallow will never miss.
On a cold winter night where
such things seem a myth, remember.

The Best Of Modern Humor / Edited By Mordecai Richler

This collection, published in 1983, had long sat on our bookshelf unread.  It features supposedly humorous short stories from the 1930s into the 1970s.  While a good many of the authors were unknown to me, there were a fair share of names that I recognized.  These included James Thurber, Evelyn Waugh, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Terry Southern, V. S. Naipaul, Tom Wolfe and Woody Allen.

I found that humor does not always translate well from one generation to the next.  There are references made to then-current events that have now been long forgotten.  What surprised me even more is that so many of them are painful to read today because of racist or sexist overtones.  In characterizations of women and Blacks, what once evoked laughter is now only insulting and cringe worthy.

There are certainly gems to discover in this collection.  But I found myself scratching my head at some of the stories that Mordecai Richler chose to include here.  A good many came nowhere close to tickling my funny bone.  I was especially embarrassed to read the satires that attempted to capture the spirit of the Sixties.  The humor from that time period has not held up well at all.

Three Wishes

Three wishes given.
Without thought, in youth,
the first is wasted
on accumulated wealth,
beauty’s shallowness,
applause or
the insecurity of dominion.

The second might as
well been spent on a mop.
At life’s halfway point,
there are so many mistakes
in need of erasure,
tarnished dreams to
buff back to former luster.

We become miserly
with the third, final wish.
Fearing impulsivity,
held dear, its talisman is
a hedge in old age,
until we realize it
has already been granted.

Kafka On The Shore / Haruki Murakami

In this metaphysical mind-binder, Murakami has created a novel that will appeal to a wide audience.  Its separate chapters tell two stories that satisfactorily intersect at the book’s conclusion.  The odd-numbered chapters’ first person narratives describe a fifteen year old boy named Kafka who runs away from his father’s home in search of his mother and sister, who fled and left him behind as a child.  The even-numbered chapters describe the life of an elderly man, Nakata, who, since a strange event as a child, has remained a blank slate without memories and illiterate as well.  Ultimately, the old man and the boy’s lives intersect in the novel’s conclusion.

These two characters are befriended and helped by others in discovering their purpose in life.  In Kafka’s case, it is a hemophiliac assistant worker at a private library.  The sexagenarian, Nakata, thrust into a life outside his familiar boundaries, is helped by Hoshiro, an uneducated truck driver.  These four characters’ blended stories make this novel a gripping tale.  Murakami challenges belief by including leeches and fish raining down from the sky, talking cats, and characters dressed as Johnnie Walker and Colonel Sanders, as well as describing a stone that opens the divide between the living and the dead.  

What has always made this author special is his ability to blend the commonplace with the bizarre, doing so in a credible manner.  In this novel, he succeeds in spades.  The reader accepts the unusual without a second thought.  In Kafka On The Shore, Murakami draws from Western and Japanese influences to craft a work that is not only unique, but a masterpiece that defies placement in the strictures of any genre.

I Capture The Castle / Dodie Smith

I Capture The Castle is often lumped into the genre of Young Adult books.  Published in 1948, it soon attracted an audience of adolescent girls drawn into the magical world described by the novel’s narrator, seventeen year old Cassandra Mortmain.  It is presented in the form of a diary in which she is trying “capture” her family on the page and improve her writing skills.  What rich material she has to work with.  It is a family living off the generosity of others in a moldering, damp English castle that lacks electricity and other modern amenities.  Her father, famous for writing a classic book as a young man, has not produced anything since.  He spends his days reading detective novels in the castle’s tower.  There is also Cassandra’s young stepmother who enjoys sun bathing in the nude, and an older sister, Rose, who is intent on escaping the poverty, even if it means marrying a man she doesn’t love, just so long as he is rich.  Added to the mix is a younger brother and an adopted caregiver who is clearly in love with Cassandra.

As interesting as her family is, the true star of this novel is Cassandra herself.  Quirky, innocent, and blooming into young adulthood, she is what makes this book so special.  The family’s fortune changes when wealthy Americans become their landlords.  The Cottons, brothers Simon and Neil, and their mother, happen to be huge fans of her father’s novel.  But it does not take long for Simon to fall in love with Rose.  A complication ensues when Cassandra finds herself attracted to Simon as well.  In the second half of the novel she experiences all the pangs that accompany unrequited love.

Naturally, in a romance story such as this, there are numerous plot twists that upend the expectations of all the main characters.  One begins to fear that its conclusion will feature Simon realizing that Cassandra is perfect for him and they live happily ever after.  Instead, the novel’s end proves to be more honest and haunting.  This coming of age story has surprising depths and charms throughout.  Cassandra might be wounded by love’s first blush, but even if bruised, she remains unsullied and resilient.  I Capture The Castle will win the hearts of both young and old alike.

Conducts The Stars

It is a lighthouse for every sailor.
But there are also sea crests to sculpt.
No two the same, like snowflakes.
A roiling mass of waves to supervise.
And tide’s traffic to shepherd.
Ringlets of foam to script on the shoreline.
The patron saint of poetry and song.
It’s the gateway to the universe.
How busy every night must seem.
And yet unhurried, it remains serene.

A craggy face of malleable stone.
Voluminously eloquent in its silence.
The moon conducts the stars.

Tell Me A Riddle / Tillie Olsen

Tillie Olsen began to write in the 1930s, but Tell Me A Riddle, her first book,wasn’t published until 1961, after she had raised her family.  It features four stories, with the title story being a novella she wrote in 1956. This story, for good reason, won the O. Henry Award.  It is an intimate tale of a Jewish immigrant couple who, after forty-seven years of marriage, have to deal with the rooted resentments silently accumulated over the years.  Yet when a terminal illness strikes the wife, true love overrules the resentments of a life shared. It is a story that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.

The other stories focus on the domestic lives of women, including the conflicts of a mother’s and daughter’s troubled relationship. The story of an alcoholic’s descent into addiction is heartbreaking despite a family’s attempts to rescue him. The third story of a White teenager dealing with a change in her interactions with a Black friend as she approaches adulthood resonates as well. It still rings true in today’s environment where we have yet to see the two cultures entirely integrate.

Paragraph after paragraph, Olsen’s writing captures how people truly communicate.  Her prose resembles the brevity of poetry and carries the same impact.  Tillie Olsen died at age 94 in 2007.  While her oeuvre is scant compared to some authors, the works she left us deserve to be rediscovered today.  She was an author well ahead of her time in terms of the social issues she addressed.  Sadly, these stories are still relevant today.  Her depiction of the complexity of motherhood, addiction, and race relations shows she was a feminist well ahead her time. The book’s haunting prose sixty years later is still as relevant as today’s headlines.  There is not a wasted word to be found in this collection.

Sorrows And Warnings

The last Ash now left
standing after blight, only
named on a street sign

The bird feeder filled
through forty winters, empty
as the house itself

Once a plump orange,
a harvested squash forgotten,
freckled with March’s rot

The fingering sound
of wind at the window, still
intent on trespass

A ricochet of
hail, gathered into a fist,
pounding to get in

In moonlight laced with
frost, a chorus reduced to
soloing crickets

Chinese Pottery

I dreamt of pottery last night,
a collection of Chinese
samples from the Ming dynasty.
On one, oxen strained,
muscling a plow, another was
wrapped with a jeweled
creature of magnificent length.
Some featured horses,
others, depicting birds in flight,
lively as a May Day.

Each seemed pungently fresh
with colors not yet dry.
A few, polished a smooth blue,
others, wine-stained
a vivid red, and many softened
as if by moonlight.
The rest, gold infused, a poor
artist’s reward for having
etched a bird’s vibrant plume.

A potent elixir, Chinese poetry
mixed with Merlot before
bedtime, reshaped into pottery.