It’s the great sweep of time that allows us to make sense of our lives and the lives of people.

I subscribed to American Public Media’s newsletter “Speaking of Faith” several months ago, but never got around to reading or listening to any of it until tonight. After a few minutes I started taking notes like this:

(Novelists) know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live.

Interesting interview with Pulitzer Prize nominee, the captivating Mary Doria Russell. Plus, she talks about Steve Martin. And Flynn will tell you what’s up with that.

There’s no ignoring the ‘faith-cenetric’ aspect of the piece but it’s more about the novelist playing the role of God, as as a creator of peoples and worlds.

Me: Did you ever have any side effects when you were on Prednisone?

Mom: I wanted to tear my head off to stop it spinning around backwards. Every day. Is that what you mean?

Me: Uhm…yeah.

I’ve felt like handing these out this week. But I don’t have enough to go around.

Prednisone is a nasty little drug you never want to take if it can at all be helped. My doctor said it can make you mean. My mother, in a rare burst of concise and precise, put it best.

It’s 2:00 a.m. I’m downstairs. In the dark. In my husband’s pajamas. Microwaving milk.

Most of you will be able to pull an image from that. But unless you’re a genuine, long suffering, insomniac, you won’t really appreciate the moment or how it felt or how very much it resembled a Charlie Kaufman adaptation. And that’s exactly what insomnia feels like. Something that’s been sitting in Charlie Kaufman’s head.

Two weeks ago I found a new Used Book Store. I gave the cashier a 1.75 and she gave me “The Early Stories: 1953-1975″ by John Updike. I read it with my milk this morning in the 3:00a.m.

Fifteen minutes ago I find out this. He’s dead. John. Updike. At 76.

In Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro does such a brilliant job with first person narration – realistic, casual, conversationalist – that he completely lulls the reader into a false sense of something. Not security, necessarily, but something.

And that false sense of something is more telling than the story itself. It’s Ishiguru’s genius. His ability to keep our guard down while forcing us to draw frightening parallels between an abstract world we abhor and would never conceivably allow, and our own.

It’s a novel. Fiction. We’re meant to suspend belief. To settle into the story. But what happens when we become too relaxed. When all that relaxing bleeds over into our every day lives. And we stop doing anything else because settling and accepting becomes the easier option?

Of course it couldn’t happen. We’d never start treating people like they weren’t people anymore…certainly not because someone in authority told us to. Or because a talking head tried to cloak it in some kind of virtuous. Something as profound as humanity could never really fall into question.

Never mind history. Never mind the holocaust. Never mind the genocide that’s taking place right now. All over the world. (See where I’m going with this?)

Never Let Me Go is the kind of book that gets your gears going. A bit of Brave New World for a not so brave world to think about.

Good stuff. Read it. You’ll enjoy.

In an effort to make light, The Euro has been telling me I remind him of Ruprecht when I eat. This makes me laugh. When I laugh, I drool a little. This makes me laugh more.

I never imagined I’d be pleased to have half my face feel numb. But that’s what I am today. Pleased. After being told earlier this week that I could look forward to my unilateral facial paralysis healing in six to nine months…I gotta admit, laughing at a Dirty Rotten Scoundrel joke and procrastinating with polyvore were the only things that kept me from depression.

But today I can feel the left side of my face burn. It’s still not working properly. I have a wonky smile. I’m still sporting an eye patch. Food is best served pureed…but not really consumed because it just takes too much time and effort and everything tastes like salt anyway (the taste buds on my left side have also been affected).

What started as a heavy cold and sore throat became a set of ear aches and a viral infection that spread to my cranial nerve and paralysed the left side of my face. A COLD, people. A COLD.

Let this be a lesson to all those who shun medical treatment because they don’t like the idea of playing pawn to pharmaceutical companies.

“Mr Obama swore his oath of allegiance on the same Bible used by Abraham Lincoln at his inauguration in 1861, held by the new First Lady Michelle Obama.”

Apropos, I watched the inauguration in a pirate’s patch today. Now I’m getting ready to watch SAY ANYTHING…in the same patch.

Dear Flynn,

I agree. It is a mite on the impolite side to turn down a generosity like sausage. Also, if you grew up in West Virginia in the 80s, you’re kinda like a war baby. Rations and all. Force of habit.

Plus, I’m reading Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Dystopia always make me hungry.

B.
xx

It took three tries before I finally convinced myself to get out of bed this morning. Since I had no one to coerce me up and at ‘em, I lay there until 10:00am.

The Euro, in an effort to not catch everything I have, has been sleeping in the guest room this week. He says I’ve also started singing the ‘plague song’ again in my sleep. I totally blame Kenzie for this but, whatever.

Something happened to the heat. It’s well and truly below freezing outside and our heating system takes a time out. The fireplace is charming but it doesn’t really reach The Euro’s upstairs office. The two of us basically froze until 5:00pm tonight when the thing that keeps us warm went back to doing what it was suppose to do. Not sure what the glitch was but I am grateful that it is now 75F and boiling in my bedroom.

We’re making plans to visit my grandparents. Sooner rather than later.

Until last year I traveled to the States twice a year, each Spring and Summer, to spend a month with them at their home in Iaeger, West Virginia. Racked up air miles like nobody’s business and went to bed feeling not-so-bad that I missed out on a holiday in the Maldives.

Over the past 12 months I’ve visited more frequently. But it’s always been in dribs and drabs. A weekend here. A few days there. Never that solid month where we could get down to business peeling potatoes and painting porches. I promised Pa over Christmas that I’d be back in February to spend good quality time. Hopefully a whole week.

I told him I’d arrange all of their hospital visits so that I could attend and I’d bring him more of that fancy English chocolate he likes so well. He said to be sure to bring The Euro too because that Euro makes the best coffee I ever had. My grandmother agreed and added he cooks better than a woman!

My grandmother has dementia and Pa is her only carer. Things like freshly brewed coffee and roast dinners are meaningful to them; and since neither enjoy the physicians’ visits that a chronic illness requires, both appreciate the time I spend flirting with, and getting to know, her 72 year old doctor.

Growing up I got most of what was meaningful to me from my grandmother. Pa was a bit of a superhero to be applauded and adored. But it was my grandmother who was always present…teaching me things like how to sit like a lady and how to be me no matter what. Even though Pa remains, hands down, the best story teller I’ve ever met, it was my grandmother who loved words. Who spent years of her life putting them down on paper.

She published four books of poetry in her more youthful years and last summer she took me into a spare bedroom and introduced me to a dozen or so voluminous notebooks made up of short stories and poems and bits of her memoir. She had organised them by the decades of her life. She handed me a dull blue one and said “I don’t remember these, but it says I wrote them in my thirties. That’s how old you are, right?”

I haven’t read the notebook yet. Because I break out bawling every time I touch the spine. Then I think about that novel by Nicholas Sparks. The movie with my favourite little fellow, Gosling. How I never understood the appeal that warranted a million dollar advance. Until my grandma began to forget. Then it all made sense.

I’m getting so tired of sick. I know. I moan. But I’m not accustomed to not hearing and not tasting and not being able to push my body to run and jump and stay awake for more than six hours at a stretch.

It’s only temporary and SO VERY SILLY of me to complain but all this sitting at a desk until mid-day, then coming home, then going straight to bed…is beginning to wear thin. Even if it is all I’ve had the energy to do. Two days of normalcy since Christmas. Two!

Still, I’ve read a lot. Last night – this morning, rather – I woke up at 3:30am and read again about Anse and his teeth and was reminded how much I still adore the socks off Ole Bill Faulkner.

The night before I was up at 4:00am reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot (1969).

“The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes.”
That’s pretty personification, that.

The last time I read any Eliot, I was a sophomore in high school. It was the last time I read any Elizabeth Bishop too. (Just sayin’.) My teacher was Shelby Neal.

I loved that class.

*p.s. Just got the loveliest message from an old MHS classmate of mine, “N”. Thank you so much.