Half of the seeds I planted never grew

Squirrels dug up and tossed one of the purple basil plants. And slugs ate the kale. A deer lost from the herd wanders up and down the sidewalk in front of our house, threatening the hostas, barely even blinking when the dog shriek-barks. The weather turns sweltry. I have so many plans for the week,

but in the end, I do nothing, momentarily sideswiped by unexpected health news, which turns out to be a bit of a bummer, but I'm trying to roll with it. 

In the meantime, I laze on the porch swing, escaping into a good book. There is always that. Did I tell you how books saved my life? And how lucky I am now. Surrounded by them. Speaking of

the good book I'm reading. Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. From the very first sentence I am hooked and marveling. The voice. The story. A darkness at the core about how this country treats its unwanted children, and even though I know this and wish I could forget it, I can't stop reading. Let me tell you a story.

A harried grandmother comes into the library, three little kids scrambling off in three different directions the moment they all spill through the door. A girl and her two little brothers. The littlest one breaks my heart with his droopy eyes, how he's old enough to talk, but doesn't. How he goes stiff with a tantrum when he doesn't get the plastic train car he wants. How he disappears into the stacks the second the grandmother turns her back. 

The grandparents who visit the library fall into two categories: 

the doting, swooping, gushing, proud

and the worried, rigid, impatient. These are the ones who forgot what it was like to have children of their own or are glad to be through with it, and how greatly relieved they'll be when this visit is over and the grandkids can be handed back off to the parents. 

But there's also a third category. The grandparents who thought their parenting days were over, but now, here they go again, for whatever reason, with these children in their custody. 

The harried grandmother wears a look of continual surprise as she mutters weary reminders to say thank you, to share, to clean up after yourselves. I want to tell her she's doing a good job and it will all turn out okay, but how could I ever know that. 

Instead, I offer the kids stickers. The next time they come in the littlest one remembers and makes a beeline for my desk. He garbles out the word Sticker, and I want to hug him, hug the two other little ones, hug the grandmother. 

I've let go of any hard feelings for the lost deer who will any day now chew my plants down to the dirt. Because, why not. 

The things that seem to matter so very much, in the end, don't. The things you can’t imagine will ever matter, do. 

A reminder to myself: half of the seeds I planted grew.

 

Sleepless in Columbus

I've been watching a lot of Rom-Coms lately, spurred on by my daughter who's home for what will likely be her final summer with us. This fact is something I'd rather not explore too deeply, and nightly-watchings of Rom-Coms are the perfect solution. So far we're exploring the classics-- mostly Norah Ephron-style and/or Meg Ryan-ish, with a dash of Hugh Grant sprinkled in here and there.

On Mondays we put that on hold to watch the Bachelorette, which is not rom or com-- unless you count hard-to-tell-apart bearded guys bickering with each other and one narcissistic psychopath trying to manipulate the clueless bachelorette-- to be rom-mish and com-mish.

And then it's back to true Rom-Coms, Sleepless in Seattle, You've Got Mail, Notting Hill... 

A few weeks ago I went to the book launch of a Rom-Com, my friend Kerry Winfrey's new book Waiting for Tom Hanks. The story is the very best of the genre, fun and sweet and smart. Added bonus: it's set in Columbus and there's a scene in a bookstore, the very bookstore where Kerry held her launch party. When I was getting my book signed, I asked Kerry why she thought Rom-Coms are back IN lately, and she said, They're an escape from what's going on in the news.

She is right about that. When I read her book, I immediately found myself immersed in a different world. It's a funny darling place where the heroine's writing a Rom-Com in a coffee shop and playfully bickering with a handsome movie star, in town to film, what else? A Rom-Com.

I don't usually read Rom-Coms. And by not usually, I mean I stopped reading them when I was 15. Okay, this is a total lie. I did go through a more recent young adult romance binge. (ahem. Twilight.) But Twilight (and all of its many two-boys-fighting-over-one-girl angsty variations) was all rom and no com.

What I loved about Kerry's book was how she played around with the genre, calling attention to all of the romantic tropes, from the spilling-coffee-on-each-other meeting to the dash-to-the-airport-with-the-zany-friends conclusion, in a funny, but never mocking way,

because if you mock a Rom-Com, you lose what makes it both rom and com

the Hope part.

That is, after all, what is at the core of these stories. Hope, that we can find our one true love somewhere out there (or maybe they've always been there and we just never noticed). But even more important, Hope, that we live in a world where we can still believe in something hopeful.

I don't know if I believe in that world anymore.

Or more truthfully, I don't know if it's fair to Go There when other people are suffering so much in reality.

But here's the real question: Is it possible to live in our present dark reality without a place to escape to every once in a while?

On sleeping for a year and waking up in a storm

We're probably meant to feel horrified. A girl, who seemingly has everything, decides to escape from the world by sleeping for a year.

But I have to admit that I was strangely drawn to the main character's quest in Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. It's the biting language of the book, the dark humor, the thoroughly unlikeable, and yet, somehow sympathetic narrator, and the blurb on the flap that promises one of "the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature." 

I read the book in one day, curled on my own couch, laughing at times at the absurdity of the situation (can you really go to sleep for a year?) and wondering too, how to sign myself up, because really, who doesn't want to occasionally throw on Netflix and binge-watch a season of something while drifting in and out of reality? 

In the case of our narrator it's not Netflix, but a trusty VCR and an unending supply of movies to binge-watch. The year is 2000. She's just out of college, living in New York City, working at a pretentious job, basically playing the role of a bored snotty beautiful receptionist at a surreally weird art gallery. Her on again/off again boyfriend is an asshole but she keeps going back for more. Her best friend is an easy person to push around, over-the-top desperate and pathetic, but probably the only person in our narrator's life who genuinely cares about her since both of her parents died.

Oh, and there's that awful psychiatrist, eager to prescribe any and all medications to ensure this girl gets her sleep. 

I won't tell you the rest, but please, someone else read this so we can talk about it!

Warning about the next book:

There's a dog in it, that dies. I knew this going in, which is why the book sat on my bedside table for two years. I have a thing about dogs in books, specifically, dogs dying. The book in question won the National Book Award though, and I typically like to read those. The author Jesmyn Ward won a second National Book Award last year, so I couldn't deny the pull of the book any longer. 

An hour after closing Moshfegh's book, I jumped into Ward's. It's called Salvage the Bones, and oh my God. The writing. This is, I don't know what to call it exactly, Faulknerian? Luscious metaphorical language and description, a story and characters that grab you on the first page. 

It's twelve days before Hurricane Katrina hits and our main character is an African American girl, fifteen, newly pregnant, poor, living in the deep backwoods of Mississippi with her alcoholic father, her brothers, one of whom raises pitbulls to fight. The dog, Jesus God the beautiful dog, and these kids- the intense loyalty they have for each other, their determination to grow up, to survive, and all the while, 

there's this storm coming. 

After I read the book, practically shaking at the end when I knew what was going to happen but praying I was wrong, when I closed the book, wondering how I could feel not despair but somehow hope, and how in the world did Jesmyn Ward DO THIS? I looked up everything I could about her, 

listened to an interview she did after she won her second National Book Award for Sing, Unburied, Sing, which I can assure you will not sit unread for long on my bedside table. She's made me question everything I thought I knew about our country, taking me by the hand gently and then slapping me upside the head,

waking me up from my privileged binge-watching reality into a world I didn't know existed but know now has always been here.

READ. IT.