First and foremost, I want to thank everyone for their kind thoughts, wishes, prayers, and sharing of experiences about my recent fascinating foray into the world of modern medicine. This is all reasonably new and exciting for me, since I'm pretty healthy, and I'm fortunate enough to have good health insurance, supportive co-workers, and loving friends both in RL and here on-line. Thank you all, and please consider yourselves hugged.
As for books...
My friend Tally came around last night, burdened with glorious purpose bearing my laptop, my e-reader, and a big fat parcel of books so I wouldn't get bored. Among the books are JK Rowling's latest, an early 1900's book of English short stories, a couple of novels, and the book that I am currently reading. It's an old one, a memoir, and why and how I missed it growing up it beyond me, because it's one that sure should have been on my TBR list long since.
I think you'll see why I should have read this a while ago when you read the title:
An American Childhood, by Annie Dillard.
I remember this little memoir/philosophical work/extended meditation on childhood and a particular place in America coming out to great acclaim, but I wasn't all that interested; I hadn't read any of Dillard's other books, was newly married and trying to write my own, first, dreadful novel (don't even ask), and was too busy enjoying being young to devote the time and energy to reading about someone else's life. I vaguely knew that Dillard was originally from Pittsburgh, but other than that, I knew little about her.
Well. To say that I am impressed is putting it mildly. This jewel-like book about growing up in an upper middle childhood in Point Breeze, near Pittsburgh, has sucked me in completely. Dillard captures not only the sense of wonder and beauty and otherness that separates a child's awakening to self and the world from the mundane and the adult, she brings 1950's Pittsburgh to vivid life. I was born in 1960 to a less affluent family, but enough of what describes was still there when I was child ten years later that I'm all but aching for that familiar, beloved, forever-lost lost place that was the foundry of the world.
I'm only partway through, but hope to finish it today before they (please God, get this over with!) remove my gall bladder and send me back to my little grass shack in Kialakaua Hawaii the Last Homely Shack East of the Manhan. I haven't seen the Triple Felinoid or slept in my own bed since Wednesday, and I ache for the familiar smells and sights and clutter that is mine. Until then, I'll have to comfort myself with passages like this, which I never could write to save my immortal soul, and remind myself that though my home is now in Massachusetts, Western Pennsylvania is in my bones:
When everything else is gone from my brain - the President's name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family - when all this has dissolves, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.
I will see the city poured rolling down the mountain valleys like slag, and see the city lights sprinkled and curved around the hills' curves, rows of bonfires winding. At sunset a red light like housefires shines from the narrow hillside windows; the houses; bricks burn like glowing coals....
Catch you on the flip side, my friends.
Peace,
Ellid/Lisa