It is Friday midday, May 10, and again the weather forecast was way off but to my advantage. That is of course, if you follow the circular logic of my favorite self-composed adage "Things always turn out for the best if you make the best of the way things turned out."
It was supposed to rain all day according to the radio weather forecast yesterday, and since Knight's Park floods, our Art Club painting in the park was cancelled and I got to sleep late, walk the dog and do my favorite thing - READ!!
I only have about half a dozen reading left-overs - magazines I started and didn't finish, a NYT Bk Review or two, some gathered newspapers and a new New Yorker.
The Sun. NYTimes Bk Rev. has a feature I love where they ask an author to talk about the books on her/his night table, last 'great' book read, childhood reading and so on. Whenever I read that, I always think about the beginning of my serious reading career, when I left the world of children's literature and entered the world of Great Literature via a series of European classics on a bookshelf in my Grandmother Lyon's basement. No one ever talked about those books, where they came from or why they were in the basement. There was also a really big fat dictionary, the kind that has its own pedestal and is about 10 inches thick with the oxblood colored hardback covers.
It was there that I met a book that informed for better or worse, an understanding I would have about the world for the rest of my life. The book was the collected stories of Guy deMauppassant and the story was "Ball of Fat." In brief, the story was about a prostitute fleeing Paris at the time of a Prussian invasion. She and a carriage of aristocrats and petite bourgeois of the merchant class were approaching a guarded border crossing. As her fame had carried even so far, the Prussian border officer demanded that she offer her favors in exchange for the border crossing permit. Ball of fat was a patriot and outraged at such an affront. However, the other carriage occupants who had scorned her throughout the trip and shunned and shamed her, suddenly warmed to her and beguiled her into giving him what he wanted so they could get safely across the border. She acquiesced and as soon as the transaction was complete and they were permitted to cross, they carriage occupants again shamed Ball of Fat, in fact, even more scornfully because she had given herself to the enemy.
If I had to explain what I learned from that, I would say that those often considered "betters" were rarely better, that you can't rely on friendship, and your own character is the only lasting value.
Second only to the European classics was Outdoor Girls on a Hike, which introduced me to plucky independent girls who solved mysteries, hiked in the woods, unafraid, and made plans and went places on their own. They were the models for my future. I have collected about eight of the books in the Outdoor Girls series over the years, and when I was sunk into a deep depression and suffering from pneumonia the year I retired, they kept me company on the sofa, under a quilt, through the weeks of my solitary recuperation.
Books and animals have been the mainstays of my existence. I LOVE them, although I love the animals more and of course, that is because the animals can love me in return. One is sitting beside me as I type this entry, a fat cat named Little Yock who was rescued from a cemetery, and a dog on the other end of the sofa, rescued from the Camden Animal Shelter. They nap while I read.
We all enjoy quiet, and unlike many humans, they can sit quietly while I read without demanding attention or getting restless.
So on my blog theme of "Places to Go and Things to Do" I suppose this one is stay home and read! If you have nothing to read at home go to a book store, I recommend 2nd Time Around Book Store in Rancocas Woods, on Creek Road. If you want a recommendation of a book, I am totally enjoying BECOMING, by Michelle Obama, a warm, well written, totally engaging account of her adventure of a lifetime, growing up and marrying the man who would become America's first African American President. She is a woman to be admired and they were a couple to celebrate and remember with sad regret and longing (that we had such grace and grit and competence once and it has been replaced by moronic bombast and self serving greed.) Those were the days, my friend.
Happy Trails,
Jo Ann
wrightj45@yahoo.com
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