Pandemia Journal - My Blogger book club - The Janes 8/5/2020

Don't know if there will be another blog post after this one. There is a "new and improved" format for blogspot that no longer allows me to post so this may be the last one. I can only do this one because there was an allowance to use the old format one more time, however the old format was not the one I used and it doesn't allow me to make the text larger - sorry! So, I can barely see this type as it is. Maybe I can type it on 'pages' and past it in - I will try! Blog Post - My blog book club and my invisible friend. Recently, after spending a few evenings watching El Chapo as part of my Latin American experience, i watched one episode of Immigrants, a series on illegal immigration and the ICE debacle. I got so depressed by the brutality and heartlessness in both of these series, that I needed to take a break and visit a gentler, simpler, imaginary place - AVONLEA, Prince Edward Island. When I was a confused, terrified, misfit child, I found Anne of Green Gables in my Grandmother Lyons’ basement bookcase. As I have said before about this bookcase, I have no idea why it was in the abasement and no one but me had any interest in the books at all. I don’t know whose they were originally, although my Uncle Joe Lyons told me the Tarzan book was his father’s, my grandfather, Joseph Lyons, Sr. Anyhow, there, I found a girl like me, a dreamer, a book lover, a storyteller, who was humiliated at school, and traumatized in a number of ways in ordinary life. Anne showed me you could survive and thrive despite it all, and I did! Watching the series again, with new fresh eyes, I realized what a profound impact the book had on my life. My lifelong interest in one-room schools, my 35 year career as a teacher, my love of writing, and so much more (my love of trees and my feeling of empathy and comradeship with animals.) This time, I noticed how as my life moved on, so I became other characters in the story - during my motherhood/teacher years, I became a kind of Marilla, and now in my old age, I have softened into kind of Mathew. It came to me that the delicious details, the deepening profundity of the simplest dialogue, the momentousness of ordinary little things, came from a world where a woman was so confined by culture, community and law, that she was forced to ponder and use for her resources, the long littleness of life. Then I thought, how much L. M. Montgomery, Charlotte Bronte, and Jane Austen had in common. Their focus on the psychology of the intimate life, the customs, the hypocricy, the conventions in constant jousting with human nature, was created by their very confinement within the Victorian cage of their times. If I had a book club this would be what I would like to discuss. But being a freewheeling, follow my own trail kind of reader, I don't join book clubs. Last month would have been the start of a long period of Latin American authors. Well, I hope something gets improved so I can continue to talk to you, my invisible, imaginary friend. You are like the imaginary friend in the china cabinet that Anne Shirley spoke with in her years of solitude -Katie in the clock! Happy Trails, Jo Ann