To Believe in Yourself

Self-esteem is a tough nut to crack for most people. Very few people think they are perfect and those that do can't see what the rest of us know.  So we all have weak spots in our self-confidence.  But, if you are overweight, as about two-thirds of American are, or even obese (which is a third of the American population right now), being self-confident borders on the impossible.  Despite these numbers, anyone carrying extra pounds is continually subjected to the suggestion that skinny people are the only ones who really count.  Size is always a factor in the entertainment industry; marketing and fashion campaigns use skinny models and the rest of us chase endless ideas on how to modify the bodies we have right now.  With all of this subliminal propaganda, do you wonder why folks get depressed?

Enter Jennifer Dome King, the blogger behind Stellar Fashion and Fitness and the author of Fat Girl Power: How I Built Confidence through Body Positivity, Fashion and Fitness.  After chasing the Holy Grail of everyone else's approval, Jennifer went after a more difficult but rewarding goal.  She learned to love and believe in herself, just as she is, and debunk society's myths about weight-limitations.  You've got to admit, that takes guts.

Let's look at one of the myths Jennifer battles: that overweight people must be inactive. Yes, carrying extra pounds can sap a person's natural energy but, in Jennifer's view, that  only increases the importance of regular exercise.  Physical activity helps keep people healthy and happy, no matter what size they wear. And she doesn't just talk the talk.  Last year Jennifer created, "The Makeshift 5K" for everyone who wants to take a step toward health for themselves.  There are no stopwatches, no ribbons and no criteria for entering.  Just participating is enough to get you accepted.

Acceptance, particularly self-acceptance is a big part of body-positivity because it is a problem that people of all body types have.   After spending more than fifty-seven years on this earth, I've met people with different sizes, shapes and skin tones, but I've rarely met one who accepted his or her body, just as it existed. Instead, I've seen people starve, neglect, overwhelm and torture themselves to meet some arbitrary, impossible standard. Body-positivity doesn't mean that we shouldn't take care of the blood/bones/skin and tissue packages we spend our lives encased in.  Rather, it means we recognize the strong relationship between our physical and emotional selves and quit using one to beat up the other.

Jennifer says that the philosophy of Body Positivity can be reduced to the phrase "Love Yourself". Yes, and her essays remind me of another loving teacher: Charlie Smalls, lyricist of The Wiz.

Believe in yourself, right from the start

You'll have brains, You'll have a heart

You'll have Courage, to last your whole life through.

If you believe in yourself

as I believe in You.

Jennifer believes in the entire world. I hope the world returns the compliment.

The Old, Family Porch Rocking Chair

Great Uncles and Nephews
(The only record of my family on the porch)
The bare edge of the rocker is at the left

My dad's family lived in a house with a front porch they never used. I mean they never used it during my lifetime.  When we visited, we always parked in the side yard and used the kitchen door for our exits and entrances. (Some farm families do that; the kitchen is the heart of the house and everyone's go-to spot before and after the fields.)  All the indoor rooms were lived in but the front porch, with its wrought iron supports and cement floor was just not a comfortable place. The only decorations I remember seeing on the porch were some Elephant Ears growing out of coffee cans and the only seats were some wooden rocking chairs that could put splinters in your thighs if you sat in them. These chairs were hard and unfinished and the antithesis of comfort. Alone, they were enough to turn me into someone who hated porches.

Luckily that didn't work because my adult home came equipped with a porch that I wouldn't change for the world.  Running the length of the house it feels like acres of space and from the first, I wanted to equip it with rockers; big, beautiful, polished, wide rockers like they sell in Cracker Barrel stores.  Of course when we moved in, we couldn't afford Cracker Barrel's furniture but I was willing to wait.  Someday those generous machines for sitting would surely grace my porch.

The porch rocker in its natural state:
distressed but not depressed.

In June my husband claimed he had found me the perfect birthday present.  No, it wasn't what I asked for (he said) but it was exactly what I wanted.  He was sure of it.  Then, he presented it with all of the pride of a little boy showing something he'd made in Scouts.  It was a wooden rocking chair,  narrow, unpainted and splintery, just like the ones on the old front porch.

So how do you tell a husband you hate his present?  How do you point out the differences between your dream chair and what he found for you?  I've got to tell you, I couldn't.  Instead, I coated it with spray paint, stuck it on the front porch and mentally declared I'd never sit in it.

Then Hurricane Ivan hit.  

You may not believe it, but when a Grade 3 storm hits the coast, we feel it 280 miles north.  The wind and rain took out the power and the only place to wait out the storm with enough light was on the porch.  I sank my rear end into the depths of an Adirondack chair and stared at the world now over my knees. Hubby sat down in the chair he gave me and began to rock. For hours I tried to converse with a spouse whose head was three feet above mine. I was miserable but he was obviously comfortable. And, because he was wearing blue jeans, he seemed immune to splinters.  Was I wrong about the old porch rocker?

Ready for another 10 years of weather

Of course I was, on so many levels.  Not only was I ungrateful brat when my husband was trying to please me, I was ignoring the heritage on both sides of our marriage.  Both of our families grubbed a life from the land, his in Alabama and mine in Oklahoma and neither one had money for polished, front-porch rockers. When the long days were finished and they needed a breeze, our grandparents rested in rough wooden porch rockers like this, at least until they got air-conditioning. They hoped we'd find an easier life and we have, but at base, we are still country people and my husband's chair was the perfect choice for the porch. It's a part of our lives.

My birthday rocker still graces the front porch and today he got a fresh coat of paint. Nothing too fancy because he is what he is, a chair designed to withstand rough weather.  He's actually quite comfortable and sturdier than he looks.  And now that I've lost some weight, it turns out he's not  narrow at all.  In the decades he's spent with us he's held cats, friends, guests, tools and groceries and I expect he'll hold us for the rest of our days.  It turns out, I didn't need to get the porch rocker I valued.  I just needed to grow up enough to value the porch rocker I have.

A Thoroughly, Old-Fashioned, Kid's Book

Now that Halloween and it's cornucopia of scary stories is past, it's time to look at the final part of the year, when the shadows lengthen early and the evenings run cold.  These are the evenings when it's good to snuggle up with a few, warm comforts as we step into the long nights of the year.  So, pick up a warm drink, a good companion and a nice, old-fashioned kid's book, like The Railway Children.

It makes sense that the Industrial Age created "the Cult of the Child" and Children's Literature. Before then time, working and middle-class kids went with their parents to the fields and shops and started helping as soon as they could stand.  Children weren't read aloud to at night because many of their Georgian-era parents lacked the energy, or ability to read at the end of the day and they had no money for books.  Then came the era of machines and their descendants started working indoors. The money was better but these Victorian parents were often absent from their children's lives and they missed the little ones they labored for.  It's no surprise Victorian children were read aloud to in the evenings and that their stories often dealt with children learning to function without their parents.  Enter Peter, Roberta (Bobbie) and Phyllis: the Railway Children.

As the famous first line says, they weren't railway children to begin with.  At first they were just a brother and two sisters, tolerably decent as children but not the examples of perfection the Victorian age wanted.  They squabbled at times, their morals weren't perfect and they were used to a standard of comfort.  Then, their father is taken away and everything changes.  The servants are dismissed, the house and fine furniture are sold and Mama says they have to "play at being poor" in the country.  Mama changes from their supervisor and playmate to a woman who stays shut up for hours, writing stories to keep up with the bills.  And the children, left to themselves, become fascinated by the trains that run through the valley below their ramshackle house in the country.  The adventures trainwatching leads them to paved the way for Jane and Michael Banks, the Pevensie children and other heroes of British kid-lit.

The story must have had a ring of familiarity to it for its author, Edith Nesbit. As a child, she lost her father as a child and endured several family moves.  Later, she became one of the era's few working moms, writing fiction to support her own brood of children and her unsuccessful, philandering husband.  Chained to her desk by necessity, it would have been easy to Edith to remember the free if lonely days of her own childhood or imagine what her own unsupervised kids were getting into.

It's what my grandmother would have called, "a thoroughly English book" and I suspect The Railway Children was one of the stories she grew up with.  There's an editorializing narration, plenty of strange and wonderful coincidences and (I'm sorry to say) characters painfully distrustful of anyone not English.  Still, Peter, Bobbie and Phyllis carry the philosophy that everyone deserves kindness (at least until proven otherwise) and, as the heroes, their beliefs carry the day.  It's a lovely belief to hold onto at night or share with children, even if it is thoroughly old-fashioned.

When writing is the family business

A lot of great writers seem like they were better with ink and paper than people. Pick up biographies of some literary geniuses and you'll find many worked hard at their crafts and often endured terrible setbacks but were also self-centered loners who focused on their own problems to the detriment of their loved ones. A few of the "greats" were self-destructive abusers. Others unearthed family traumas or secrets and then publicized these for money. You wonder how their relations ever stood them.

On the other hand, there are a few authors who were so devoted to their families that their talent seemed to echo through their DNA.  Take a look at these clans of chroniclers and prepare to be amazed.

The Bronte Girls

The Bronte Sisters - Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, the literary doyennes of Yorkshire.  They grew when opportunity ran thin on the ground, especially for girls. These three (and their brother, Branwell) developed a rich communal imaginary life that carried them through some miserable childhood experiences.  All three of the Bronte girls tried to become teachers at some point (the only respectable profession open to women then)  but frail health and romantic disappointment eventually brought them back home.  As the daughters of minister they were, of course, poor as church mice and  they decided to try and make money by jointly writing a book of poetry.  Since their culture still didn't accept the idea of women as professional writers, the published book was credited to Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell; male pseudonyms with the same initials as the poetesses.  The Bronte sisters changed from poetry to prose and two years later England was hit with those twin monoliths of Victorian novels, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as well as Anne's story, Agnes Grey. Two years later came Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall and the Brontes were out of poverty and ruling the best-seller list, though not for long.  Consumption took Anne and Emily before 1850.  Charlotte lived long enough to marry and enjoy some degree of her literary success but it was difficult for her to continue without her sibling support system. The only novel she wrote after Anne and Emily's death was a retelling of her first effort. 

Mary Bard Jensen and Betty MacDonald

The Bard family clan: The Bard family's motto was "Don't be a Saddo" although some would say the clan had a right to be miserable.  The patriarch, Darsie Bard, died in 1920 leaving his wife with five young children, his aged mother, a heavily mortgaged house and very little money.  Nevertheless, his widow, Sydney to everyone that knew her, believed in making do and moving on without complaints. This "Never Give Up, Keep on Grinning" attitude kept the family together and doing anything (including writing) that might pay the family bills.  Sydney wrote, but her second daughter, Anne Elizableth, was the one to hit gold as Betty MacDonald, the author of The Egg and I and her children's series, The Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Books.  Sydney's eldest daughter, Mary Bard Jensen also did well in the domestic humor market with her books about being a doctor's wife and one of Betty's friends Monica Sone published Nisei Daughter.  Almost every book contains the theme of facing adversity with optimism and humor. There are worse beliefs in this world.

Lawrence and Gerald Durrell

And then, there are the Durrells.  Masterpiece tipped me off to The Corfu Trilogy the saga of (another!) widow and her eccentric family trying to survive on no money and a good attitude, this time in a foreign land. The stories were obviously penned by the youngest child, Gerald, but it is his eldest brother, Larry, who insists he is going to be a writer.  After two good episodes about this fascinating family, I started reading Gerald's first book, My Family and Other Animals, and decided to do a bit of research on the family.  Are they known? Holy Smoke, are they ever!  The sardonic but kind Larry turned out to be Lawrence Durrell, one of the "Great" modern novelists my college  English instructors raved about in the 1970's. (Chants of "Miller, and Durrell and Greene, Oh MY! would spill angry English grad students into the halls of my first university.) Lawrence Durrell's work is visionary, sexy, brilliant, bitter, and good enough to be considered for a Nobel prize at one point but Gerald's stories of their family are what gained popularity.  (A good thing, since Gerald's vocation as a naturalist paid little or nothing!) The Corfu trilogy brought in cash and unexpected dimensions to any would be biographer of the "more literary" Durrell. The writing bug even spread to their sister, Margaret who penned "Whatever Happened to Margo?"; her account of how the family coped once they were relocated to England.

So there you have it.  A novelist doesn't need to cut off his/her family in order to work (although writing requires quiet every once in a while).  Family can actually be a scribbler's greatest ally, if his/her siblings get into the act.  As long as everyone agrees to help and refrain from being "a Saddo."

An Early Halloween Story

Let me state from the first, the events of yesterday were unforeseeable and unavoidable. None of the actions taken by all parties were neither premeditated or predictable.  However, in case a group of panicked Puritans is already headed to my house, armed with ropes and lit torches, I wish to make the following declaration:

• I am not now, nor have I ever been, a witch.
• Due to a past Halloween party, I own a hooded, black cape.
• This garment is a mass-marketed item, as the manufacturer's label attests.
• To my knowledge, said cape has no supernatural powers but it is a surprisingly warm, yet light-weight garment.

• Yesterday, I donned the cape in question prior to walking down my private drive at sunset. 

• The cape's hood was in an upright position to keep my ears warm. 
• Said cape is voluminous and anyone seeing me from a distance would not have been able to make out my "regular" clothing beneath its folds.

• When I started my walk, I had no idea the neighbors were entertaining young children on their front lawn. Consequently, I was as surprised as the children when they saw me coming over the hill.        
  
  

  
  
  
  
• Children can move very quickly when frightened and at the time I believed pursuing them to explain I meant them no harm would only make a bad situation worse. So I flew back, er... returned to my home.
  
  

  
  
• I heartily apologize for any nightmares I may have inadvertently caused. However any kid who panics at the sight of a middle-aged woman wearing a black-cape, sneakers, and horn-rimmed glasses is a kid with too much Halloween on the brain.

(Maybe next time, I should carry my wand....)

October in Alabama: A Love Story

As a teen, I never cared for love stories.  While other girls were sighing and crying over the latest sugary "boy-meets-girl", I jumped into the classics, swearing romance book writers conspired to create Cinderella pap to weaken women's minds.  (Mom said I was foolish but she kept a soft spot for Barbara Cartland.) Not that I didn't believe in love!  I was just felt very awkward and self-conscious reading about it.  I knew that if/when I fell in love, I'd never write tell the world about it.

Then I saw the South in October.

Yes, I know people aren't supposed to fall in love with places.  And if any part of the states is known for autumn scenes, it's New England, not Alabama.  But I did and the beauty of Autumn in Dixie was then a fairly well kept secret. So I had no idea, when I crossed the Mississippi River, that I was stepping into a place of transcendent beauty.  I spent that first visit walking with my mouth half-open, about the Technicolor foliage that appeared around every bend. I found the South and Southerners fascinating and loved their complex, stubborn relationship with this place but more than anything, I fell for the faraway hills covered in crazy quilts of color underneath sapphire skies. 

What can I say?  I began to fall in love.

I began to discover why an essential element of Southern literature is its exquisite sense of place, as if the things that happen here, couldn't occur that way anywhere else. I'm not sure, but is there anyplace else where natural beauty is spilled out so generously, where "trash trees" transform themselves into moving sculptures of butterscotch, crimson and yellow every Autumn?   On the branches, the leaves are breathtaking. When they fall, they become an impressionist's fantasy. Stand outside when the leaves are coming down and it's as if fat flakes of cadmium yellow sailed off some artist's palate and start floating down to the earth,  It's a treat for the senses but that's getting ahead of my story.

Fall is a festive season here, maybe because of the return of football games and maybe to mark our turn toward the holidays of December but I think it's due to the changing weather. The blue of the sky begins to deepen or it just shows more of a contrast against the variegated trees. Then, the massive heat waves finally break and it's fun to go back outdoors. People turn out for fairs, tailgating, fun runs and visits to the pumpkin patch. Music starts playing, scents of food fill the air and everyone seems happy to be part of the world. This is a great time for festivals but my favorite trip takes us up a secret bluff.

Can you believe this is where my husband and his friends hid out when they played hooky in high school?  It's a beautiful, hidden place, about a mile's hike off the public road and the view from the top goes on for miles. In spring, wild magnolia trees on the forest floor bloom and, if you stand on the edge of the bluff, you can touch the flowers at the tips of their branches. It's even better in fall when a hike through the leaves gives you an appetite for harvest soups and barbecue.  That level of beauty is everywhere and it only heightens as the season wears on.  By the time we return to the bluff, I am besotted with the joy of life and this wonderful world full of color.

Sometime between Halloween and Veterans Day, the deciduous trees hit their zenith of color and for a few days the sun rises on hills that already seem like they're aflame.  This is the grand finale of autumn and, regrettably, it doesn't last long.  The winds decide to change or a front comes through and the trees that were covered in vermilion and bronze before, now stretch nude limbs to the sky.  The beautiful leaves, now sodden, cover the ground at least until the the leaf-blowers get going and my infatuation with autumn will be finished again for a year.

So, yes, I've become a romantic fool, a fool for the South every October.  If our romance is short-lived, at least it's beautiful while it lasts and I always have next fall to anticipate.  And I am willing to wait. So maybe this is more than an autumn romance.  Maybe this is true love.

From Myth to Man: Hamilton

It was hard telling the Founding Fathers apart when I was in Elementary School.  Every fall another teacher would try to impress the achievements of the frock-coated/ American Revolutionaries into our malleable brains with similar results.  In a group portrait of patriots, we could all pick out Franklin (rotund, bald and smiling) and probably Washington by his unsmiling mouth clamped around a set of dentures but the rest were identifiable only to those who had studied.  To the rest of us, they were a group of middle-aged, white males with funny clothes and powdered hair.   If you had asked me then who Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and Benedict Arnold were, I'd probably have said: "One was a traitor, another was shot and the third one fired the pistol."  I doubt if I could have said more.

And that's why we need writer-historians like Ron Chernow.  His lauded volume Alexander Hamilton not only rescued the memory of a brilliant man from obscurity and (with the genius of Lin-Manuel Miranda) brought new respect to this patriot's memory; it illuminates the character of Hamilton so well that the man and his peers become people we can recognize and relate to.

Almost everyone went to school with someone like Hamilton; I know I did.  Look back in your memory to the bunch of outsiders in your class whose clothes don't match the current fashion and whose family weren't considered pillars of the community. Despite knowing they aren't part of the "in-crowd" most of them have some friendships and function as regular students not this kid. Outsider he may be, but that doesn't seem to register with him. Instead he wears his intelligence and self-confidence like armor and attacks each subject like it's a competition to be won.  This is the classmate whose hand is always up, who argues with the teachers like he is their peer and who has scholarships, a major and 10-year plan lined up while the rest of us are still looking at colleges. The kid's self-confidence often comes across as arrogance which means he/she isn't well liked but everyone recognizes the student's intellect and drive. Actually, "drive" doesn't begin to describe this kid's laser-like focus. This is an adolescent with the will, and brain of an adult.  But what is making this Sammy run?

Chernow believes Hamilton's insecurities as a child formed the needs that drove him as an adult. Abandoned by his father and functionally orphaned at 13, the illegitimate Alexander wanted the social and financial security he saw in other lives and missed in his own. Using his thirst for knowledge and a gift for writing, Alexander maximized ever chance fortune threw his way, first in the Carribean and then in the American Colonies where marriage and revolution gave him the opportunity to rise in a fledgling meritocracy. Unfortunately, his talents and aspirations also carried the seeds of his undoing.

Like many geniuses, Hamilton worked well on his own but lacked the insight and diplomatic give-and-take necessary to function well in a government of other accomplished, ambitious officials, all with their own agendas. (Among other things, Chernow's Hamilton traces the beginnings of America's two-party system and verifies that politics has long been a blood sport in this country.)  A compulsive and prolific political writer, Alexander was so used to gaining support through published essays that he expected public\exoneration after writing of his involvement in a sex scandal.  That action ruined his political future and his belief in the code duello as the way upper-class gentlemen settled disputes led to the deaths of himself and his first-born son.  Hamilton's tragedy is not a life of unrealized promise (much of his initial work is still apparent in this country's financial structure) but that his underlying insecurities kept him from seeing his life's work come to fruition.

By all means, catch a performance of the musical Hamilton if you are lucky enough to get tickets.  By all accounts, it's an amazing show.  But while you are learning the lyrics and melodies of this revolutionary musical, read the biography they sprang from.  As rich as the theatrical production is, this book is the mother-lode.

Elegy for an Honest Marriage

It's October, one of my favorite months for stories, even though most October stories have a tie to the supernatural.   So it only seems right to start off with a story by one of the writers most associated with scary stories: Stephen King.

At its essence, marriage is a closed corporation.  It's a private entity with its own personality and the principals own all the stock.  Sure, often children are born to a marriage and spouses share parts of their lives with others but these people are beneficiaries, not stockholders; if children leave and friends fall away, the corporation continues unless death or divorce intervene, keeping secrets known only to the principals. At least that's the premise of Lisey's Story.  And those untold secrets are what makes a marriage powerful, even when one of the principals dies.

Lisey Landon is still learning about the strength of her marriage years after her husband, Scott, died. Scott was a successful novelist and the public face of their marriage.  His passing left her with a sizable amount of cash, a barn full of books, and some very insensitive academic types that believe their knowledge of Scott Landon's work gives them superior rights to and understanding of Scott, the man.  Only Lisey knows how wrong they are.

Scott's commitment to his wife is a suggestion why some marriages go the distance, even when one of the principals is famous.  Landon treats his fans with kindness and respect but recognizes their view of him is grounded in their response to his stories.  In his words, Lisey sees him as himself, a person of both weakness and strength, that is totally separate from his work. Before the world fell in love with Scott's creations, Lisey fell in love with Scott, not his work, making her one of the few trustworthy souls in his world.  And trust her he does with his deepest secrets, the ones where King's imagination runs dark.

If parents and siblings knew us when we were children, then spouses see how we live with the effects of that childhood . Lisey's learns of her husband's fearful background and the genuine affection that can thread through knots of abuse.  She also discovers the genetic dynamite her husband carries and the extraordinary abilities and terrors he keeps private.  In exchange, Scott gains access to Lisey's quiet, incredible sense and strength and insight into her long-term dance in a gaggle of sisters. To the public, Scott and Lisey Landon look like an uneven couple but they are a strong, symbiotic team, unaffected by fame or money. The marriage is based on mutual trust they've learned to rely on, knowing each will not only keep the other's secrets but the secrets they hide from themselves.  

King fans will find the humor and gruesome scenes in Lisey's Story that fill many of their favorite author's books and literary fans will be enchanted by the pool at Boo'ya Moon, the place Scott says all storytellers drink from to find the words and ideas that keep them writing and us reading.  But make no mistake, Lisey's Story is primarily a love song, a hymn for a long, loving marriage.  Listen well because songs are all outsiders are allowed to hear.  The best of any good marriage remains a privileged secret.

Learning in the Worst of Times

I've been thinking about pinch points lately, those intervals in a story when you realize how difficult the hero's task is.  They occur (optimally) at the 3/8th and 5/8th point in a story and structurally, they serve a two-fold purpose: to show how vulnerable the hero(ine) is and what will happen if he/she loses.  But structure never interests me as much as character and pinch points teach and clarify these better than anything else. The same thing is true about people. Pinch points are what we learn in the worst of times.

The axiom says failure teaches more than success and the essence of a pinch point is failure.  For example, the first pinch point of LOTR's The Fellowship of the Ring happens at Weathertop, when Frodo succumbs to temptation and puts on the Ring.  He becomes vulnerable to Sauron's most powerful agents, the Nazgul, and the resulting injury nearly destroys our hero.  Frodo never fully recovers from the experience but both the reader and he learn from it. Frodo shows a resilience and physical fortitude after the injury that most other beings don't possess. And his character is strengthened after the failure. Strong as they are, the Nazgul never successfully distract Frodo from his destiny again. None of this is apparent until Frodo fails and his failure at the first Pinch Point strengthens him for the second, when his company loses their leader, Gandalf. Grieved as they are, Frodo and his companions continue with their journey knowing their likelihood of success fell with Gandalf into the abyss.  Their reliance on each other increases and the remaining story turns on both those redoubled and fractured alliances.

Frodo at Weathertop in Peter Jackson's Fellowship of the Ring

The fact is people, like books, have pinch points, but ours aren't conveniently scheduled at the 3/8th and 5/8th points of our lives.  Instead we face instances when we're overwhelmed by pain and events. That's how I felt eleven years ago when my father died.

Losing a parent, for many of us, isn't just overwhelming emotional grief, it's an existential crisis.  No longer are we junior citizens in some family corporation; in an instant, we become senior members, the next in line to go, and the sole custodian of some childhood memories.  That's an incredible amount to assimilate all at once and more than most people can handle. Luckily, as Frodo found, catastrophes can be met, especially if we don't meet them alone.

The Fall of Gandalf - same film

Led by my incredible sister, people who loved my Dad pulled together through the despair that followed his passing.  They listened to us, laughed and cried with us, fed and boarded us, fetched, carried, and above all, showed us we were still loved even if we'd lost the man who'd loved us first. I learned a lot about the strength and love of old friends eleven years ago.

I also learned a lot about my sis and myself in those days. Her strength of will has been apparent since infancy; seldom has a more focused person walked this earth.  But dad's death taught me more about the nature and limits of my sibling's strength, that it can become over-stressed, and when she can use my help. I found out I could help her.  In my own way, I dealt with disaster and found I could tolerate pain and help others with theirs. I found out many things I feared were worse in anticipation than reality. Sis and I both learned a lot in that time and that knowledge served us well when Mom's death followed Dad's. If their passing turned us irrevocably into grownups, those events also made us into something new: a team.

That's the nature of learning in the worst of times.  We're under so much stress, we don't even know we're learning, much less learning what really matters.  Only afterwards, will we recognize it as a pinch point.  And we're better beings for surviving its lessons.

The Evolution of a Name

I like to believe that somewhere out there, someone reads what I write. (To quote one of my favorite plays, In a world where carpenters get resurrections, anything's possible)  If so, they've seen alterations in the name of this place, patiently reading while I tried to find the phrase captures the idea and atmosphere I'm trying to create here.  The search hasn't been easy.

Initial Title: A good start but not yet there.

I started out with "The Stories that Follow You Home" a phrase I love because I believe some stories do just that.  While trends change and popular poems, books and plays appear and vanish like popular music recordings, some stories put down roots in your soul and imagination. They stick with you, like a good friend, and when you re-read them, you find gifts you didn't see before. I love those rewarding tales and the people who feel the same way. I love people fascinated by the structure and function, and power of story. But, what are those people called?  Is there a term for a lover of stories?

We all know what lovers of books are called: bibliophiles.  It comes from two old Greek words, biblion (meaning books) and philos meaning loving.  But the stories that follow you home come from more places than books.  Some of my followers came from plays and quite of few came from poems. Some come from oral tradition, news reports or the earth itself. So I searched and searched through lists of "philes" for a one-word term meaning "lover of story".  And I found exactly nothing.

Better and Worse: I've got the Atmosphere right but this isn't about me, it's about the people who love STORIES!

This amazes me.  How can there recognized terms for the love of poetry (Metrophilia), plays (Theatrophilia), even myths (Mythophelia), without a name for the underlying element that pulls them altogether?  The idea is ridiculous. Finally, I did what everyone does when proper terms don't exist: I invented a one that does.

According to Google and Wikipedia, the ancient Greek word for story is Istoria (ἱστορία) and it means "learning through research", which is exactly what we do when we read.  So, someone who loves the function and power of "Story" would be an Istoriaphile, right?  And since I want this to be a comfortable place where lovers of story are free to relax and talk, I've turned it into the coziest spot in my library.  

Now, that's more like it!

So, here we are, after almost two years, in the Istoriaphile's corner.  If you've been reading awhile, thanks for your patience.  And if you've just found it,Welcome Home.