March 20, 2006

• MONDAY READING

  The Year of Magical Thinking
  by Joan Didion
  
  
  When I got my Xmas book gift card last year, I bought two books:  A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (subject of much later controversy) and The Year of Magical Thinking
  by Joan Didion, published just last October.  I found Frey’s book
  disappointing for more than one reason, though I didn’t think he
  required quite the skewering he got from the Great Oprah.  Joan
  Didion’s book, on the other hand, was exquisitely written, deeply
  personal, and a subject all of us have to face at some time or another
  - death of a loved one and the grief that follows.  In her case,
  it was a double whammy.  She and her husband of 40 years had just
  hospitalized their newly married daughter with flu that became
  pneumonia and then septic shock in short order followed by induced coma
  and life support. 
  Days later at dinner, her husband, John Gregory
  Dunne, also an author, suffered a massive and fatal coronary. 
  Four weeks later their daughter pulled through and after two months
  collapsed and required brain surgery to relieve massive hematoma.
  Though it didn’t happen in the time period the book covers, Quintana
  died just months into the following year at age 39 of acute
  pancreatitis.  This book describes the journey of this wonderful
  writer through that first year.  The magical thinking part was
  that she couldn’t stop operating in the back of her mind with the idea
  that her husband would somehow return.   Here are the first
  words of the book and the last, and it is so worthwhile reading what
  lies between:

  “Life changes fast.
  Life changes in the instant.
  You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
  The question of self-pity.”
  
  “I think about swimming with him into the cave at
  Portuguese Bend, about the swell of clear water, the way it changed,
  the swiftness and power it gained as it narrowed through the rocks at
  the base of the point.  The tide had to be just right.  We
  had to be in the water at the very moment the tide was right.  We
  could only have done this a half dozen times at most during the two
  years we lived there but it is what I remember.  Each time we did
  it I was afraid of missing the swell, hanging back, timing it
  wrong.  John never was.  You had to feel the swell
  change.  You had to go with the change.  He told me
  that.  No eye is on the sparrow but he did tell me that.”
  

  ---

  Deep Thought: 
  “If you ever discover that what you’re seeing is a play within a play,
  just slow down, take a deep breath, and hold on for the ride of your
  life”
  Today I am grateful for:  Everything that comes in handy
  Guess the Movie:  “Blue
  flower, red thorns. Blue flower, red thorns. Blue flower, red thorns.
  This would be so much easier if I wasn’t COLOR-BLIND. “  Answer:  Shrek, 2001.  Winner:  RnBoW_SPOT
   Plight Deepens for Black Men, Studies Warn
  
  by Erik Eckholm
  
  BALTIMORE — Black men in the
  United States face a far more dire situation than is portrayed by
  common employment and education statistics, a flurry of new scholarly
  studies warn, and it has worsened in recent years even as an economic
  boom and a welfare overhaul have brought gains to black women and other
  groups.
  Focusing more closely than ever on the life patterns of young black
  men, the new studies, by experts at Columbia, Princeton, Harvard and
  other institutions, show that the huge pool of poorly educated black
  men are becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society,
  and to a far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic
  men.  (Rest of article here.)

  • 8:13 pm
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