Evidence of Miracles: Their Eyes Were Watching God

It's hard to write well about miracles.  They blindside you and because they're so unexpected, it's hard to frame lead ins for them.  With other stories, the author can add foreshadowing and clues to point the reader in a general direction but miracles come without warning.  Sometimes the miracle is such a surprise, that people refuse to believe it occurred.  I have my share of skepticism but I do believe in miracles and I love when they happen.  That's probably why I love the book  Their Eyes Were Watching God.  As far as I'm concerned, the story in the book, the story of the book and the story of the woman who wrote it are all walking proofs of providence.

Let me start out with the writer, Zora Neale Hurston.  She was one of eight children born to an African-American minister and his wife who lived in Alabama.  She was born with talent, strong will and a brain but luck rarely favored children in poor, black families in the 1890's.  It did when her father moved his family to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated, all-black, towns in America.  Zora's self-confidence grew in a society where a resident's destiny wasn't limited by their skin tone.  More good luck put her in the path of some gifted teachers.  With this background, Zora used her  own combination of hard work and resourcefulness to go to college and she studied anthropology at Howard University, Barnard College and Columbia University.  Her studies made Zora realize that the Florida home she had known contained a rich, heretofore unstudied culture and she spent a large part of her life documenting this world before it disappeared.  When she wasn't writing writing books of folklore or studying other cultures, she created essays, plays, short stories and novels.  Her second novel was Their Eyes Were Watching God.

TEWWG is, more than anything, the story of Janie, a middle-aged woman who learns to trust her own instincts after surviving three husbands, and the extremes of life.  To hear Janie tell it, she has been "a delegate to the Big Association of Life" and her membership dues were paid through hard experience, often with the wrong man.  Janie's grandmother selected Logan Killicks to be Janie's first husband, hoping he would give his young wife security.  Instead, Janie found the emptiness of a loveless marriage.  Jody Starks promised Janie  excitement and change from the Killicks farm but Janie finds she is little more than a trophy to the ambitious Starks, who believes a wife is something to be exhibited, bullied and bossed.  Only with Tea Cake, the traveling laborer who captures her heart, does Janie find the relationship of mutual affection and respect she craves. Both Teacake and Janie make mistakes but with this loving, imperfect man Janie is content to face demanding work, a murderous hurricane and even death itself because she has the right companion.  Zora used her knowledge of Florida and the people she knew there to create a story built around a simple, profound idea: more than money or work or the approval of others, it takes Love to fill up a life.

Unfortunately, Their Eyes Were Watching God, didn't get the recognition or praise it deserved when it was first published.  It got mixed reviews from critics and few sales. All too soon, the novel was out of print and forgotten and it's author seemed doomed to suffer the same fate.  After a life of travel, love and accomplishment, Zora Neale Hurston died, penniless and alone in 1960 and was laid in an unmarked grave.

But remember, I promised you a miracle. The novelist Alice Walker discovered Their Eyes Were Watching God while she was still a student and she began to research Hurston's life.  A decade after Zora's death, Walker placed a stone on the unmarked grave and published the article, "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston".  The article focused a light on this nearly vanished author and her novel and people started hunting for old copies of the book.  Three years later, the book was put back into print and now it is a part of college courses everywhere, recognized and taught not just as a great African-American tale or a great woman's story but a great novel.  That's a bona-fide, sure-enough miracle.

Like I said, it's not easy to describe a miracle but sometimes we recognize them when they happen. Miracles, like grace, are the good we don't always deserve and certainly never expect.  Yet, these surprise blessings give us hope for the future. They restore our faith in ourselves and the world and our belief in a  benevolent providence. Like Their Eyes Were Watching God, miracles are gifts of love, the love that fulfills our lives.

The Wright Stuff

There they are, pictured in American History books, looking like would-be models for a Grant Wood painting: Orville and Wilbur Wright, two men idolized for their achievement in flight but unknown and unknowable beyond that remarkable fact.  These tall, thin men appear in the history of mankind, one of them skimming over a sand dune in a contraption of wood struts and fabric while the other stands alongside.  Then they disappear again.  Most people can't tell you which brother is in the flying machine. Until recently, we've seen them as aviation's first pair of ciphers.

By contrast, David McCullough has devoted his life to creating a greater understanding of American individuals and events that shaped this country's history and his new book, The Wright Brothers goes a long way toward demystifying and humanizing this legendary pair.   In many ways, it takes someone like McCullough to point out the history of these remarkable brothers is a quintessential American tale. 

Born in the mid-west as the grandchildren of immigrants, Orville and Wilbur had the singular good fortune of having enlightened, loving parents.  Their father was a traveling minister who loved learning almost as much as he loved God.  Bishop Wright encouraged his children to read widely and develop their own opinions about life.  The boys were younger siblings in a brood of children and a bit shy but they probably would have developed unremarkably except two set-backs refocused their lives.  First, Wilbur was hit in the mouth with a baseball bat and lost most of his front teeth.  Instead of going to college, he spent the next three years in the house recovering, (cosmetic dentistry was in its infancy) caring for his terminally ill mother, and reading every book he could get his hands on.  The isolation made a shy man shyer but it also ignited his brain.  Then Orville developed an illness that kept him in bed for months and, to pass the time, Wilbur read aloud to him from books on science and nature.  By the time they recovered, the brothers were devoted to engineering and science.

McCullough tells their story in plain, good-humored prose that is easy on the eye and ear.  Reading The Wright Brothers is almost like listening to the narration of a Ken Burns film.  It's friendly and open, as if the speaker knows he has an intelligent audience with an interest in his reasonable story.  Dramatic language doesn't need to be manufactured to keep the reader turning pages; the events described are enough.

Another gift of McCullough's research is that he creates the context that make the accomplishments of the Wright brothers understandable.  Any story about the Wright Brothers mentions that the brothers originally made their living repairing, building and selling bicycles, a concern that seems fairly distant from controlled flight.  McCullough puts this in perspective by pointing out the safety bicycle sold by the Wrights (one with two wheels of similar size an chain drive) was a new phenomena that made self-propelled transport viable.  In other words, the Wrights were entrepreneurs interested in cutting-edge technology.   By repairing and then creating lightweight, dependable, and fast bicycles, Wilbur and Orville taught themselves elements of mechanical engineering that helped them develop the flight control system they later put into their planes.

Like Edison the Wright brothers were inventors, undismayed by failure, and as unskilled as businessmen as they were gifted in engineering but history is full of people whose focus allowed them to achieve in one area but hindered them in another.  If their work is substantial and documented, usually their achievements are remembered and cherished.   Thankfully, writers like David McCullough make sure the achievers are remembered as well.

When there's more to the Novel than a Story

Not every novel is a classic.  Visit any English class and you'll hear that a lot of novels are pulp or, as Capote said, "That's not writing; That's typing."  I won't argue that point (my mom didn't raise anyone that foolish) but I think some "popular" novels get less respect than they deserve.   These books, whose primary purpose is entertainment, often have insights into the human condition.  To ignore the good in these stories is to turn a blind eye to real gold.

Dick Francis's 24th novel is called Proof but it could have used one of his later titles, Come to Grief.  Here, Tony Beach is trying to live a reasonable life under the weight of a double burden.  His wife passed away six months before and he's still mourning her death.   The second is the shadow of a family legacy: Tony's father and grandfather were famous as brave men and riders but Tony fears the damage that comes from falling off a horse.  So he sells wine and spirits for a living, watches other people ride horses and remains convinced he's the family coward. 

It's Tony's connections to the horse world that have him catering drinks at a party where his own talents are called into play.  Some restaurants are selling inferior wines and whisky under the labels of superior spirits (Only oenophiles and single-malt scotch drinkers will grasp how heinous a crime this is) and Tony's knowledge and taste-memory skills are used to investigate the fraud.  Once the criminals learn he's involved, Tony discovers for himself whether not he deserves to be called a coward.

Between the story and some interesting background on spirits (each distillery can recognize it's own product not by taste but by a chemical analysis called a profile) are some spot-on observations of humanity.  How bereaved people are often expected to act as if they've accommodated their loss when their sorrow is painfully fresh; why forgiving a law-breaker may be sensible but removing the consequences of breaking the law is foolish and that while loss may be sudden and devastating, recovery is the process of years. These may be just observations to the casual reader but to someone grappling with grief or injury, these nuggets of sense can be touchstones to be remembered and used.  They make Proof so much more than just a Story.

As for the title, Proof may mean the measure of alcohol in this drinks-related tale or it may be the evidence required to establish the truth of the matter, whether that's a bottle of Scotch or the content of someone's character.  According to Tony, the proof of alcohol was once tested by mixing it with gunpowder and fire.  If the mixture burned with a steady blue flame, the drink held at least fifty percent alcohol.   Of course technology can determine the degrees of alcohol in a bottle these days but that won't work on people.  To gauge the content of their characters may still require a trial by fire.

The only constant in life is change

They don't teach us that when we're kids. When we're little, the routine is a big part of our existence and we rely on it as much as we chafe at its boundaries: on weekdays we wake up and get dressed for school, following a specific route from home to class and back; we meet who we're supposed to meet when we meet them and homework is done on the dot.  We have a prescribed dinner time, family time and bedtime and our birthdays arrive on schedule every year.  During adolescence we fight to tear up the schedule and we become adults when we realize how our parents fought to keep the reality of change from impinging on our routine.  Adults know the only constant in life is change and to survive they must learn to adapt.  Sometimes in the process they make mistakes but that's a part of learning to adapt.

This is the undercurrent of Elisabeth Egan's debut novel, A Window Opens, and her heroine, Alice Pearse, starts the story understanding the need.  As a veteran of the sandwich generation she's a mom to her children and a daughter of parents who all need her at the same time.  She's also a loving wife so when her husband's career takes a radical hit, Alice looks for a full-time job to keep the family income stable and give him the opportunity he needs to re-write his vocational future.  And since Alice believes in the future, she takes a position with one of the new, edgy conglomerates looking to revolutionize the retail experience.

Part of book is focused on the ever-shifting conflict between honoring and trashing the past and one of the comic highlights of A Window Opens captures it in the war between paper and e-books.  Alice's new employer (no surprise) wants to focus the majority of their product on e-books and comes up with nasty nicknames for the traditional paper-and-spine format  but one of the company perks is each new employee gets a first edition of his/her favorite book.  (I imagined someone offering me that job and then withdrawing the offer after I requested a first edition of Jane Eyre.)  Alice's choice is there when she starts her job but the book is never really hers.  She can't take it off the job-site or even read its pages.  The volume must stay wrapped in plastic and under lock and key.  Eventually, Alice has to ask herself: what's the point of having a book if you're not allowed to read it?

There are other questions for Alice and some of the answers aren't that easy but Egan's best point is about time.   Because of our growing culture people can become almost anything in life they want to be (a parent, an astronaut, a horticulturalist) but no one can be everything, certainly not all at once.  Each life has a limited amount of time and our choices determine how we'll spend it.  Egan's advise is to base those decisions on who and what we love, mindful that any choice closes some doors.  That's not as grim as it sounds, as my mom used to say.  Whenever circumstance closes a door, somewhere A Window Opens.



Elisabeth Egan's A Window Opens will go on sale in August of this year.  My thanks to NetGalley for sharing a copy of this with me for review purposes

The Gift

Sometimes you just get lucky.

I believe that.

About six months ago I started this  column, writing about books I'd come to love dearly and early on, I praised Shirley Jackson, a writer that almost seemed forgotten.  My mother had loved her work and introduced me to it at an early age.  That was lucky because, in those days, Jackson's work (with the exception of one story) wasn't reprinted.  At that time, Jackson wasn't often remembered in literary circles and when she was the discussions were limited to her supernatural or psychologically disturbing tales.   The author also wrote a lot of well-crafted stories about family life but these were given less weight because a)they were funny or b) they were "chick lit."   Of all of her works, these looked like they had the least chance of getting back into print.

Except, now they are.

Ms. Jackson's books about life with one husband, one sheep dog, four children, 10,000 books and innumerable cats are back in print.  Life Among the Savages follows two parents and their two young children from a New York City apartment to an old Vermont house with Pillars in the Front and ends with the arrival of the fourth child, Barry.  Raising Demons sees the family of six move into their last home (a huge house that had been cut up into apartments) and the older children move toward adolescence through the eyes of the somewhat overwhelmed and sharp-eyed mother.  Her dry sense of humor about the absurdities of life carries everything along without straying near sentimentality, a quality few domestic writers can claim.  That kind of writing is a gift.  Luckily, that's not the only present we've got coming.

Let Me Tell You is due to be released late this summer and of course, I've ordered my copy.  The collection comes from previously unpublished essays that were edited by two of her children, Laurence Hyman and Sarah Hyman Dewitt.  Early reviews (oh, those lucky critics who have read this already) promise a varied collection that showcases Ms. Jackson's wonderful subversive humor and her clean-as-a-whistle prose.  The book comes out on August 4th.  I'd better take vacation that day.  I won't be worth shooting until I've read this book.

Like I said, I was born lucky.  A newly invented product saved me when I was an infant and, despite scores of mistakes, I've avoided a lot of pitfalls and found an awful lot of friends.  Oh, and my mother let me read the work of Shirley Jackson.  Actually, that was more of a gift.

The trials of fathers and daughters

Okay, I know it's close to Mother's Day but there's something about Fathers and Daughters.  God knows, I adored mine.  He was funny, smart and bullheaded, just the kind of man to indulge a mischievous daughter who didn't want to obey her mom.  Yes sir, I think my father was brilliant but a lot of girls feel that way about their dads..  Adela Rogers St. Johns certainly did and she captured that father-daughter spark in her biography, Final Verdict.  Of course, when she said her Old Man was brilliant the rest of the world agreed.  Earl Rogers may still be the greatest trial attorney that ever entered a courtroom.

It's funny but no one remembers Earl Rogers these days.  Mention Johnny Cochran or F. Lee Bailey or Gerry Spence and legal heads will nod.  Talk about Bill Kunstler or Clarence Darrow and some history mavens will admit they had skill but they point out these guys lost as many cases as they won.   Talk about the man who Perry Mason was based on and you'll hear "Perry who??"  Well, such is the nature of fame.  Still, in the first half of the twentieth century, if you were charged with murder and everyone assumed you were guilty, the best news you could hear was "Earl Rogers is taking your case."  And if he was, Adela would be at your side.

In the era before computer simulations Rogers brought re-enactments into the courtroom and visual aids to instruct and aid the juries.  He was an expert on forensic evidence and is considered the inventor of the art of cross-examination, one of the skills highlighted in the character, Perry Mason.  Perry used to irritate me with his habit of cross-examining a witness until he or she confessed to the crime.  Earl Rogers actually did that while Adela watched him from the first row behind the defense table.  She went with him to client meetings in jail-cells and crime-scene investigations while Mother sat in the house and raged about the husband and daughter who embarrassed her so with their antics.  Adela wouldn't or couldn't become the kind of girl her mother wanted any more than her mom could be the kind of woman Earl Rogers needed in his life.  Mrs. Rogers was beautiful, popular and demanding but she lacked the spiritual generosity and intellectual curiosity her husband treasured.  In the end, the couple split up and Adela looked after her dad, instead of him looking after her.

Earl Rogers had incandescent gifts but his life and career were shortened by booze.  Time after time he would disappear for days or end up under arrest himself and he drank up the fortune he earned.  Eventually the alcohol affected his brain and Rogers could not give a client what he felt they were entitled to, the very best defense.  That broke the heart of the lawyer and probably increased his drinking.  Finally, Adela asked the court to commit her father to an asylum so he could dry out.  In typical Rogers fashion, he fought the commitment, cross-examined his daughter and freed himself with just two questions.  Of all of his victories, this may have been the costliest as he died in a flophouse a few months later.

Adela writes of her father with with great dignity, honesty and love, rightfully crediting him with the confidence, knowledge and network that helped her build her own career as one of the first Hollywood journalists.  I used to watch her on chat shows talking about the early days of pictures or about San Simeon and William Randolph Hearst.  I don't remember her talking about her Dad.

Well, great fathers are hard to speak of once they're gone, even the ones who let you down.  With all of his troubles, Earl Rogers did  the best he could for his daughter, just as he gave his clients the best defense he could muster.  In turn, she loved and was loved by him.  That's my final verdict.

On Growing Up, Summer and Secrets

Adolescent friendships are unique: The close friends we make as children almost become part of our family, watched over equally by supervising parents, teased or ignored by resident siblings.  Glad to be included, they become part of the whole and accept conditions without thought or judgement.  On the other hand, our adult friends find us as self-sufficient beings, with loosened family ties.  Only the friends of our adolescent years perceive the context of our family's past and the adults we will become. More observant than young children, they witness the stresses in these families they know and, being teenagers, they sometimes judge, although they rarely blab about what they learn.  Self-conscious and plagued by hormones, most teenagers prefer to keep secrets.

These are the undercurrent themes of Bittersweet, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore's new novel about identity and lies.  Mabel Dagmar is her narrator, a working-class girl dependent on  scholarships for her college education and the opposite of her roommate Genevra Winslow, the assured descendent of a wealthy, Eastern family.  To Mabel, the Winslows exist in rarefied existence of Ivy League schools, named summer cottages and the kind of confidence that only comes from generations of independent wealth and she joins Ginevra for a summer vacation at the family compound with the envy of an outsider.  

Mabel's search for her own identity follows two patterns many teenagers follow.  First, she rejects the choices her own parents made and then she tries to absorb the values of someone else, in this case, the exalted, entitled Winslows.  Although these attractive people appear to collectively exemplify the virtues of New England wealth (including one or two eccentric relations) Mabel sees, as the summer lengthens, that coils of subterfuge and lies bind these people together as surely as money, blood and tradition.  Then she sees how those coils reach out and destroy other people.  Eventually Mabel must choose what kind of adult she will become, which set of values she will embrace.

In some ways, Bittersweet follows the classical pattern of a Gothic story: a young woman in an isolated, romanticized setting discovers some big, bad secrets and a big, bad adversary.  Yet, this is no Jane Eyre.  For one thing, Mabel lacks Miss Eyre's spiritual convictions and is burdened with secrets of her own so she has to rely on different weapons to overcome the adversaries and makes more fallible choices.  However, the stronger difference is the setting and this highlights the new writer's skill.  Instead of the moors or a brooding castle, Bittersweet is set in a summering Vermont wood that is half camp and half family estate.  It is Ms. Beverly-Whittemore's prose that shows evil can shine in the summer sun and stalk victims through twilight and fireflies.

Bless those with faith in the innocence of summer,  They should have life in abundance and look elsewhere for stories. Bittersweet speaks for witnesses and adolescent friends and those who know  the power of secrets.


My thanks to Blogging for Books for providing me with a copy of this novel.  LLG

The Lessons of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler

Every adult who was once a kid reader has some books tucked away in his/her soul.  These stories are usually hidden quite well but they still guide the adult.  The history professor won't talk about the book of ghost stories that got his attention in grade school but it stimulated his first interest in the past.  The attorney may speak of hornbooks and precedents instead of the copy of Katie John that stayed with her through fourth grade but the fictional heroine is still there.  And the old woman dozing in nursing home's day room listens as child read about Pooh and Piglet and reacquaints herself with the citizens of Hundred Acre Wood who led her to a lifetime of reading.  The books we love as children incorporate themselves into our being and we carry their ideas with us through life.  I realized that today when I found an old friend, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.  Decades had lapsed since I last read the story but I wasn't just seeing something familiar.  I found the lessons I've been living by for years.

A little background:  Claudia Kincaid makes the ultra-sensible decision to run away from home, in order to get a little justice.  Well, it makes sense when you're the sixth-grade, always-responsible, eldest child  in a family of six and your future looks like more of the same.  She picks out a sensible hideaway (The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art) and sensible goal (stay gone till her parents appreciate her) but her best decision is to recruit her little brother, Jamie as her accomplice and financier.  This complimentary pair move into the museum, taking advantage of the artifacts and amenities in the building after closing time and joining the perpetual school tours during daylight hours.  The book is, among other things, a siren song to New York and I'll bet many an out-of-towner has put the MoMA on their itinerary because of the role it plays in this book.  Still, the best part of Frankweiler doesn't come from the museum or its mystery or even Claudia and Jamie.  Tucked away in the story are the observations of Mrs. Frankweiler as she follows the kids on their trip.

According to Mrs. Frankweiler, [becoming] part of a team is something that happens invisibly, and she's right.   Real teams aren't created by a coach or a director; they come through a mutual decision of the members.   My own sister and I co-existed for years, loving and hating each other as siblings but no one would have called us teammates.  Then our Dad died and we got each other through not one, but two separate funerals.  Somewhere during that awful time, we learned to rely on and like each other and we've been a team ever since.  I just wish Daddy had lived to see it.

Frankweiler is a big believer in internalizing experience.  She says some people spend so much time and energy documenting a pleasurable vacation that they miss the vacation they're having.  Somewhere along the way, I folded that belief into my chromosomes.  Yes, I have some photos of trips.  But my best memories, the ones I think of when the words, "Vail", "Camp", "Family" or "Beach" come to mind, were never photographed.  Those come from the times I lived completely in the moment, implanting the memories in my brain, if not my camera.  I don't need photos to remember the Atlantic's spray on my face or the sun on my arms near St. Petersburg or the eternal green of summer camp.  The details I want to remember are there, gorgeous and rich, and once they're gone, no photo could bring them back.

Frankweiler also says we need days when we learn and days when we absorb what we learn.  If not, we become trashcans of meaningless facts.  This may sound a bit new-agey but the wisdom here is sound.  We go through life bombarded with information these days and not all of it is accurate.  Periodically, we need to sit down and sort it all out: we figure out what works and what doesn't and how it all relates to us.  It's this process that allows us to make connections and gain a greater understanding of our world.  That work can't be done while we are harvesting data, we need time to think as well.  And, as humans, we need time for rest and sleep.  Even as kids, we need time to just be.

Mrs. Frankweiler, or her creator (E. L. Konigsburg) believed that, "Happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around."    I hope the woman and the character enjoyed a lot of that flapping in life.  They certainly gave a large measure to others and they taught me some lovely ideas.  I've held on to those ever since. 

There's a story that needs to be told

Me, I'm a fool for history.  Show me a place where something really happened and tell me the story so I can see it in my mind and I'll be your friend forever, even if the story is sad.  So much has happened where I live that I've always got plenty to read but there's one bit of regional history that I haven't found captured in books.  It's time someone wrote about the Rhythm Club Fire.

It happened seventy-five years ago today, in Natchez, Mississippi.  Natchez was a medium-sized county seat then of about fifteen thousand people, sixty percent of whom were African-American.  Because this was during the cruel and moronic Jim Crow period, the town was effectively split along racial lines and white and black people co-existed with a minimum of interaction.  The divide was so deep, I'll bet that almost half of Natchez had no idea their town was known as a place for great music.

A few years before, a group of African-American entrepreneurs (self named, The Money-Wasters Social Club) had turned a long narrow building in the business section of town into a nightspot called The Rhythm Club.  The place may not have looked like much from the outside with its tin walls and shuttered windows and the interior decorations consisted of Spanish Moss draped from the rafters, but people didn't go there to look.   This was the era of swing music and the Money-Wasters made the Rhythm Club a regular stop for black dance-bands touring the South.   The Rhythm Club became the local place to go to hear music, cut loose and have fun, until April 23, 1940.

That night, the Rhythm club was stuffed with people, despite the sixty-five cent admission: Walter Barnes, a gifted musician and band leader was there with his orchestra and seven hundred or so people, including some music students and their teachers, had found their way through the front door entrance to the dance hall in back so they could hear the great band play.  Then around eleven thirty, a spark by the hamburger stand and only exit caught that dry, Spanish Moss draped through the rafters.  Now dry plants are potential fuel already but this stuff had been sprayed with a petroleum based insecticide so it was essentially a match waiting to be struck.  The flames started shooting across the ceiling, people began to scream and run but the fire was between them and the exits.  Walter Barnes and his orchestra tried to calm the crowd with music, but they were trapped in with that inferno.  Over 200 people died in that fifteen minute fire, including the bandleader, Walter Barnes.

The aftermath was horrendous.  The local hospital and the black undertakers are overrun with victims and some of the burned are sent home without treatment.  At least 60 of the dead couldn't be identified and were buried in an unmarked, mass grave outside of town.  The newspapers arrived, along with the Red Cross but there isn't a lot of follow up.  And all of this leads to questions.

How did the town of Natchez deal with this hideous tragedy?  Were the lost and injured remembered by all or was the event seen only through the the filter of segregation?   What happened to the black power structure of Natchez after that night took so many of its members?  What treatment was available or recommended for someone with serious burns at that time?  How did the injured recover?  Did they recover?  How do you go on living after coming through something like that?

A small museum, a handful of websites and one or two films talk about the tragedy but I haven't located any books that research this subject in-depth.  Creating one would be a job for a historian who can devote years to the project but it's a subject well worth chasing.  If reading books about disaster has taught me anything, it's taught me these stories are so much more than about how people died; they're about how people lived, what they cared about and why they should be remembered.  I hope somebody writes about Rhythm Club Fire because I want to read that book.

To Breathe the Air of Books

I have a condition I think of as "The Book Bug."  Whenever I approach a large collection of books  or I get my hands on a new one, my pulse jumps, my heartbeat quickens and I seem to get  a slight fever.  I've had the condition for decades.  It hit me as a kid whenever Scholastic Books distributed their lists of new paperbacks and I was allowed to purchase two. (My attempts to increase the order provided early lessons in negotiation and the Bug returned when the books were delivered.)  The air around books is rarefied to me and I've been known to get a book rush when I enter a big library, a good book store or a list of new book reviews.  I'll probably need a defibrillator if I ever visit the Library of Congress.  Up till now, I've assumed I'm the only one with this silly malady and I've been too embarrassed to admit it. Thanks to My Reading Life, I now know it's a condition I share with the writer, Pat Conroy.

Conroy is, of course, one of the novelists whose stories are a combination of  imagination and autobiography and he is the first to admit that.  He is also a reader with a world-class addiction to literature. It started with his mother, an autodidact who saw reading as a means of escape as well as self-improvement; she read constantly to her children.  Their family library was started with  a selection of cast-offs, lucky garage-sale finds and the children's school reading lists but the Conroy kids became readers of note.  Pat described his own head rush when, as a young man, he found a place in Atlanta called "The Old New York Book Shop". The owner became a friend who sometimes  let Pat mind the store.  Behind the counter, Conroy read the store's stock, gobbling up all the great books he couldn't yet afford to buy.

Not all readers feel the need to write but most writers (Conroy included) start out as dedicated readers.  I believe the metamorphosis happens when a reader finds the stories or books that cleave to and over-charge his or her soul.  The charge builds up until the passive reader is ignited into someone who must transmit his or her own tales and follow the writers that outlined the way. Conroy's conversion began with the novels of Thomas Wolfe and it's easy to see the attraction.  A lonely, word-loving boy of the South found the story of another lonely Southern boy written in lyrical prose.  The identification was immediate, surrender complete and another reader picked up the pen.

In the end, any writer worthy of ink retains an addiction to reading but their craft brings a new appreciation of the art.  Books can take you anywhere, teach you anything and bring you home for tea but those who have created their own books grasp more of the artistry in the creation.   Maybe that's why Mr. Conroy appreciates all the stories that sustain his life as a reader.  Or maybe he's just suffering from The Book Bug.

On a personal note, this is my 100th post.  For those who follow this page, thank you.  My gratitude is deep.