Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff vs. Cleopatra: A Legend by Hollywood

I'm thick into reading Stacy Schiff's recreation of first century BC Alexandria, the opulent Egyptian coastal city that was home to the ancient world's greatest library and a 300 foot tall lighthouse that brought home fleets of quinqueremes, war vessels powered by five tiers of rowing slaves. The city itself was dressed in walls of alabaster, ivory and red granite and played host to elephant parades, political intrigue and extravagant banquets served on gold plates and scented with incense. And ruling over all, the legendary Pharaoh Cleopatra.

Schiff's new biography Cleopatra: A Life tells a true story as wondrous as science fiction, of a woman ruler believed to be divine. Brutality, excess, and marriages between immediate family members were the rules of the game. Fratricide, filicide, uxoricide and all the the other -cides were commonplace in efforts to keep ultimate control of the country and its wealth.

Schiff's accounting of this world is astounding, not just by the jaw-dropping subject matter, but by her work of faithfully tracing the story itself. The record is full of holes, the ancient accounts colored by contradictions, slander and sexism. "As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman," writes Schiff, and Cleopatra's education and power proved so threatening to her first historians that her early image had to be smudged out, then recreated as that of a sexy vamp, a seductress of great beauty, luring great men to their doom with her kohl-lined eyes.

But that is the Myth, the kudzu of history, as Schiff describes it, that rushes in to fill where facts are absent.

There is little evidence that Cleopatra was a great beauty, but much that she was intelligent and well spoken. Rich, resourceful, flattering, clever and witty, yes. A sexy seductress? Eh.

The mythologizing of the history-makers works to diminish the pharaoh queen who in life was capable of raising armies while exiled in the Syrian desert. Making Cleopatra's sexuality the source of her power instead of her considerable intellect, inspired leadership, extensive education or natural talent reduces her to a less threatening figure to the male power structure. Making her a seductress makes her morally suspect.

Schiff: "What unsettled those who wrote her history was her independence of mind, the enterprising spirit." To the first century poet Lucan, she "whores to gain Rome."

Modern movies did not originate the Myth, but have done much to perpetuate it. In a 1999 TV miniseries, a young and sinuous Cleopatra makes rolling out of a rug in front of Caesar as sexy as a veil dance. No surprise that the HBO miniseries Rome has Mark Antony calling the queen a wh0re before they preside over throne room orgies.

Even the supposedly "educational" video, "How Beautiful Was Cleopatra?" from the UK's Open University uses overtired sexist stereotypes and Playboy-style silhouettes to make its Neanderthal point:

"She did what women have done for centuries: used her sexuality to manipulate men."



While many films have exaggerated Cleopatra's sexual powers to the diminishment of her intellect, one movie seems to have gotten at least part of her culture correct - the opulent Alexandrian spectacle of which she, as one of the richest women in history, wholeheartedly took part.

I saw Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1963 production of Cleopatra years ago and all I remembered was

1) it was long;

2) it was overwrought;

3) it had less kitschy pleasures than my favorite sword and sandal epic, The Ten Commandments;

4) the two stars, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, began their tumultuous relationship on set, although both were married at the time; and

5) the excessive budget nearly bankrupt the 20th Century Fox studio. (Actually, the film recouped its $44 million budget - about $300 million today when adjusted for inflation - after a few years of theatrical and TV showings.) And...

6) ...there was this one scene, where Cleopatra makes a dramatic entrance in front of the Romans. The pageantry was out of control, with a wild parade of animals, dancing girls, colored smoke, a bird flock release and hundreds of men pulling a Sphinx-like parade float bearing Cleopatra and her young son dressed in gold. The first time I saw it, the scene looked to me like wildly inaccurate Hollywood exaggeration.

What a surprise to read in Schiff that Mankiewicz got it about right. She describes an Alexandrian parade: "a Dionysian procession had introduced gilded twenty-foot floats to the city streets, each requiring 180 men to coax it along. Purple-painted satyrs and gold-garlanded nymphs followed, along with allegorical representations of kings, gods, cities, seasons....Fires erupted and died down; lights flickered from statues' eyes; trumpets blared spontaneously." Seems the only thing anachronistic in this movie scene was Elizabeth Taylor's wink!

It has been refreshing to read Schiff's revision of Cleopatra's Myth that parses the legend into less simplistic likelihood. I can't wait to see what she does with the bacchinalia and the asp.

You can read more posts about Cleopatra: A Life here. I received a copy of the book from the publisher with no obligation.

Slime Envy: The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

Elisabeth Tova Bailey's The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating is the first June book for the From Left to Write book club.

Bailey contracted a mysterious and debilitating virus on a trip to Europe and spent several years in difficult recovery. Her book is not a memoir of her own illness, however, but the story of a tiny woodland creature, found by a caretaker, moved to a violet plant at Bailey's bedside and observed by the author who had nothing but time to study her temporary pet.

To a bed-ridden young woman for whom simply turning over was agony, the slow gentle movements of the snail were a perfect object for her entertainment, diversion and observation. Deathly ill and enervated, the author found the naturally slow snail offered lessons on its fascinating and unique physiology and habits. The book grows into a meditation on how the tiniest of creatures can alter one's perception of time itself and one's purpose within it.

The small book moved at, well, you can guess its pace, and yet every detail of the snail's behaviors, as told by Bailey, fascinated me. Thanks to her lovely prose (and perhaps my contrarian nature,) it was her loving and detailed description of slime that intrigued me the most. Yes, snail slime.

Did you know that snails secrete various types of mucus for different purposes? Did you know that when injured, they will produce a medicinal mucus full of antioxidants for healing? And a different kind to help them float over the irregular woodland floor? And yet another that allows them to adhere to vertical surfaces? Did you know slime protects a snail's eggs, keeps its skin moist, reveals its sex to potential mates and repels predators with its awful taste?

As I read these amazing abilities, all made possible by a secretion of water, salt and protein-sugar, I started to get a little envious of this molluscular super-power.

If only I had a thick gelatinous covering on which I could glide over the travails of my path! I could resist the tiny tickling fingers of my little Nora who still, in a last vestige of breastfeeding, sucks her thumb while massaging my belly. It's kind of sweet, but can set my teeth on edge too.

Oh for leaving a trail behind me of glistening grossness, instead of being the one who cleans the trails left by my little ones, their rooms of constructed toy cities, their bobble head metropolises and stuffed animal islands, the stair railings bound up with masking tape bridges for the tiny Squinkies to cross, the bathroom littered with dollops of toothpaste and webs of dental floss.

Oh for a thick protective coat that made me unappealing to menacing creatures. Not that I have predators trying to eat me up, but I do wish I could have left that young suit at the bank with a mouthful of bitter slime after he subjected me to his clunky attempts at small talk today.

"So... Do you have a job or are you just a stay at home mom?"

(This is the same bank where another Frat Boy In A Suit invited me and my daughter into his office with, "Come on in, girls!" Slime to you, Buddy. I've got twenty years and a degree or two on you. The name is Ms. Fey.)

Today I sighed and answered slowly, "I am a mom but there is no 'just' about it."

"Yeah!" he giggled. "I heard on the news that if you added up all the work that women do at home, they should be getting a hundred thousand a year!"

Yes, Blithe Young Man with your first job and and your no dependents and your probably equally unencumbered roommate, that's about right. Personal chefs can earn $50K/year. Event planners about the same. Cleaning crews charge $100/hour. Tutors are $50/hour. Caregivers get $200-300/day. Sedan driver rates start around $50/hour. Cipher it all up, add and multiply times two little extra-challenging sweethearts, carry the seven and you're got...a labor of love and an institution of inequality.

Instead of multipurpose slime, I may be better served by the lessons of patience offered by Bailey as her book's last words:

"Lots to do at whatever pace I can go. I must remember the snail. Always remember the snail."

You can read more posts about The Sound of A Wild Snail Eating here. I received a copy of the book from the publisher with no obligation.

Tina Fey's Bossypants

Mia and her daddy imitating the cover of Tina Fey's new book.

No, Tina Fey is no relation, but she is an inspiration. And her book is a revelation that fills me with elation! (I'm stopping.) Bossypants, Fey's comic collection of stories about making it to the top ranks of comedy writing for Second City, TV and films, has plenty of no-nonsense, hate-free girl-power messages as well as belly laughs.

A couple of warnings, though. Don't read the Bossypants chapter called "The Secret of Mommy's Beauty" while you are taking your giant fish oil pill because you will snort water out of your nose and without that big gulp the horse pill can scrape something awful on its way down.

And don't start thinking you and the writer are buddies even though her voice is as intimate and confessional as that best junior-high friend who could nearly make you pee your pants from laughing so hard in Earth Science.

Just because she cuts her little daughter's fingernails in the exact same way you do, (fyi, "cutting the nails almost all the way left to right and then letting her have the honor of pulling the clipping the rest of the way off") and just because she dares to confess "things most people do naturally are often inexplicably difficult for me" and admits she has told her husband she was going to look for the diaper cream and then went and stood in her child's room just to get some "me time," that does not mean she "knows" you and "gets" you. (Remember how well that one time went when Liz Phair and you were in the same bowling alley? Remember? Remember?)

Because if you start over-identifying with the funniest woman in America (sorry Lily Tomlin! Still love you!), you're going to start composing little TMI chapter-musings in your head with titles like "My Favorite Hair (Not On My Head)" and descriptions of your experiences with Maxi Pads and their adhesive strips that worked as well as a circle of Scotch tape covered in lint. And you really don't want to do that. Really.

I finished Fey's book last week around the same time Oprah was saying her see-ya-laters. Oprah (why haven't I been watching her? She's so cute and funny! Because TV in the morning makes me feel like the day is getting away from me, that's why) anyway, I watched Oprah this last once and she got me all fired up with, "Take responsibility for the energy you bring in this room." I love that! Then I remembered that it's a great line to whisper to yourself but one that will be laughed at in this house if you hang it in a frame on the wall as a little passive-aggressive reminder to other people.

Hot on Oprah's heels was another empowerment whammy from Tina:

My unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism or ageism or lookism or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then when you're in charge, don't hire the people who were jerky to you...Do your thing and don't care if they like it.

(I'm omitting the riotous context of that good advice that makes it slide down like funny honey, but you get the important point.)

Oh yeah, and one final warning when you go out and get Bossypants. (BTW, my favorite illustration of that title was Tina's story of demanding "What are you doing?" when she found her gay friend playing footsie with some guy she couldn't stand, because she described herself as trying to be funny and controlling at the same time. That line kills me.)

That final warning. Don't spend too much time wondering why we distinguish poetry and comedy since Tina Fey makes you realize both art forms rely on condensed and precise language, both achieve artlessness and ease in their greatest forms and both potentially make us stop and rethink the world. Because that's kind of interesting, but instead, you could be having a better time howling your way through something Tina wrote, like this:



Or this.

Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard

I started thinking about culture shock even before we left for Mexico.

Our little family had just breached the departure doors at O'Hare Monday morning a week ago to find a solid mass of travelers standing in indecipherable lines that snaked through the lobby. No signs or borders. Baggage check in? Security? I wouldn't interrupt the chattering teenagers who made up most of the crowd massed in front us to ask a question -- high schoolers lose half their IQ points waiting in groups.

A lone besieged airline worker offered information in the middle of a scrum of travelers. My dear husband Randy, too polite by half, waited patiently to cross the line of spring-breakers and began with "Good morning...."

I barged forward, barking, "International baggage check in!" I got a pointed direction and the reply, "Six."

It may not have been my best moment, but our flight was scheduled before 9 a.m. and I'd had four hours of nervous sleep. Hey, this is Chicago. We get the job done. We just elected Rahm Emanuel with 56 goddamn percent of the fucking vote, baby. Deal with it.

Still, an episode from Elizabeth Bard's charming memoir Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes rang in my head, chiding me as we found our way to check-in kiosk #6.

Bard falls in love nearly simultaneously with her French boyfriend and the cuisine of his native land. After months of soaking up and in Paris culture, she visits a cookwear shop with her mother, who has not yet learned the ways of the true Parisienne. Bard's mother approaches a salesman with a piece of pottery and announces, "I want to buy this." Wincing, Bard escorts her mother out of the store and conducts the transaction herself in the properly French way, polite and correct.

"What?" asks her mother on the sidewalk.

Where to begin? "You didn't say 'Good morning,'" replies Bard, who writes of feeling like she has "centuries of catching up to do."

The scene, like so many tales of culture clash in this memoir and in most travelers' memories, is about much more than a simple misunderstanding. Entering a foreign world means occasionally facing a volatile mix of cultural pride, personal desire, and the needs of the group versus those of the individual.

I was feeling what Bard calls "a cultural jet lag" as I drove the desert highway that leads into our destination town of Todos Santos later that day. Some portions of the road are dinky single lane with steep gullies on either side and occasional chunks missing from the white line on the edge. Some stretches are recently refinished blacktop, eight lanes wide, but with no markings, no yellow or white lines, and little guidance when your lane suddenly disappears and you hope the cars coming the opposite direction stay to the right.

Our host laughs at this and tells us a story of a town in the Netherlands that took away all their stop signs and streetlights. Car accidents became rare from the subsequent eye contact and caution.

Courtesy and care - it's not a bad way to move through the world, especially where you don't yet know the rules, but you already feel yourself falling in love. The trick is knowing how to execute that courtesy.

Brent tells another story of when he first arrived in the little town, keeping his head down as he passed people on their porches, until he learned, quickly, the abundant response his hellos would receive.

My little Nora calls a chirpy, "Hola! Hola!" to strangers out the car window. I wince, like Bard.

Two little old ladies in knee length dresses and black pantyhose walk slowly arm in arm up the hill in the neighborhood of Los Pinos. "I've learned to say, 'Buenos dios, Senoras,'" Brent explains, as he demonstrates a slow turn to face their precious and terrible dignity with a deep nod. Some early mornings on holy days, he and Serena can hear them singing, fifteen or so ladies, in a procession to the orange stucco chapel down the road.

The publisher of Lunch in Paris sent me a copy of the book with no obligation. You can read more posts about the memoir at From Left to Write.

Mrs. Seraponas Dreamed in Chicago

Natasha Solomons's lovely first novel, Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English, is the latest book read by the From Left to Write Book Club. The title character Jack Rosenblum is a mensch, an irrepressibly optimistic Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, who escapes with his wife and daughter to England in 1937. In love with his adopted homeland, Mr. R. desires nothing more than to naturalize completely and become a proper English gentleman. He becomes convinced to best way to do this is to create his own perfect golf course, never mind his near complete ignorance of the game nor his inexperience with landscaping manual labor. The first day he begins work to fashion his course from sixty acres of rocky hillside, Mr. R. wipes his hands delicately after each shovel of dirt. Such is the gentle humor of this sweet book, that by its stirring ending, had me cheering on the would-be duffer.

Author Natasha Solomons cites her grandparents' rural Dorset cottage as an inspiration for the book. The writer still lives near the former home of her grandfather and grandmother in rural southwest England, and fills the book with the charms of the county's folklore, with odd characters written in rich dialect who call our hero "Mr. Rose-in-Bloom" and with glorious depictions of the Dorset countryside.

By happy accident, I finished Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English this week, around the same time I completed reading my maternal grandmother's diary of the year 1933-1934.

My strongest memories of my mother's mother, Amelia Seraponas, are of her regal bearing and the beautiful white hair that she wore in a soft bun at the nape of her neck. Reading her diary for the first time, I have the chance to see her as a young woman, a twenty-eight year old with a new baby and a sick mother to care for, newly married to a man with an insecure job and mood swings of dark to light and back to dark again.

Set in gritty Chicago, rather than the bucolic hills of Dorset, England, my grandmother's diary tells a fragment of the hardscrabble story second generation Lithuanian-Americans lived during the cold heart of the Great Depression, yet omits the satisfying and triumphant climax of Mr. Rose-in-Bloom's epic undertaking.

In the winter of 1934, my grandfather Tony had left a milk delivery job to sell cookies door to door for an outfit with the deceptively sweet name of Mama's Cooky Company. Times were tough and sales were so slow, Tony had to add his own savings to keep up the appearance of meeting his sales quota.

Grandma tended my infant mother, Bernadette, cooked herring and eggs for Lenten dinners, cleaned the house, sewed and ironed, and worried about money. Her goal was to save $4.00 a month.

On a Thursday in April, Amelia writes of taking the baby to the grocer to pay $2.00 toward their bill, then to the coal company to do the same and order more heating fuel. Tony came home that night to tell her his bosses had been fired and that he would be laid off in a week.

After four months trying to sell cookies to households as strapped as his own, Grandpa Tony, along with twenty other salesmen, was fired the Saturday after Easter, 1934. "What are we going to do now?" writes Grandma. "Heaven only knows." My mother was five months old.

The next day, Amelia took the time to write the diary's last entry.

"What a beautiful day. Tone went out to look for a store. It seems Al Segreti is fired for being caught drunk, but he was still working on his milk wagon." So Grandma didn't write her happy ending, but she did fashion one with grace notes of hope. Perhaps her young husband would start his own business. Maybe he could snatch up Al Segreti's job. Even with the despair of Tony's firing, it was still a beautiful day.

I am left in suspense, but only because I want to read every day of the Seraponas's climb to self-sufficiency and safety, not because I do not know it happened.

The happy coda for the story of my grandparents lies in my treasure of memories of visits to their home when I was a child. Grandpa Tony went back to work as a milkman and he and Amelia had a second daughter, my aunt Joan. They saved enough money to move out of the city to Clarendon Hills, a western suburb with curving streets and enormous elms whose roots split the sidewalks into angled slabs. Aunt Joan remembers feeling as if they had moved to the country. Grandma worked at a nearby Montessori school.


To me, their home was as magical as the idyllic picture Solomons paints of the Rose-in-Blum's thatched roof home in the Dorset countryside. Grandma and Grandpa's front door with its dark wood panels and rounded window seemed the entrance to a fairyland cottage. My sister and I swung from the tire swing in the side yard and explored the musty basement where a homemade doll house hid under a white sheet. Grandma had made the back yard into a verdant paradise of raspberry and gooseberry bushes, mature fruit trees, and lush peonies. One day she showed me how to cut a giant stalk of rhubarb from the garden border, then set up a work space in the sun porch where I could cut the purple stem into bite-sized pieces with a paring knife. I washed the rhubarb pieces one by one in a small bowl of water, then dipped them in a bowl of sugar, and bit into their sour-sweet wet crunch. A taste of goodness, as full of love as the simple lunch Grandma made for me from a boiled egg with butter, salt and pepper next to a sweet glass of tickling Fresca.

Remembering the love infused into these simple foods takes me back to the other story line of Solomons's book, that of Jack's wife, Sadie, who initially does not share his enthusiasm for all things English. She sees his eagerness to assimilate as a betrayal of those loved ones left behind. To remember her father, mother and brother, lost in the Holocaust, she bakes recipes from her mother's old cookbook. In a bit of magic realism, the cakes turn out four feet high and those who taste them feel Sadie's sadness. This sharing of Sadie's grief gives her comfort.

The publisher of Mr. Rosenblum Dreams in English sent me a copy of the book with no obligation.

Buh-Lizzard!

I stood behind the glass door this afternoon and watched little Nora as she waited for the kindergarten bus. Wrapped in snowsuit, boots, gloves and hat, she worked in the fresh snow, throwing handfuls into the air and catching them on her hatted head like confetti. She looked down the street for the late bus, then looked back to me to wave and catch one of mine, then got down to the business of play again. Big armful-sized blocks of snow were carried to her snowbank work table, icicles retrieved from the cherry tree and stuck in the top, (hair? a crown?) a stick from the maple stuck to Snow Buddha's side. Or perhaps he was a frozen King Triton, after the mermaid movie that we watched again this morning.

This morning the village's miniature snowplow cleared the sidewalk where Nora stands and I'm kind of sad, even with the glorious sky and sun that have followed Tuesday and Wednesday's SnowMyGod Snowmaggedon of 2011. Yesterday I had carved out a wandering path from our front walk to the corner where the bus drops off the kids. Now the way is straight and broad. My homemade version may have been no more wide than the narrow width of a snow shovel, but its leisurely curves and clumsy chunks showed the craftwoman's effort. Like a sculptor's tool marks in the clay.

The last simile brought to you by Steve Martin's newest novel, An Object of Beauty, a lovely and lively tale of art dealers and collectors I'm reading set in the galleries and tony restaurants of Manhattan. Martin, whose memoir Born Standing Up I loved, describes the pre-millennium, pre-financial-crash art scene with the ease of an actual collector:

"Whether (the art of the '90's) was any good or not, the sheer amount of it -- to the dismay of cranky critics -- was redefining what art could be. Since the 1970's, art schools had shied away from teaching skills and concentrated on teaching thought. Yet this was the first time in conventional art history where no single movement dominated, no manifesto declared its superiority, and diversity bounced around like spilled marbles on concrete."

Martin's prose is chewy and delicious, well, until I hit the novel's 9/11 episode this morning. Stopped me dead in my tracks, and brought me back to the awful experience of reading the first half of Chris Cleave's Little Bee last summer. (At that novel's midpoint, Cleave puts three of his characters in a horrific scene so vicious and disturbing, every following action can't bear the weight of what horrors came before. I gave up when two lovers were arguing about his wife - how could we be expected to care about their petty squabbles after that unerasable image of the murder on the beach?)

An Object of Beauty hasn't lost me yet, just made me pause. I'll see if the ever-deft Martin can work his magic on the American tragedy that eclipses all others - perhaps he'll whip a cape over the disaster and distract me with some flash in the other hand. Or fit compassion into the cool hearts of his art lovers.

Deborah Eisenberg is a writer capable of handling the difficult retelling of New York's enormous blows in her story "Twilight of the Superheroes" from her recent Collected Stories of Deborah Eisenberg. I've been reading this huge collection for months, after this high recommendation from my friend Christina, "She writes the way I think." I knew what Christina meant by the first page: "...for a moment that seemed endless I had been pulled down into a forgotten period of my life when I, too, had strained to adhere to the slippery requirements of distant authorities." Honestly, I just want to hold up lines to show you - look at this! And this! And this from "Twilight:"

"Oh that day! One kept waiting -- as if a morning would arrive from before that day to take them all along a different track. One kept waiting for that shattering day to unhappen, so that the real -- the intended -- future, the one that had been implied by the past, could unfold. Hour after hour, month after month, waiting for that day to not have happened. But it had happened. And now it was always going to have happened." Which is about as perfect a description of our collective post-9/11 disbelief, and more specific grieving, as I've encountered in a while.

I've read Eisenberg's story "Days" three times now, after the first reading kept killing me softly with its song. An unnamed woman of undetermined age and means of support stops smoking which begins a downward slide told in precise declarative sentences that made me laugh with their blackness. "I feel as if years of rage have condensed around the sides of my brain and are dripping down into it, forming pools in which all its other contents are becoming sodden and useless."

"The ruin that is (her) life" is slowly saved by an introduction to the YMCA and its cold pool and running track, its "little tropical hut" of a sauna. The woman seems to relearn how to think, like a stroke victim relearning to speak, and her small improvements are about as close as Eisenberg gets in this beautiful and ambiguous collection to a positive resolution.

I know this character's fury and confusion and hopeful persistence. Sometimes to me too, "it seems that there is a growing number of women, and that I am not among them." If you can laugh with me at that great line, you too could love this story and this book.

The Bridge Builder's Gift

The girls are having a snack in the museum basement. It’s Family Day at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and before we jump into the treasure hunt and the koi ogling, we need a short break to fuel up. The girls crunch goldfish crackers and to keep them eating, I offer to read to them one of the beautiful picture books strewn on one of the little tables.

It’s The Quilt Maker’s Gift by Chicago artist Jeff Brumbeau. The rich colors and sweet details of Gail De Marken’s illustrations suck me in, but it is the story that nearly knocks me over.

A rich king so loves his possessions that he declares his birthday celebrated twice a year and demands all his subjects give him gifts. He is still not happy. He hears of a quilt maker, whose intricate and beautiful hand-sewn quilts draw people from near and far to try to buy one for their own. They are all turned away, because the woman finds homes for her quilts in a singular way. Once she had completed one of her masterpieces, she leaves her home at night and wanders the streets of the city until she finds a homeless soul sleeping on the street. She covers him with her quilt and returns home to begin another.

“Give me a quilt!” demands the king.

“Make presents of everything you own,” replies the woman. “And then I’ll make a quilt for you.”

At first the king refuses and his efforts, along with those of his bumbling army, to force a quilt from the woman are foiled in gentle ways that made my girls laugh and cheer. When the king eventually, reluctantly, agrees to the quilt maker’s plan, he can only make himself part with a single marble. The gift makes a boy smile. The king next brings out some velvet coats. The people who receive them are solemnly grateful, and the king feels the beginnings of gratification, but something is still missing. He decides to take his collections of blue dancing cats and clear glass fish and his merry-go-round with live horses to the village square. This gift creates an explosion of joy from both receivers and givers that the king did not know he had been longing for.

He packs his wagons and begins to travel the world, giving away all that he has accumulated. Every time he gives a gift, he sends a sparrow to the quilt maker and she adds another square to his quilt.

By the time the king has given away all his wealth and the last weary sparrow arrives at the quilt maker’s door, my tight throat has pinched my reading voice into an emotional squeak and my nose and eyes are running.

The king's sacrifice is not what has me in tears. When I look at De Marken's images of the king, I see in their place a real man who lived his life in this way.

Thomas J. White, the co-founder of the revolutionary health organization Partners in Health, died this month at the age of 90. By the time he reached his eighties, White had given away nearly all of his personal fortune, tens of millions of dollars, to provide education, health care and services for the poorest of the poor.

A few weeks before he died, Tom White sent a last check of $5000 to Partners in Health, the Cambridge-based organization that has transformed the model of aid-giving from one of charity to one of community partnering. "My role is pretty much played out," read the note accompanying the check, "but on to the future!"

I first encountered stories of Tom White's generosity in the book Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's account of the birth of Partners in Health. Kidder writes how White's initial seed money of one million dollars enabled Partners in Health to begin with a clinic in rural Haiti. That clinic, Zanmi Lasante, evolved into a public health system across 12 sites in Haiti, employing nearly 4,000 people, most of them Haitians, and serving a population of 2.6 million in 2008. The organization has established community partnerships in Kazakhstan, Peru, Boston and the African nations of Rwanda, Lesotho and Malawi, with partner projects working to implement the community-based model of PIH in Mexico, Guatemala, Burundi, Mali, Liberia and Nepal.

Tom White's financial support made much of this possible. His wealth came from J.F. White Contracting Co., a successful Boston construction company White inherited from his father and nurtured from a foundation excavator to a major builder of hotels, stadiums, dams, subways, and bridges.

The word "philanthropist" usually brings to my mind a grainy black and white image of John D. Rockefeller in a somber suit handing out nickels to bewildered-looking children. We're expected to be grateful for the largess of civic donors - our great cities' hospitals and museums, like the one where I brought my girls on this free of charge Family Day, were built and funded from their generous sharing.

But who thinks of a philanthropist as brave? Who thinks of a philanthropist as so selfless he could go against conventional thinking that urges continuous financial growth? So empathetic that he would rather halt the agony of today's sick and hungry than take faith in the metering out of future interest? Instead of treating retirement like a tightrope walk that is foolhardy without a voluminous savings cushion, Tom White used the time as a chance to divest himself of his accumulated wealth. He was able to watch the transformation he made possible as the humblest of homes were improved with solid roofs and floors, as third world lives were saved with the modern medicine we take for granted in U.S. hospitals.

White not only uttered the common sentiment of desiring to die poor, he lived it. "I can't take it with me, my kids are OK, and my wife's taken care of," he told the Boston Globe in 2004. After his children were grown, (thirteen total, from two marriages), he sold his larger houses and lived in a modest two-bedroom condo in Cambridge with his second wife, Lois.

Here is the gift Tom White left for me: a question that feels both revolutionary and of great ethical importance. Why die with money? White cast new doubts on the idea that growing and maintaining the largest financial surplus possible is a worthwhile goal, or even a moral one. Once our children are grown capable and comfortable, what greater needs will they have than those of the world's poor?

I've read the biographies, heard the stories of great men and women who lived lives of self-imposed austerity: Dorothy Day, Jesus, Mahatma Gandhi. For some reason it was this man who brought the message home. A modern man, a builder of bridges and clinics, a man who favored plaid golf pants to the white robes of a penitent, who made presents of nearly everything he owned.

The Earth-Bound Cook and the People Who Grow Her Food

Our friends Brent and Serena are coming for Thanksgiving! The entire family is thrilled, although the girls are a little disappointed that their dog Trixie and the baby burro won't be able to make the flight from Mexico.

We spent our spring breaks in 2007 and last year at Brent and Serena's village of Todos Santos ("All Saints") on the west coast of the Baja Peninsula, about fifty miles north of the tourist magnets Los Cabos. If all goes well, we'll return this March. We've fallen in love with Mexico.

A natural spring makes Todos Santos a literal oasis in the middle of the sun-baked yet beautiful Sonoran desert.

In Todos, agriculture not only supports the economy, but meshes with the landscape. Orchards and farm fields pop up between houses as you take the short drive off the single paved road of "downtown" Todos toward the residential neighborhoods to the north. Pepper plants rustle in the sun across the street from the hotel where gringos take yoga lessons. On our last trip, Serena described the scout troups who camped out in the mango orchard we'd pass every day. Rows and rows of tomatoes flourish next to the gravel road that leads to the unswimmable stretch of the coastline we called Killer Beach. I ran this route nearly every day of our trip last spring.

Sometimes the fields I passed when I ran would stretch away from my view, entirely empty of any life but the lush green plants, but occasionally I'd see a worker or two, fiddling with the water lines or doing other farmery work. Once I saw a man spraying the plants from a canister on his back. And sometimes those workers brought the kids, like the two boys who messed around in the back of their dad's pickup. They stopped their play to watch me jog by.

"They have parties in the fields," said Serena, who works in a school for the children of the migrant farmworkers who travel up and down the coast picking crops. She described the relaxed gatherings at twilight, where families bring picnics and the children play in the rows.

I thought again of the fields of Todos and the children who played there when I was reading and cooking from Myra Goodman's new cookbook The Earthbound Cook.

In between her intriguing and delicious recipes, Goodman offers mini-essays on the healthy planet lifestyle. Her "Twelve Reasons to Choose Organic" included this: "Choosing organic protects farmworkers, wildlife, and nearby homes, schools and businesses." She goes on to quote a 2009 study from the Annals of Neurology finding twice as many instances of Parkinson's disease among people who lived near homes sprayed with pesticides compared with those not exposed.

Farms are not operated by robots. They are worked by real people, often parents, whose children may need to come along for the day. It's no secret that the manual labor required to produce and harvest the crops that end up in our grocery stores and on our tables is often performed by vulnerable populations, who may have limited options and resources for child care and health care. According to the Migrant Clinicians Network, pesticide exposure may be one of the highest risk environmental hazards for migrant farm workers and "children especially are at risk." Even if they do not work or play in treated fields, the children of farm workers can be exposed to pesticides from their home, the surrounding environment and even the clothes their parents wear home from work.

I cannot find a more compelling reason for choosing organic produce than to lessen the risk of pesticide poisoning for children.

The other writers for the From Left To Write website are discussing Myra Goodman's book today. You can find their posts here. Emily, from West of the Loop, had this to say: "...the cookbook is all about cooking in a mindful way that is healthy for your family and for our planet — because aren’t those two things inextricably intertwined? For example, eating more vegetarian meals is both good for our bodies – because those meals tend to be lower in fat and higher in nutrients — and good for the environment because eating lower on the food chain consumes fewer resources."

The more I learn about sustainability, the more I see its theme of connection, like the intertwined benefits that Emily describes. And the more I learn, the more I believe a greener, more sustainable lifestyle is one that tries to connect more with the world, one that tries to examine where the products we consume originate, how they are made, and who are the people who benefit or suffer because of our choices.

By the way, I used Goodman's recipes for a beautiful apple pie with sweet crust, a chocolate-pecan cake with milk chocolate ganache icing and a delicious summer squash-tomato stir fry that used up the last of our CSA vegetables and herbs. I'll be trying her cauliflower "couscous" recipe soon.

This post was inspired by Myra Goodman's cookbook, The Earthbound Cook: 250 Recipes for Delicious Food and A Healthy Planet, which I received with no obligation from the publisher.

Interview with Emma Donoghue

The From Left to Write website has an interview with Room author Emma Donoghue today, including questions from yours truly!

Her novel Room was stunning to read and it's very exciting to have this added insight to her process. I love her voice and her sense and her candid advice so much. Here's a great quote: I find the parent-child relationship infinitely interesting; it changes every week, it’s never stable or symmetrical, it can swing between tyranny and zen-like acceptance, passion and banality every couple of minutes.

You can read the entire interview HERE and my original post here. And here is a round-up of all the posts inspired by Room from From Left to Write contributors. Writer-Mommy's post comparing mothering as a verb to motherhood as a noun is particularly moving.

Room by Emma Donoghue

So happy to be discussing Emma Donoghue's masterful, gripping and funny novel Room with the From Left to Write book club this week. Initially, the premise of the book, told from the point of view of a five year old boy gradually coming to the understanding that he has spent his entire life imprisoned in an 11 x 11 foot bunker by his mother's kidnapper, gave me the heebie-jeebies.

Enough with the morbid fascination for extreme cases of violence towards women and children. Enough with "Click Here for photos of the house of horrors." Don't feed the dragon.

Room turned out to be something very different. Jack's mother, despite nearly nightly rape, emerges not as a victim, but a resourceful and stunningly brave heroine, whose inventive construction of a particular version of reality has not only kept her son from physical harm in their tiny world but protected his innocence and sense of well-being.

When Ma takes an enormous risk, the pages of Room became some of the most terrifying I've ever read. When I reached that point, it was after eleven at night, I was the last one awake and I stood in our cold bathroom, crying with fear, unable to take my eyes off the story.

Then things got surprising and even more interesting. The story does not end here, as a conventional thriller would have. And the pages that follow force us to see the world we live in from the point of view of a three-parts-civilized, one-part-feral child, who, despite all, appears to have escaped damage.

Both Jack's unique position to observe the oddities of our modern world (crocs shoes, predatory talk show hosts, the chaos of the mall, grandmothers hooting "yoo-hoo!" at the playground) and his undamaged quality that his mother's creativity was able to preserve allow the book's second half to become dryly funny and very much so.

Which is pretty amazing to me because here's the thing about safe. The topic of safety is pretty hard to make funny. People on safety patrol can be awfully sanctimonious. Safe is the derogatory word used to describe second-rate art.

As I write this I sit in front of window offering a high-rise view of a Chicago parking lot below. A little person in pink wanders alone in the aisle as her big people lock up their car. There are no moving cars in the entire lot, but I can feel an unpleasant tension. Parenthood heightens most parents' Spidey-sense and the added acuity can sometimes balance out with a decrease in the humor-sense. Heard any good jokes about vaccines lately?

Room resonated for me in so many ways. The memoir I'm laboring over has an ongoing theme of safety's folly - the well-intentioned hoops adults jump through to try to keep and preserve the children in their care, how physical and emotional safety can come to be at odds, the tension of safety vs. independence and self-sufficiency.

I wrote several paragraphs last night (which I intended to share with you, but left behind on the desktop of the aforementioned high-rise) about my mid-teen years when my aunt and uncle worked their darndest to construct elaborate ways to keep me physically safe and sound despite absolutely no efforts from me to be dangerous. I was the abstemious virgin in the family, whose favorite habit was reading, who hung with spiffy clean crowds and neglected to get her driver's license until she was eighteen.

My free time hours were busy with Girl Scouts, Key Club, French horn practice, writing original oratories about the importance of positive self-esteem and stuffing squares of black and white tissue paper into a chickenwire frame shaped to resemble Pepe Le Pew. (Pepe's levitating tail and the white smoke issuing from his ass ensured French club won the homecoming parade float first prize that autumn.)

The innocence of which kind of made my guardians' over-protection all the more ridiculous, but if I take even a half second to ignore my own irritation at the earliest curfew I knew and the harshest grillings when it was overreached and take another half second to look at my aunt and uncle's obvious motivations, all humor in the situation comes to a full stop.

Well, duh. If they could not control the awful recent past, if they could not take back the awful accident, if they could not even bring themselves to talk about it with the children who remained, the least they could do was try to control the already compliant girl who tried to see love in their strictures, since affection and pride came from them with more difficulty.

So you can see some of the challenges I'm facing trying to write the truth with both compassion and humor. Some days writing my story feels like constructing a jigsaw puzzle out of pieces of broken glass. And yet it's the joy in the past that I most want to convey, the joy in Jeanne and Chris's leap into the air next to the trailer, the joy that couldn't be extinguished, despite all.


You can find more posts about Room at From Left to Write.

The participants in From Left to Write Book Clubs receive from the publisher a copy of the book discussed.

Maddie Dawson's The Stuff That Never Happened

The From Left To Write Book Club discusses new books in a particular way - instead of reviewing what we've read, the contributors share their personal experiences that have been inspired, or, as in my case this week, dragged up by the text.

It was hard for me not to sit as judge and jury when reading Maddie Dawson's first novel, The Stuff That Never Happened. The story of a young adulterer stirred up all sorts of muck from the shallows of my history and it was not a fun time to recall. So I hoisted all my discomfort back onto Dawson's protagonist Annabelle McKay and read her antics with ire and a self-righteousness it was difficult to resist.

The illicit sex in The Stuff That Never Happened occurs between two married people, in the same home they share with their spouses and young children, but this flagrant cheating, for me, did not seem like Annabelle's biggest betrayal of her even-keeled yet distant husband, Grant. It was her casual lying about meeting with her old lover twenty-six years after the affair that felt even more deceitful and had me scribbling "LIAR!" and "O.M.G.!!" in the margins.

Like this passage, where Annabelle defensively misrepresents her reunion with the old lover to her husband: "Come on, this is ridiculous! Okay, fair enough, I saw Jeremiah Saxon. Twenty-six years have passed, and big deal! I run into him in a market, against all odds. And then, yes, I go for coffee with him. I sit in Starbucks with the man and hear about his boring, trite, dull life."

She omits the part about she and Jeremiah making out in the park, "like a couple of teenagers."

We've all heard the adage from a cheated partner: "It's not the physical relationship that hurts the most, it's the lying." Dawson's book brought this line roaring back into my head.

We all operate in the social world by interacting with the people around us on a bedrock of trust. Any question we ask of another human, from the innocuous ("Can I have this by Tuesday?" "Would you like fries with that?") to the most vital, ("How can I help?" "Will you marry me?") presupposes an answer that corresponds to a shared reality. We build our plans, our hopes, our work, our relationships on the presumed truth in those answers. That's why, when faced with a suddenly revealed lie, we can have a hard time understanding or accepting that we've been deceived. And that is why, when caught in a lie of our own, we can experience the deepest shame. We haven't just chosen the wrong words; we've ripped the social contract. We've messed with the rules of logic that run our world. And for the people we have lied to, finding out that their version of reality is broken can be torture.

When the man who is now my husband and I had been dating six months or so, we flew to Florida to meet his parents. I had never had such a well-matched boyfriend - he was kind, respectful, fun and funny, open about his imperfect past and willing to listen to me pour out long, if somewhat edited, stories of my own. And, most importantly, he seemed really into me. And he was gorgeous. (Still is, but back to our story...)

One night on Sanibel Island, during a lull in the family drama, Randy and I stepped outside to sit by the pool. My head was spinning from all the emotion and hasty intimacy at my first gathering of his unusually close family and I suddenly felt an urge to come clean to this man.

"I have something I need to tell you." And with that I fell silent. Here I was again, standing in front of a beautiful trusting man, the hard truth stopped up in my throat. But this time would be different. This time I would make good. I wouldn't change the subject and commit the sin of omission; I wouldn't slip into another lie to avoid an awful truth. I pressed on.

"I need you to know something about me. I have never been faithful in any serious relationship."

My announcement may have been immature dramatics or a compulsion to stir something up, but it was also true.

"Okaaaaaay...," Randy replied, still smiling. "Why are you telling me this? Is there something I need to know?"

"Oh, no! I'm not talking about now, with you!" I had to stop to think. "I'm not completely sure why I'm telling you this. I think...it's because...I want us to be honest with each other. And I don't ever want to go through that again."

I need to emphasize how much I really didn't want to go through that all again.

I don't know if Maddie Dawson has ever seen the face of someone she has hurt deeply or if the cuckolded husband of The Stuff That Never Happened is purely a work of the imagination. I hope the latter. No mind-blowing sex, no thrill of getting away with it, no sweetest taboo, is ever worth the pain or the long-living guilt of knowing you have inflicted that pain.

Maybe I wasn't confessing to Randy so much as professing - letting the man who I would marry know that I was done done done with cheap drama, that I had outgrown honky-tonk over-romanticizing. Letting him know that I could no longer believe in the excuses of loneliness, immaturity, confusion, deluded ideas about passion, bad examples, desperation, indecision, tattered self-esteem, cowardice, alcohol, or Billie Holiday. Letting him know that I had grown up a little since that stupid time in my twenties. And that I could now hardly recognize that cowardly lyin' girl, even though she was me.

Randy's response to my big reveal, "Well, you let me know if there's anything I should worry about," was the equivalent of a shrug. He would tell me later that he did worry a little about what I had said, but in the seventeen years since then, jealousies and suspicions (except about those two bitches, Ms. Bar and Ms. Work) have had little place in our relationship. Honest.

May it ever be so.

You can find more posts about The Stuff That Never Happened here, at From Left to Write.

The participants in From Left to Write Book Clubs receive from the publisher a copy of the book discussed.

Hope Edelman's The Possibility of Everything

The writers in the Silicon Valley Moms Blog group are discussing Hope Edelman's newest book today and I am thrilled. Although I've never met the woman, Hope Edelman's name and story feels as familiar as that of a friend. We are both around the same age, lost our mothers too soon, studied at the University of Iowa, and have two daughters. We married our husbands for the same reason -- as Edelman puts it in The Possibility of Everything, "he was the kindest man I'd ever met." And we both write, although her output towers over mine.

Her books have been on my shelf for years, their titles like a distilled description of the rawest part of my life: Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss; Letters from Motherless Daughters: Words of Courage, Grief and Healing; Motherless Mothers: How Mother Loss Shapes the Parents We Become.

The tone of these books fluctuates between that of an understanding counselor, bringing healing and understanding to women who grieve and that of a consummate researcher, analytical yet insightful. I have found much comfort there, but little of the messy emotions that have accompanied my own delayed grieving process. Motherless Mothers' index has no listing for "rage, drowning in."

Edelman's latest book, a memoir entitled The Possibility of Everything, exhibits a slightly less confident voice, but one I can relate to in even greater measure. It describes with great honesty a period in her life while she was taking on the most daunting of roles: first-time mother of a challenging child.

At a tense period in her marriage, Edelman's then-three year old daughter began exhibiting disturbingly aggressive behavior that the little girl attributed to the influence of her imaginary friend, "Dodo." Along with her understanding husband Uzi, Edelman used a family vacation to Belize to explore the powers of the country's natural healers to help her daughter and to explore the limits of her own credulity.

I'm not interested in debate whether Edelman's daughter was literally possessed by a supernatural spirit or not. I may be a confirmed atheist, but I'm not an evangelical one. Nor do I believe my skepticism can diminish the undeniable power in Edelman's descriptions of eerie behavior by the precocious three-year-old Maya, of her growing suspicions that something was seriously wrong with her daughter, and of the strange, yet strangely ordinary visits with Belizian spiritual doctors.

Who can deny that little Maya was receiving something she genuinely needed when Edelman anoints her child and rustily recites old prayers at the moving climax of the story? Perhaps whether the nature of that needed thing lies in the supernatural, the emotional, the psychological or a combination of these is less important than that Maya, and her mother, experienced a moment of healing.

In a Q and A with the Silicon Valley Mom Bloggers last week, Hope Edelman revealed, "when I committed to writing the book, I made a promise to myself that I wouldn't try to sugarcoat the story to make myself look good. I wanted to write a true, authentic story that honestly revealed who I was—or who I think I was—ten years ago, even if I feel that I'm not exactly the same person now." She admits she "had to find courage and humility to write ... parts of the book."

The self-doubts and anxieties that Edelman fearlessly shares resonated deeply with me. My first daughter Mia worried me too, to a degree that I was nearly afraid to share. My compliant second daughter's first word was a lispy "Yes"; Mia's first word was "Duck." It took me a while to figure out that Mia was issuing a warning rather than naming a bird.

Mia has always been a dramatic child, full of passion and stormy moods. Even now at seven, tears can fall fast over spilled tea, over the prospect of homework and the promise of dessert only after the playroom is cleaned. Her tantrums at the age of three shocked me with their intensity. Her face would turn a terrible red, the screams seemed endless. But unlike Edelman, I connected the dots very early between the loss of my mother and the extreme distress I felt when my daughter's emotions overwhelmed her.

When Mia screamed and writhed on the floor like no child I had ever seen, I spoke to her in a voice that seemed that of an actress playing a role I had taken on without sufficient rehearsal. That voice fretted, pleaded, bargained, threatened, and occasionally stayed calm and let Mia and her emotions take their time. Another voice, the one I hear in my head, whispered, "Of course."

Of course something was seriously wrong with my daughter. Because something seriously wrong happened to her mother. My parents died when I was four. Becoming a mother myself for the first time brought up powerful feelings of grief I had not been allowed, by others and by myself, to experience when I was young. Tapping into these deep rivers of sadness, longing, questioning and anger at times has complicated my own efforts to be the good mother I want to be.

Like Hope Edelman's little girl, my daughters have asked, "Why are you so sad?" when they saw their mother in tears. My initial impulse to remain vague and to distract because the reality seemed too complicated and too frightening has battled with my desire to be emotionally honest and genuine, to be open about the past and my struggles with it.

Now that I have a little more parenting experience and the equilibrium and perspective that come with it, I know that I have to move beyond the simplistic idea that Mia and I are stuck in a terminal determination rather than moving on a journey of healing. I know I need to let my daughter be who she is without projecting my fears on her. I am getting better at stopping catastrophizing that things are worse than they may be.

When I asked Hope Edelman whether her daughter's internal struggles may have been a stressful reaction to Maya's limited understanding that her mommy had something terrible happen to her, she saw less of a direct connection. You can read her full response to that questions, and others, here.

My deep thanks to Hope for sharing her story with us all, for taking the time to discuss her work with the SVM bloggers and bringing our attention to the country of Belize. Edelman donated a portion of the book advance to a book drive for the library in San Ignacio, toward building two new classrooms in San Antonio, and as a high school scholarship for two children from San Ignacio, since only about 60 percent of the citizens of Belize can afford to go to high school.

Coco, Igor and Catherine, Elizabeth, John and Rielle

News broke yesterday of Elizabeth Edwards separation from her philandering husband, John Edwards, as I finished reading Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky: A Novel by Chris Greenhalgh for today's Silicon Valley Moms Blog Group book club. I found the coincidence very ironic. You can't help seeing similarities between Stravinsky and Edwards, two men with big talents and the big egos needed to promote those talents, both dependent on rich sponsors to get their messages to the public. And both full of rationalizations for sleeping with other women while their wives are seriously ill.

Catherine Stravinsky, bed-ridden with consumption, must deal with the humiliation of living in the home and under the protection of the very woman who temporarily steals her husband, the designer Coco Chanel. The Stravinskys are in exile from their beloved Russia, which is caught in the throes of violent revolution. Composer Igor Stravinsky struggles to find time and peace to work on a symphony and a revision of the modernist classic The Rite of Spring. Chanel has offered her summerhouse outside of Paris for the use of the Stravinskys and their four children during the warm months of 1920. She also offers herself to Igor, who does not resist.

Reading American Wife last summer offered me a great deal of insight into the possible workings of the mind of a woman who remain married to a man like George Bush; Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky could also be read as a companion piece to the Edwards saga. Perhaps Edwards, like Stravinsky, passively blamed Fate for driving him into the arms of a flattering, and conveniently childless, other woman. The by-some-accounts slightly loony Rielle Hunter holds no comparison to the cultural touchstone and creative powerhouse Coco Chanel, except in her status, at least when the affair began, as a single working woman without pesky dependents. Elizabeth and Catherine retain their dignity and seem to gain some solace in the company and comfort of their children.

I turned forty-five this week. I celebrated with my husband and my children and then celebrated again with some old friends, some who are mothers, some who are not. We found plenty to laugh about and share, sitting together on pillows on the floor. Battles between women who have chosen different paths seemed airy, far away and very likely imaginary.

See Mom Run

"What are you reading?" asks my seven year old, most likely enticed by the cute robot on the cover of See Mom Run: Side-Splitting Essays from the World's Most Harried Moms, a new anthology of real life stories from blogging moms, compiled by Beth Feldman.

"It's stories written by mommies," I offer.

"What kind of stories?" she asks, still intrigued by the pink robot, but two seconds away from losing interest.

"Well, there's one mom who was driving to the water park and her daughter threw up all over the back of the car. "

"Really?" said Mia, her eyes lighting up.

"And there's another mom and a lady asked her if she was 'with child' when she wasn't pregnant and she wanted to ask the lady 'Are you with brain?'"

I added this last episode for the benefit of my husband who was walking by and would get the joke. I laughed loudest at this one, but to recapture Mia's attention, I added: "Yeah, and there's another mom who was at a restaurant and her baby pooped and pooped and wouldn't stop pooping!"

Mia, who is entranced by all things scatological, dissolved into loud and happy giggles.

Every parent has a immature digestive system story of his or her own to share. My favorite from our family starts when Mia was only a few months old and had been worrying her ever-observant mother with two days of wet, but not dirty diapers. One night I laid her on her changing table and tried a little infant massage in gentle circles on her belly. She complied with a big mess in front of me. Yeah!

A couple of weeks later, we were visiting with my husband's sister and her husband who had a new baby of their own. I was talking with my brother-in-law about how cute the little cousins were and he mentioned, "It's so funny to watch them poop."

"Yeah," I said. "It's like soft-serve!"

My brother-in-law gave me a half horrified, half-puzzled look and I suddenly realized he was talking about the funny faces that kids make when they are struggling with their innards, NOT the actual product of their struggles.

William and the Christmas Moon by Laura Robinson

The sweet folks at Sawbridge Studios sent me a copy of local writer/artist Laura Robinson's book William and the Christmas Moon: A Shadow-Casting Bedtime Story a few weeks ago. I've been meaning to tell you about it; it is so so beautiful - but the time has flown. Now you'll just have enough time to run out before Christmas Eve, because believe me, you'll really love starting a new holiday tradition, sharing this special book with your children.

Robinson's poem-story of William's magical night journey is accompanied by exquisite cut out illustrations designed to be lit on the wall by a cunning little flashlight that comes with each copy of the book. You'll need two AAA batteries. The attached flashlight, which ingeniously hooks to the book with velcro, is best for the images. Our old Maglight distorted the projected shadows.

My girls were squealing with delight at the pictures projected on the bedroom wall; I was entranced by the delicate beauty of the images. Two deer drink water by a moonlit lake. Pinprick stars twinkle over a snowy village. As I read on, my girls fell silent under the spell of the picture show in the darkness. The line, "Darkness frees our eyes/To see what daylight can disguise," made me think that this was a perfect story for the eve of the solstice. And made me think with new gratitude about the very darkness that we work so hard to banish this season.

Robinson has used this lovely shadow technique previously in her book William and the Magic Ring. I'm getting a copy to put under the tree for the girls.

William and the Christmas Moon by Laura Robinson. Sawbridge Studios, 153 West Ohio Street, Chicago and Green Bay Road at Tower Court, Winnetka.

This Is Where I Take You To The Movies

We'll get back to our Scandinavian trip in a moment, but first we interrupt our travelogue for a few words about Jonathan Tropper's novel, This Is Where I Leave You. The Silicon Valley Moms Blog Group is featuring Tropper's new work for their book club today. Discovering that the book's topic is grief and family dysfunction nearly opened a big can of dread for me. You see, the particular SVM style of discussion is for the bloggers to write about how a book speaks to our own personal experience rather than to review it.

Not being able to hide behind the critical distance afforded by the position of a reviewer NOR being able to enthusiastically gush about a book I really loved is tough enough; now I had to go to the hard and thorny place, too?

Tropper's comic novel takes place during the seven days when the four adult children and mother of the Foxman family sit shiva (think a week-long Jewish wake where the family is expected to live together for the duration) for the father. The narrator son, Judd, has recently discovered his wife's affair with his boss and gets the news that she is pregnant on the heels of hearing of his father's death. Mayhem ensues as the family members fight among themselves and with their spouses and lovers, as ancient resentments are brought back into the light and a family "brand of irony and evasion" gets in the way of healthy grief.

Let's do a little checklist now, shall we? Let's see how the themes of this book can be related to my own familial "personal experience." Um, unresolved grief issues? Check. Adult siblings with communication "issues"? Oh, big check. Cute kids running around for sweet comic relief? Thank goodness, check. Clever and chatty characters who work their way through rivalries with fisticuffs, humor and big dramatic gestures? Uh, no, not really.

So as I read and laughed my way through Tropper's novel, I actually found myself relieved not to be reminded as much as I expected of my own dear troubled family. Rather I found myself thinking of some other families - people you may know as well. The Fockers, for instance.

Perhaps it was the cinematographic spectacle of scenes like the dinner when a grandchild proudly displays and then tosses the results of his potty training. Perhaps it was the complicated and smart quartet of siblings who bait and riff off each other in hilarious dialogue, throwing off lines like "That was great. Can you tell me another story about your period?" and "Let's face it, you're a little scary. You're actually scaring me right now. Your face looks very red. Are you even breathing? Is he breathing?" Perhaps it was Judd's recounting of the plot of a chick-flick he sees on a date - a perfect skewering of the current trite trend in Hollywood romantic comedies. Or probably it was the combination of all these, but something in Tropper's book kept bringing me back to memories of movies I've seen about dysfunctional families.

I was reminded (but not in a reductive way) of the messy families in movies I have loved, like Meet the Parents and the friggin' brilliant and underrated Flirting With Disaster (if you have not seen this movie, please, please, go out and rent/Netflick/Tivo it RIGHT NOW, whatever you need to do - you will laugh all the way through and marvel at the comic brilliance of Lily Tomlin, Alan Alda and Richard Jenkins who goes on an LSD trip that has to be seen to be believed. Sorry, let's get back...)

And thinking about great movies about dysfunctional families then started me reflecting on family movies I wanted to like but hated: Dan in Real Life nearly nauseated me with its airless and unreal family reunion, the whole pretty family enjoying games together and putting on a (gulp) talent show. Away We Go took the usually adorable John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph and made them smug and judgmental as a couple facing first-time parenthood.

But I'm not evaluating TIWILY's suitability as a screenplay here. Instead, I'm thinking about how art helps us get through imperfect life and get beyond overwhelming emotional pain. There's some awful stuff that the characters in this book are facing: ruined hopes, infidelity, betrayal, infertility, loneliness. But our reading experience is a happy one - we are buffered by the pleasures of the plot, the cleverness of the dialogue, the amen truths of a wise narrator.

"People need someone to blame. I had failed her in some fundamental way, and she simply couldn't bring herself to forgive me....So now we've each done something unforgivable and the universe is once again in perfect balance."

It makes perfect, crazy sense.

For most of my life, books and movies have been the way I've been able to face pain that was too extraordinary to touch in real life. Movies were my emotional education: People cried on the screen, families embraced, couples had arguments that cleared the air. The experience of watching Ordinary People was like watching a documentary about real lives, not an abstract and fictional entertainment. At home, silence, closed doors and small talk were the way to push away the mess of emotion.

When I was thinking about this post, I asked my husband to brainstorm dysfunctional family movies with me.

"Ordinary People," he said.

"Oh, that's a good one. Of course. But I'm trying to think of comedies."

"They're all comedies."

Oh my wise husband. It's so true. You have to laugh at the horrors families inflict on themselves; it's the only way we can go on.

Some good summer reading...

I'm tearing down the back stretch of Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road, but already sad about the upcoming end of the ride. Such a pleasure. An adventure story of two Jewish travelers at the end of the 10th century, making their fortunes in the wild and dangerous lands between the Black and the Caspian seas.

"I am not overly encumbered by principle," the wraithish and moody Zelikman defines himself. "I am a gentleman of the road, an apostate from the faith of my fathers, a renegade, a brigand, a hired blade, a thief..." He and his companion, the giant Abyssinian Amran, share a love of elephants, their horses and their weapons, and a talent for squeaking out of tough situations. Although the hearts of both have been hardened by this vicious time, Amran has a bit less melancholy than his companion. The two find themselves kidnapping, then rescuing, then following with an army under the command of a young Prince, bent on restoring his lost kingdom.

The adventure is nearly non-stop, slowed only for a few moments here and there of resigned reflection; the suspense is breathless.

Here is an example of Chabon's deliciously chewy prose. Amran, in the middle of a scheme to retrieve his buddy's stolen horse via stampede, contemplating the chance to again save the young prince: "The melancholy he had been carrying seemed to break him open, and the face of his lost daughter was confounded in his heart with the face of the young prince of the Khazars...It was the business of the world, Amran knew, to manufacture and consume orphans, and in that work fatherly love was mere dross to be burned away. After long years of blessed absence, the return of merciful feelings toward what was, after all, only another motherless and fatherless child, struck Amran, bitterly, as a sign of his own waning powers to live life as it must be lived."

Some luscious chapter titles:
Chapter Thirteen: On Swimming to the Library at the Heart of the World

Chapter Fourteen: On the Melancholy Duty of Soldiers to Contend with the Messes Left by Kings

Chapter Fifteen: On Following the Road to One's Destiny, with the Usual Intrusions of Violence and Grace

Beginner's Greek, a novel by James Collins

A book cover blub and reviews compare James Collins' Beginner's Greek to the novels of Jane Austen, but as I was reading, the only Austen moment that came to mind was by way of Andrew Davies' Pride and Prejudice when Lizzie writes, after an unflattering but entirely accurate description of Lady Catherine's daughter, "I'm sorry to be hard on any of our sex, but there it is." I do want to be supportive of a first-time novelist, but I really hated this book. Randy got so sick of my disgusted snorts as I was reading it in the car that he threatened to throw it out the window.

Beginner's Greek works so hard creating a protagonist that is affable and loveable, that I absolutely despised him.

Julia leaned forward. "Tell me something....You haven't said a word about your career. How come?"

"Oh," Peter said. "Well--I save that for when I am going out to dinner with a woman for the first time. We'll talk about it-- that is, I will--for pretty much the entire meal. I mean, not every minute--you've got to order and so forth. Also, when a woman and I are in each other's arms after...after...you know, I like to tell her about it. It's beautiful."

"What if someone asks you what you do?"

"I've always wanted to sort of draw myself up and say with a withering look, 'I am a gentleman.'"

You might wonder, like I did, if this conversation was intended to be laughable, but it's followed by the so literal lines: "Julia liked Peter. Over the months and years, she had always been happy to see him, and, in fact, he had worked his way into her heart."

Peter Russell meets the woman of his dreams on a plane, but because of an unexplained loss of a piece of paper, he loses her to his best friend. Never mind his own lack of courage that prevents him from admitting his feelings or protecting the woman from her philandering husband. It was the paper's fault!

So he marries another woman he doesn't love.

When the philanderer is dispatched by a bolt of lighting (my favorite moment of the book), our weenie has this lovely thought about his wife: "He could flip Charlotte in a year, and nobody would care."

Yeah, right, a gentleman.

In conventional, non-experimental fiction, to earn the right to be the main character, you need some kind of pluck, or gumption or special quality - something, anything! That sets you apart from the million other Joes and Marys out there. But this Peter can't do the right thing - he can't do much of anything - it has to be done for him. His wife runs off with another man and Peter, for over-complicated and implausible reasons that are all in his head, even with all obstructions conveniently whisked away, can't tell the girl of his dreams that he loves her. He can't figure out a way to stand up to his bully boss. But he still gets the girl, watches the boss get his comeuppance and in a dinner party scene that explains the title of the book, manages to impress a table of scholars, business titans and cultural elite.

"Peter emerged as sort of a mascot of the table. Two people would be discussing something--a movie, a political issue, the economy, the human condition--and then they would turn to him and ask him his opinion. Peter found himself able to talk with perfect ease on any subject at all."

This may sound cruel, but instead of Austen's work, the book that I was reminded of, actually, was A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's crappy novel that he couldn't sell and so falsely labeled a memoir. ("At first I made an effort to fit in, but I couldn't pretend, and after a few weeks, I stopped trying. I am who I am and they could either like me or hate me. They hated me with a fucking vengeance....Got first DUI. Blew a .36, and set a County Record. Went to Jail for a week.") I couldn't take Frey's self-consciously hard-ass persona and where else but in the fantasies of an insecure male ego do scenes like this live?

Would you like my copy?