STAR WARS AND SPARKLERS

We try to enforce with our grandchildren: no screens except the window screen when driving either on or off Old Mission Peninsula. We savor together long distance glimpses of Grand Traverse Bay, squat cherry trees dressed in seasonal color: petal pink blossoms, red ripe cherries, wispy white snow; vineyards lush with winding vines or beach pounding waves and ripples. They know it’s a twenty minute scenic wonderland before they can pull down the DVD screen, position thumbs for texting, or click their favorite electronic game.

It’s harder when there’s no sweet or sensational scenery.  Arriving at a belated family Chinese New Year’s Celebration we noticed the grandsons were quiet and out of sight. (I missed my traditional welcoming hugs, especially.) Seems their uncle had a new “Star Wars” DVD they had discovered.  Parking the kids in front of a television is no one’s idea of a celebration so Dad went off to fetch them.

Amid some grumpy looks and long faces, the boys ages 6 and 8 joined the adults. During dinner the long faces disappeared as they practiced mastering delicious new Chinese delicacies with chopsticks, especially smacking their lips over green tea ice cream and chocolate cake.

Their enthusiasm and our enjoyment of their happiness continued as we all wrapped in winter clothing to tromp outside in the middle of a snowstorm for sparklers! Shivering and shaking it wasn’t easy for Dad and their uncle to light those pesky sparklers. But it was worth it: Big smiles, delighted cries, and gleaming luminaries blazed in the blizzardy night. We were all participating in family memories to talk about for years ahead. Better than Star Wars any day.

FAMILY TIES

 

Winter Bloom by Tara Heavey  simonandschuster.com

Faithful Place by Tana French (Kindle edition) tanafrench.com

In the beginning I thought these two books could only be connected by their setting: Dublin. But further reading revealed, despite divergent writing styles, a comparable theme focused on the importance of family. Heavey uses the recurring image of the garden to cultivate her multiple characters and plant the plot. French’s plot is driven by one character, Frank Mackey, a rough, coarse Irish undercover policeman, seeking to solve the twenty year old murder mystery of his first girl friend. Mackey’s deeply dysfunctional family members and neighbors in Faithful Place, the Dublin neighborhood he grew up in and his family still inhabits, all play minor roles.

In both books, moments and place matter. Frank as first person narrator declares early, “In all your life, only a few moments matter. Mostly you never get a good look at them except in hindsight, long after they’ve zipped past you.” (Faithful Place, Loc.47-48) Frank is always looking back: analyzing again what happened, how it happened, what he missed. He also uses the past and hindsight to justify his abandonment and, ultimately, betrayal of his family. His abusive, alcoholic father and the rest of the family’s passive acceptance drive him from Faithful Place.  In Faithful Place similar characters are drawn apart by place.

In Winter Bloom diverse characters are drawn together by place, a neglected walled garden they work together to restore. The book has multiple viewpoints, but one is Eva who discovers the garden and remembers “…her own secret garden. It was small, but contained many possibilities…She felt as if she were the first person ever to see the garden. As in really see it.” (Winter Bloom, P. 16) The momentary possibilities of the garden sprout and bloom: budding relationships, flourishing connections, thriving stories.

Each book’s plot relies on past events to drive it. In an author interview, Heavey said she first wrote each character’s story one at a time: Eva, the bereaved widow and mother; Emily, the unwed mother; Uri, the Holocaust survivor; Mrs. Pendergrast, the abused wife. But her agent felt they were too episodic and advised her to break up the individual stories into chunks, although each story is still narrated sequentially. This structure works well if only to keep the reader reading…to see what happens next; but also to see how all the stories connect within the garden.

In Faithful Place, French has Frank declare, “There’s no password more powerful than your past.” (Faithful Place, Loc 1091) And certainly Frank’s past is the password for the book’s plot. As he strives to solve the murder he remembers past episodes and scenes.  As readers, we need to figure out their significance and relationships, just as Frank is. No straightforward plot line here!

Both endings are celebrations of sorts. Winter Bloom has an “Autumn Party” where family forgiveness is the theme and characters are working on happy endings. Faithful Place has Frank reminiscing for a special Friday night during a lost summer, a gang from the neighborhood is having fun together with “a couple of big bottles of cheap cider...All around us the Place was humming like a beehive shimmering with a hundred different stories unfurling.” (Faithful Place, Loc. 7169) But there is no happy ending, Frank commits the ultimate Irish sin of betraying his family and he can’t go home again. It is only now he realizes his lost, “…and I hope to God that somehow or other, before it was too late, we would all find our way back home.” (Faithful Place, Loc. 7219)

LETTERS FROM MY DAD: Beyond Charity

Just a few weeks ago I was talking to my friend, Ellen, about growing up during World War II. She mentioned living near North Platte, Nebraska, and how the entire town seemed involved in running, manning and baking for the North Plate Canteen. Her description reminded me of a postcard of the North Platte Canteen my dad sent on his way to Salt Lake City in December, 1943. Ellen and I marveled together how a tiny town in the middle of nowhere made such a difference to so many lonely, bewildered servicemen.

The Canteen was conceived just eleven days after Pearl Harbor when a group of woman took cookies to the Union Pacific Train Station, hearing a troop train full of Nebraska servicemen would be traveling through. Turned out the servicemen were from Kansas, but Rae Wilson, one of the cookie ladies, declared she wasn’t going home with her cookies and offered them to the men. Later she wrote to the local paper and suggested this be a daily offering. And what a big offering it became as 55,000 women got involved serving over six million men during the war years. npcanteen.net

 “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

In another incident recorded by my dad, he talks of visiting a family in Salt Lake City for dinner. The USO set up such dinners with volunteering families:

January 2, 1943
We went into town to the U.S.O. From there they sent eight of us to a private home for supper. It was a nice home, a doctor, his wife, and daughter about 24 years old. They gave us chicken sandwiches, potato chips, pickles, date bars, celery, and a choice of coffee, coke, ginger ale or beer. They had a very nice fireplace and it sure was swell just sitting there. They also had a swell record player and some real nice records. One of them was Tommy Dorsey’s “Moonlight Becomes You.”

Simple acts: hot coffee and cookies served by smiling women, records playing Big Bands; giving comfort to a forlorn fellow far from home. My dad came from a tiny southwestern Michigan village where everyone knew each other. His caring radius of friends and family radiated from there. As friendly as he was he was still cast among thousands of strangers during the war. How beautiful for me now to extend a hug to all those who did that for my dad when he ventured outside his known radius.

BOOK REVIEW: CRIES IN THE WILDERNESS

Disfigured, A Saudi Woman’s Story of Triumph over Violence by Rania Al- Baz (Memoir) new.gbgm-umc.org/umw/programs/readingprogram

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Memoir)

Lipstick in Afghanistan by Roberta Gately (Fiction)http://books.simonandschuster.com/

Gertrude Bell, Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell (Biography)

The life journeys of these four very different women were woven together through similar Arabian settings, Muslim religion, and personal perseverance. Using different genre generated gripping stories of grit and guts in hostile physical and social environments. Through their life stories three of the women, Al-Baz, Hirsi Ali, and Bell, became activists and role models.

The two memoirs spoke in distinct voices: determined and dedicated, raging and rebellious. Al-Baz was the first women to be a Saudi news anchor before her husband savagely beat her into a coma. She was always determined to speak her own mind, but she also stayed dedicated to her Muslim religion, even forgiving her abusive husband. Not so Hirsi Ali who survived brutal beatings as a child, female mutilation and civil wars to renounce the Muslim brotherhood and escape to the Netherlands. Gately’s novel of an American nurse in Afghanistan is none of the above. She does portray the Taliban as ruthless murders, but her prose lacks the vehement and passionate fury of the memoirs. Since Gately was a nurse in Afghanistan perhaps a memoir would have worked better?

And then there’s Gertrude. Truly one of the most amazing women ever: she climbed mountains, explored the desert and served as a dynamic, energetic, and creative force in the creation of Iraq.  That’s just the beginning! Born in the late 1800s into a rich, privileged English family her roles also included archaeologist, spy, linguist, author, poet, and photographer.

Each author crafted detailed settings in different Arabian countries of everyday happenings.  Al-Baz described suitors coming to her home when she was between the ages of thirteen and twelve. “Every Thursday, the traditional visiting day in Saudi Arabia, a procession of mothers would come to the house taking advantage of the occasion to look at me in detail.” (Disfigured, p.70)

Hirsi-Ali talks about school, “This itinerant ma’alim was young and ragged, straight from the most rural depths of Somalia. He taught us the Quran the old way. You opened chapter one of the Quran, got your long wooden board, wrote it down it Arabic, learned it by heart in Arabic, recited it by heart, washed the board with reverence because it was now holy and did it again. You did this for two hours, and every mistake earned you a rap on your hands or legs with a thin, sharp, stick.” (Infidel, p. 74)

Gately invites her reader to dinner in an Afghan home where they spread a bright red vinyl tablecloth on the floor.  Howell uses Bell’s own journal to describe Mesopotamia, “The whole world shone like a jewel, green crops, and blue waters and far away the gleaming snows of the mountains that bound Mesopotamia to the north…I considered that the history of Asia was spread out before me.” (Gertrude Bell, p. 126)

Beyond teaching the reader about the Arab world, more importantly the books demonstrate how each woman became a voice for oppressed women. Bell founded the first girls’ school in Baghdad, raised funds for a women’s hospital, and set up a lecture series for females. Her life was a constant new chapter for doing things differently. When most women of her class were content to be serving tea and their husbands, Bell was sitting in a tent with a sheik or climbing mountains in her underwear. (Totally against what seemed her character, Bell was against women’s suffrage.)

After her horrific beating Al-Baz became part of a French organization, Ni Putes, Ni Soumises, which is committed to change and she says, for Muslim women, “I am a disruptive presence because I give them ideas.” (Disfigured, p. 157) Even Gately’s character, Elsa, escapes the slums to become an aide nurse, never even conceived for a girl from her neighborhood.

It is Hirsi Ali’s courage, however, which astounds the reader. After escaping depraved oppression she builds a secure life in Holland, but is not content and begins to speak out about all Muslim women’s lack of any rights. She makes a film with Theo vanGoth, a famous Amsterdam filmmaker, called “Submission: Part One,” about the relation of the individual with Allah. VanGoth is killed for his role in producing the film. Hirsi Ali must flee Holland. Hirsi Ali comments. “I need to seek out the other women held captive in the compound of irrationality and superstition and persuade them to take their lives into their own hands.” ( Infidel, p. 349) Don’t we all? Reading books like these loosens the captivity. They open up to their readers women beyond ones ever conceived. There is so much more to learn from their stories: words unspoken, words spoken; worlds closed, worlds open.