Fannie Flagg and the All-Girl Filling Station

I saw Fannie Flagg when I was young.  Not as young as my husband, (who remembers her stint as the local weather girl) but in the early 1970's, when Nixon was still president, my family got to see her on stage in a road-company performance of "Mame" with Bea Arthur supporting her as Vera Charles.  It was a night of transcendent joy.  Mame is a terrific show and Fannie took over the lead as if it had been written for her, my father forgot he hated all musicals and at the end of the performance the company got the longest storm of applause I've ever heard.   Seriously, we beat blisters onto our palms that night clapping for that flame-haired woman who insisted life was a banquet and most poor suckers were starving themselves to death.  That night, I decided no actress could inhabit Mame's character well without understanding and supporting this philosophy.   Ms. Flagg's The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion has me thinking I underestimated her years ago.  Fannie Flagg understands Everyone and Everything.

She certainly understands Sookie Poole, the central character and perpetual mother-of-the-bride in AGFSLR.  Sookie's a member of the sandwich generation, still trying to fill the needs  (and put up with) her overwhelming mother, Lenore, while watching her own children step into their own lives.  Sookie can only define her self in terms of others (Earl's wife, De de's mom) and when life-shattering news arrives, Sookie is forced to  re-evaluate every part of her life, starting with the relationship with her mother.

Fannie also understands Fritzie Jurdabralinski, the pretty Polish-American girl from Wisconsin who wants a life as fast, free and fun as the guys in town.  Fritzie has the courage and drive of any boy her age and those traits come in handy during WWII, when all the adult males are called up for service.  A pilot already, Fritzie and her sisters join the WASPs,  a group of lady fliers recruited by the U. S. Army Air Force to fly planes on non-combat missions in the U. S. so the male pilots were freed for combat flights.  Fannie captures the war-time patriotism that brought out the best in so many people and the post-war backlash that forced independent women back into domestic roles. Fanny even understands Lenore and the demons that push a strong woman into a  the termagant.  Understanding, in the hands of Ms. Flagg, is the first step toward transcending the damage of childhood and enjoying a happy adulthood.

Maybe life is more than the banquet that Mame described all those years ago.  For The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion, it's a beautiful piece of music and all the living contribute a tune, be a polka, waltz or march.  It's clear Fannie Flagg listens to all the singers and she loves the music she hears.

A Fiendishly Clever Book

I am not a Narnia nerd.  When my sister and I were young and used to arguing about everything  we would debate the literary merits of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels.  It was a war of worlds and words, the Chronicles of Narnia v. The Lord of The Rings.  (The things sisters argue about!)  Without angering the full and affectionate hearts of Mr. Lewis's supporters (including my sister) , my estimation is unchanged: with its created languages,  and mythology, LOTR is a broader, more-original creation than the Narnia series.  That being said, I am a fan of the work of C. S. Lewis and my favorite is The Screwtape Letters.

Screwtape, if you haven't heard of him, is a demon and mid-level administrator in Hell who writes to his nephew, Wormwood, a newly-minted, entry-level fiend, about the true tie that binds: their work on Satan's behalf.  It seems Wormwood has been assigned to guide some human to despair and a rejection of faith and the rookie needs help from Uncle Screwtape.  Screwtape's advice is sort of a theology in reverse because the guidance is to keep Wormwood's "patient" from redeeming grace.  Screwtape suggests that  direct attacks against the human's religion are inappropriate tactics because, "By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?"   Instead, it's better and easier to distract the human with "real" life, calling his attention to the newspaper headlines, the line at the bus stop and the behavior of the people at the next lunch table.  If you can get a human to accept that as  the "real"  and "important" existence, Screwtape suggests, he won't think about about any other life.  The same goes for the pernicious habit of prayer.  If Wormwood tries to keep his human from prayer altogether, the human will realize he's being tricked.  Instead, let him pray for his disagreeable old mother but suggest the prayers should be for her behavior (which irritates the human) instead of her rheumatism (which pains her).   In other words, whenever humans are obsessed with their own comfort, they are paving the way down to Screwtape and his boss.

It's interesting to see what activities infuriate Screwtape's boss.  Music is referred to as "that detestable art" and laughter, because it connects to fun and joy are looked down on (except when they distract the Humans from real problems) but, more importantly because music and laughter encourage people to live in the present.  This, according to Uncle Screwtape is a dangerous place.  Let someone live in the present and they accept life as it comes.   Get them to live in the future, constantly postponing pleasures and worried about possibilities, and they'll miss the improvements they could make today, Screwtape says.  Let them focus exclusively on the rainbow's end and all humanity will create is a mountain of regret.

There's a lot to what Uncle Screwtape says even with the author's reminder that, "the devil is a liar." It's a fascinating read for anyone, religious or otherwise because it speaks about humans and humanity.  Whether the devil exists corporeally or not is debatable; man's inhumanity to man is not and those actions and inaction are what condemn us in the end, according to Screwtape and there's reason to believe him.  However charming or clever Screwtape is, no reader can believe he has our welfare at heart.

As for me, Screwtape turned me into a permanent C. S. Lewis fan.  My own views may vacillate from time to time (a regular practice among humans, according to the demon) but this book acts on me like the song, "Walking in Memphis"  During the song, a gospel singer asks the observant Jew Marc Cohn mid performance, "Tell me are you a Christian, child?"  He replies, "Ma'am, I am tonight!"   When I read The Screwtape Letters, I believe in it all.

A voice from the recent past.

No one seems to recognize the name of Betty MacDonald any more.  When I was little, her humorous books had a place of honor on my mother's shelves and her series of Mrs. Piggle Wiggle books were staple of kid lit in primary school.  She was even responsible for a Hollywood film series.  These days only Google and Wikipedia can find her.

If you aren't familiar with mid-20th century pop literature, Betty MacDonald was a phenomenon.  Her first book, The Egg and I (Yeah, I bet you thought that name only belonged to a restaurant franchise!) came out the year the war ended  and sold a million copies in less than a year.  It has the single greatest dedication I have ever read (To my Sister Mary, who always believed I can do anything she puts her mind to) and some seventy years later, it's still good.  Not flawless, but very, very good.

The story is simple.  Betty Bard is raised in a family of fascinating people and learns her mother's guiding principle for a good marriage is, "whither thou goest, I will go."   When she was twenty, Betty married Bob, an insurance salesman twelve years older than herself.  Sometime around the honeymoon Bob told Betty he had a dream: instead of selling insurance, he wanted to farm chickens and sell their eggs.  Following her mother's dicta, Betty followed her husband to start a chicken ranch on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington.

Now farming is a hard life, no matter what you raise or who you are. It takes a lot of physical effort,  the chores never end and you can't count on a good result.  It's a lot harder if you weren't raised in a farm family, like Betty wasn't.  It gets really hard when little things like electricity and running water are missing and it's darn near impossible if, like Betty, you live for the Great Indoors, Office Jobs and Paved Streets.  Betty loved the glorious natural beauty of the area (she cites one profane, patriotic soul who insisted "Every #$*&!! thing in this @#$#*&!! place is purty!") but loathed the back-breaking housework, the farm hours and the rotten, mean-spirited, foolish, quarrelsome chickens who behaved for Bob but pecked at and died on her.  Bob insisted Betty should perform autopsies on the stricken birds and keep records of her findings but he didn't like Betty's "cause of death" diagnoses like  Suicide, Eczema, and Chicken Pox.  After four years, Betty was finished.  She packed up their two girls, moved back in with her mother and filed for divorce.

I think it must take a real optimist to begin life over again at the start of the Great Depression but all of the Bards seem to be optimists and many of them became writers.   Betty's mother wrote for publication and her sister Mary had a string of successful books.  During the Depression Betty worked at a bundle of jobs (memorialized in one of her other books, Anyone Can Do Anything), caught and managed to survive tuberculosis (recounted in The Plague and I which is far funnier than it sounds) and remarried, just in time for America's entry into World War II.   One night at a party Mary told a publisher that her sister had a book finished and ready for publication (a HUGE lie) and Betty came up with a pitch for The Egg and I overnight to satisfy the publisher.  The book was a smash, staying on the best-seller list for three years and spawning a Hollywood movie, or rather a chain of them, but that only led to more problems.

Of all the personalities Betty threw into The Egg and I, none are more memorable than the Kettle family who lived down the road from Betty and Bob in Puget Sound's version of Tobacco Road.  Mrs. Kettle may once have cherished the hope of living a gentler, more gracious life but she married Mr. Kettle, whom Bob described as "a lazy, lisping, S*B."  The Kettles lived in squalor, their animals lived in squalor and the house was falling around their ears but everyone thrived on Mrs. Kettle's brilliant cooking and her general philosophy of, "I itch, so I scratch; so what!"  Betty maintained the Kettles were creations of her imagination along with the rest of The Egg & I's characters but a local family named Bishop believed she was satirizing them, so they sued.  (By then Universal Pictures had started a series of Ma & Pa Kettle pictures and the Bishops may have been mad about the unflattering descriptions or they have believed they deserved royalties).  The Bishops lost.

 Betty wrote one more adult book (Onions in the Stew) about her life on Vashon Island plus her string of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books but died far too soon at the age of 50 and half a century later, her books are discussed by half a handful of individuals who probably remember their mothers reading the books aloud to them (my mother certainly did.)  Perhaps that's reasonable; I'm not sure.  The book's not perfect.  Betty's observations on the Native-Americans in her area are (at best) dated and at worst, downright offensive.  I also know humor is the red-headed stepchild of the literary world and humorists, like Rodney Dangerfield, "Get No Respect."  I know some best-selling books are not great and don't really deserve to be remembered and some wonderful writers like Zora Neale Hurston live and die in obscurity and it takes a miracle like Alice Walker's article to resurrect their literary reputations.  Life's not fair.  Still, I will re-read The Egg and I and Betty's other adult books for her glowing descriptions of the Pacific Northwest, for her affectionate view of the world and because she makes me laugh.  That's what I expect of a humorous book and all I'm really due.  When the book's done well, that is more than enough.

In praise of a class-filled society

It seems half the world loves Julian Fellowes.  A few mangy souls, like me, remember when he played Kilwillie in "Monarch of the Glen" but once he penned the screenplay to "Gosford Park" his acting days were numbered and his creation of of Downton Abbey and elevation to the House of Lords probably mean we'll never see him in character again.  Oh well.  A wise person once wrote that authors, at their best, seem to pull back the curtain for their readers and introduce us to a world we wouldn't otherwise know.   What Julian Fellowes reveals is the inner workings of the British class system and if you think that's a thing of the past, you need to pick up his novel Snobs.   As of 2009 at least, the aristocracy still owns the most boring, exclusive club in town and the excluded are still trying to get in.

The plot is a simple one:  Edith Lavery is one of those very pretty British girls with a weathy, untitled father and a mother with social ambitions.  She makes the acquaintance of Charles Broughton, an unmarried earl and heir to the Marquis of Uckfield.  (That's mid-rank in British nobility, lower than a duke but well over the knights, viscouts and barons.)  He's attracted to her, and she's been taught from birth to be attracted to his status and every thing that goes with it.   It's all very exciting for Edith until after the wedding when she realizes she's married into a rather insular, well-intentioned but dull group of people who live the same type of lives.  Once the novelty of being referred to as Lady Broughton wears off, Edith is ripe for some distraction.  This arrives (unfortunately) in the form of a good-looking actor whose film is being shot at Broughton Hall.  Edith falls from grace, then (socially) on her face when she learns that being an actor's bit-on-the-side doesn't carry the same social cache as a well-married countess.  Edith has to consider what her priorities really are and who will make her happy.   Now that that's aside, here's what Fellowes says is true of the blue-bloods, if you haven't guessed it already.

1. Dreadful nicknames.  To the rest of the world, they may be Lord This-a-Whatchit and Lady Whoosis but amongst their own kind, the elite are known by the dreadful nicknames they picked up ages ago, at school.  Knowing and using those nicknames marks you as a member of the Inner Circle.  Imagine declaring your real friendship for a middle-aged Marchioness by continually referring to her as "Googie".   Yeah, that works.

2. Hideous decorating skills. Part of the nice bit about being an aristocrat is supposed to be the generations your family has possessed titles, houses and the ability/money to furnish said houses but according to Julian Fellows, some of the nobility don't feel really noble unless they're surrounded by all the souvenirs their ancestors picked up through the ages.  If Lord Uckley's great-great-grandsire sent home a frozen husky before he went off adventuring with Robert Falcon Scott, well the husky still stands mute and stuffed by the fireplace today even if the taxidermist didn't do that great a job and the moths and cinders have made hash of the husky's coat.  I'd love to see what Extreme Clutter could do with a house like that.


3. Questionable hospitality.  I live in an area where every person is supposed to be hospitable to house guests, even if your home is a rented single-wide trailer.  We create the best meals we can afford, serve the guests the tastiest parts of the chicken and put them to sleep in the most comfortable room in the house.   Not so in England, not if you're staying with nobility.  This part, I'll have to quote:

"I have been shown into bathrooms that could just about manage a cold squirt of brown water, bedrooms with doors that don't shut, blankets like tissue and pillows like rocks.  I have driven an hour cross-country to lunch with some grand relations of my father, who gave me one sausage, two small potatoes and twenty-eight peas."

Not what you expected, right?

Fellowes goes on to say that not every member of nobility makes their friends suffer like this, nor are they all idiots.   They're just people who've been raised differently and if they're not the brightest kids in school, they can still become decent, loyal friends.  In the end they're like the rest of us, trying to do their best, even when they make a right mess of everything.  So try Snobs if you want something frivolous and fun that has just a touch of class.

At a cold, wide spot in the road

The mercury's dropping tonight and most Southerners I know hate the cold.  We're starting school later, turning on space-heaters, taping shut doors and doing every last thing we can think of to avoid exposure to frost.   Well, some Southerners can't handle cold.  We can tolerate endless heat, corrupt politicians and bad manners from visiting outsiders but our homes and our lives aren't made for frigid temps and sub-zero windchills.  So we check our weather apps and complain about the artic blasts because most Southerns prefer not to suffer in silence.   For cold tolerance and stoic behavior you have to travel to the plains where I grew up.   Kansans have made an art form out of endurance.   Maybe that's why William Inge's prairie characters work so well in his plays, especially "Bus Stop".  These folk know how to deal with a cold, dark night.

If you've seen the movie Bus Stop (and if you haven't, don't bother) you may think this is another Marilyn Monroe vehicle but the play is not.  Bus Stop is really about feeling cold and lonely  and there are few places as cold and lonely at a diner in the middle of Kansas.  Some of the characters wear their loneliness like a uniform and they accept it as part of their being.   To others, it's an ache they want to ease or medicate with booze.  All of the characters in Bus Stop are familiar with isolation, from the grass-widowhood of Grace, to Bo's orphaned life on his ranch and all of these unattached people seek love as an antidote for their solitude.

But love is a questionable entity as the characters in Bus Stop understand it.  The much-used Cherie wonders if, "You hear all about love when you are a kid and just take it for granted that such a thing really exists.  Maybe you have to find out for yourself it doesn't."  Dr. Lyman comments, "How defiantly we pursue love, like it was an inheritance due" but he points out that love requires a person to think of someone besides him or herself and many don't have that ability.  During the stay in the diner, each of the characters in Bus Stop learns whether he or she has the ability and chance to be that generous and not all of them do.  Nevertheless, it is clear they are loved as characters.  The playwright gives each of them a resolution that fits.

So when you're on the road some night, in a place that progress forgot, try stopping at the local diner.  Fast-foods franchises can't qualify as diners and the menu must include pie.  Chances are you'll like the waitress and if she smiles it's because she means it; if she doesn't, she'll still try to give you decent service.   The prices will be reasonable and if the food's not on a heart-healthy diet, it will satisfy your hunger and warm you.  If you're out on your own, it will still be all right because you won't be completely alone. And that's good to know when you're living life in a wide, cold spot in the road.

A story closer to home

I'm usually a lukewarm John Grisham fan.  I was a youngish paralegal when he hit it big with The Firm, but I found too many holes in the next few legal thrillers to enjoy them much.  I'm too much of a southern girl not to love A Time to Kill and I like some of his non-legal stories.   I love what he did for the Oxford American.  All in all, you could say there are writers I usually like more but that's not true today. Today, I found out about Gray Mountain and this evening, I read the book.   I had to because this Grisham thriller touches a field close to home.   This is his book about coal.

For those who don't know, coal generates a lot of the USA's electricity.  Right now, it supplies about thirty-nine percent, more than any other single source, and that's way down from what it used to be.  Coal mining is a big, tough industry and it has a huge impact where I live.  People have jobs and incomes  here that they probably wouldn't have except for coal.  On the other hand, the toll mining takes on a human body is scary.  Even with safety precautions, mining is a dangerous, physically demanding job and the people who do this work for years sometimes get injured badly.   It's not unusual for a miner, still in his prime, to have undergone multiple surgical procedures for torn shoulder injuries, messed up knees or bulging discs in his neck or back.  Some miners also end up with a lung disease that comes from exposure to coal mine dust. The dust settles into their lungs and creates scars that impair their breathing.  The disease, known as Black Lung, often doesn't appear until after the miner has retired and there's no cure or effective treatment for it, short of a lung transplant.  I know this because I work with folks that help eligible miners receive benefits.

Grisham writes about the coal dust in Grey Mountain and what it does to the miners and their families.  He also writes about the environmental problems caused by mining and some high-risk litigation adventures but his best passages, as always, are about working for "real people".  These are the people at the center of every lawsuit, some good, some bad, but usually all overwhelmed souls.   They don't trust anyone completely, including their own counsel, but they need help so they feel their way along, hoping it will come out all right, a thing they and their attorney know doesn't always happen.  In turn, their attorneys try to do the best they can for the clients, spent more time worrying than they like to admit and work for less money than most of them expected back in law school.   It's the life of a plaintiff's attorney and that's what Grisham knows best.
 
There's the usual plot of the youthful, in-over-the-head lawyer who gets to see some unexpected sides of the law and if the critics complain about that part of Grisham's formula,  well, it still sells books.   But if you read Gray Mountain, keep an eye on the background, on the small-town folks who (as George Bailey said) do most of the living and dying in the Appalachian Mountains.  They're the real heroes of this book and they sell their lives to mine coal.

An original voice: I Capture the Castle.

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink."  So begins seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, the narrator of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle.  You've got to admit that's an interesting opening line.  Only eight words and  you know something unusual must be going on because who sits in a sink to write?

Well, Cassandra does and she has a good reason to since that position catches the last of the daylight.  The Mortmain family doesn't have electricity.  They're a 1930's family living in a medieval castle and they use lamps and candles after sunset.  If they sound romantic and eccentric, I Capture the Castle suggests that normalcy may be something only  people with an income can afford. The Mortmains might still be eccentric under regular circumstances but right now they're too poor to be normal.

Once Mr. Mortmain wrote a successful book and their income was such that eccentricity was more acceptable but that was before his leviathan-sized writer's block moved in.  Since then the family has been making do on his ever-decreasing royalties, the money his second wife brings in from artist modeling jobs and what the family gets from selling the castle's furnishings.  (Not really their property).  It is obvious to Cassandra and her elder sister, Rose, that they must shore up the family income.  So they decide Cassandra will teach herself to write novels and Rose must marry a rich husband.

If that sounds a trifle Jane Austenish, well it should; the alternatives for a grown woman to earn an lving in England had improved some between the early 1800's and 1900's but in both eras most women made their futures through marriage. Rose's wish for a suitable suitor is granted but there is where the troubles really begin.

Dodie Smith talks about the relative meanings of wealth in this book as well as distractions, creativity and, of course, the question of love.  She does it all through the original voice of Cassandra Mortmain, that precocious child with breezy descriptive powers and acute insight into people.  Through Cassandra we see the characters of ICTC move into realized dimensions: the father, embittered by years of frustration and despair; the bohemian stepmother whose care for a husband, a family and herself is creating a wall of exhaustion; the love-lorn stable boy is there, as well at the desperate girls and then the set of brothers who may make or ruin the fortunes of this family.  None of them are good or evil, just caught in circumstances beyond their control. 

The book is loaded with as much charm as you should expect from the woman who created A Hundred and One Dalmatians but don't expect any split-haired villainess or talking family of pets to take over the scene.  There are the Mortmains, the people they care about and an English summer.  That is all the charm any reader needs. 

When the backstory is even better.

In May of 1959, a musical opened on Broadway that became an landmark show.  With "Gypsy", Styne, Sondheim and Laurents created a terrific play with songs that have become standards and a role actresses fight to play like actors fight to portray King Lear.  The show was loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee which were, according to her sister, pretty loose with the truth already.   What people see on the stage is a compelling, entertaining, occasionally disturbing story of show business and family.  Karen Abbott researched the lives of Miss Lee, her sister, June Havoc and their mother Rose Thompson Hovick for her book, American Rose and showed that the musical barely scratched the surface.

If survivors are worthy subjects of study, then college courses should be dedicated to the Hovick sisters.  Their very identities are a mystery.  They were born in the northwest during the first years of the twentieth century's second decade but their mother, Rose Thompson Hovick  forged so many birth certificates with different birth dates and names that neither woman could be sure of those details later on in life.  What their mother was sure of was her vision: both of her girls should be on stage, with the youngest in the spotlight.  Pushed, coached and pilfered for by Mama, both girls were professional performers before either of them turned five.

It is not surprising that June and Gypsy had difficult childhood.  Besides the chaos that comes from living on the road, they grew up with the stress of being the family bread-winners, particularly June.  And, even though they were raised by the stage mother from hell, Gypsy and June had limited futures as child performers.  First, despite coaching and her own hard work, the elder girl did not have the talent of her younger sister.  June was a gifted dancer and star of the family act, on and off stage.  Also, the girls went to work during the final years of vaudeville, where groups of entertainers performed live in local theaters.   As films replaced vaudeville, those entertainers either drifted to the coasts in search of work or got out of the business.  Finally, time was not on their side.  Every day the Hovick girls spent on the circuit as child performers was one day less of the time they had as cute little girls.  Eventually they would become adults and want lives of their own.  When they did, the conflicts got worse.

The girls had many things in common.  First and always was their mother, who saw everyone as either someone she could manipulate or an enemy she had to vanquish.  With Mama came a host of secrets and the sisters learned to work together to avoid  the woman, keep her secrets and minimize her attempts at blackmail or murder.  (At least two questionable deaths are tied to Madame Rose, a hotel proprietor when June was about 13 and in 1937 a woman named Ginny Augustin who boarded with Rose.)  Second, they both had great intelligence and drive.  Neither Gypsy nor June had any formal education to speak of but both became well-read, self-educated women as well as acclaimed entertainers, published writers and shrewd business women.  They also had each other, although that wasn't easy.  Because of their mother's clear favoritism, the girls were competitors as well as allies and neither could let that contest go: Gypsy, because she had been belittled and shunted aside in favor of her sister and June because her hard work and drive in the theatre were usually overshadowed by Gypsy's claim to fame as a stripper.  Yet, they could depend on each other.  When June was opening in the musical, "Pal Joey", she turned to Gypsy to help pull her costumes together and Gypsy dropped everything to help.   Then Gypsy sat in the opening-night audience and cried so hard, she stopped her sister's show.  In turn, June  threatened the production of Gypsy with litigation white it was still in development until part of the musical was rewritten in her favor. 

Karen Abbott trace the history of the Minksy brothers in this book, those famous burlesque producers that helped make Gypsy Rose Lee a legend, and included interviews with the late June Havoc and Gypsy's son, Eric Preminger in her research but the book's ultimate focus is the incredible Gypsy Rose Lee.  In many ways, Gypsy is a harbinger in American entertainment, always reinventing and representing herself and her act.  As a promoter, she eclipses Madonna and Lady Gaga and leaves Jayne Mansfield in the dust.   Other performers incorporate sex into their act to get attention; Gypsy went the other way, using comic timing  and intelligence to turn her strip act into a career where she kept her clothes on.  She and her sister started in one century and hung around long enough to become part of American Theatrical History.  Not bad for two little girls with drive and a cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs Mama.


I've had the pleasure of reading Erik Peminger's memoir My G-String Mother: At Home and Backstage With Gypsy Rose Lee as well as June Havoc's Early Havoc and More Havoc .  I recommend them all if you are interested in learning more about these fascinating sisters. 

What do you say about a classic?

There's a shiver I get when I first pick up certain books.  Reading is almost an autonomic function for me and nothing is more inviting than the site of a new, fat book but every so often I will pick up a book, read a few pages and get the "Aha" kind of shiver.   It's a reflex of recognition, when my eyes fix on some indefinable thing that says this book is really something special.  This is one of those books that seems to walk and talk under its own power and will become a beloved friend.  This book will transcend its time and be loved by people for centuries.  This one is a classic.  Other people have already awarded that title to The Bridge to Terabithia but I didn't know that until I picked up the book.   The shiver told me everything.

For one thing, it's so universal.  Every kid that ever went to school has lived in one of two camps.  Either you have been the new kid in class, like Leslie Burke or you are Jess Aarons, who has never been the new kid.  Either status has its own brand of hell.  The new kid is supposed to move from the spotlight of introduction and meld seamlessly into a group of strangers who aren't exactly welcoming.  It's like trying to tap dance with a load of dynamite in your arms: any missed step brings disaster.  On the other hand, the established kids have reason to fear this unwilling stranger.  It's hard enough to find your own place in the class pecking order without some new kid waltzing in to take your place as the best singer or math whiz kid or fastest runner in class.  Why make friends with a jerk like that?   Still, that's what Leslie and Jess do once these two opposites meet.  The rural boy and the girl with well-off writers for parents find common ground and develop the kind of friendship every lonely person needs to get through childhood.

Friendship is the central theme and gift of Terabithia; how caring for each other improves us in ways we could not master on our own.  By himself, Jess is a boy who can't see his family members, his classmates or anyone else as an individual with personal burdens and sorrows. In all fairness, no one else seems to see Jess either, except for a kind-hearted music teacher.  Leslie's friendship changes everything in Jess's life.  Suddenly there is someone to plot and plan with, someone who understands and values him. With Leslie's perspective to guide him, Jess sees the world differently.  The entire planet becomes a bigger, better place where Jess learns to master his fears.  All of this is threatened when their friendship ends prematurely.

I understand many parents have a problem with Terabithia because it deals with one of the saddest, most terrifying issues anyone has to face.  Some parents even fight to take this book off the shelves for that reason.  I understand their concern but I can't agree with them. Because Katharine Paterson captured the pain and conflicted, surrealistic stages of early grief in this book, The Bridge to Terabithia should be read by children, hopefully before they face such an event and those feelings on their own.  Grief is a difficult process and death a fearful event.  Terabithia eases some of the fear associated with these as it teaches that friendship has a way of improving a person even after the friendship has ended.

That's the final miracle of first friendships, how they open us up to new people who will care about us in the future.  It prepares a bridge, like the one to Terabithia, that we cross as we recognize the connection that turns a stranger becomes a friend.  It's almost an electrical impulse, this shock of recognition.  Like the shiver when you first read a classic.

I want a Year in Provence

Ok it's January, cold, bleak and raining.   The decorations have been packed away, the weight from party nibbles has been packed on and I'm uncomfortably aware of  the low balance in the checking account and the high one on the credit card.  I don't want to sound ungrateful after all of these winter festivities but I think I need a vacation.   I want to go someplace warm where life's pace moves with the seasons and nothing moves too fast.  Someplace where living well is more than the best revenge.  Oh heck, I want A Year in Provence.

A Year in Provence is one of those miracles that hit the publishing business about twenty years ago.  Picture this: British author and advertising executive, Peter Mayle, accumulates enough money to retire early and move into an old, stone, farm house in the South of France.  Living there, he finds, is both less relaxing and more fun than he ever anticipated.  He writes an account of the strange and wonderful things he finds there (under the heading of strange include a neighbor who expects him to cook a fox; the expert who teaches him how to handicap a goat race; the winter gales that are cited as an affirmative defense in criminal cases and most of his visitors from England. Wonderful things include the light, every meal, every glass of wine, his wife's patient optimism and the way everything seems to work out though never as expected).   The book is published and becomes an international best seller.   The poor man now has more money than God but  no privacy because of all the tourists and book groupies beating a path to his door.  He has to move to New York for some peace of mind.  (Irony was created for situations like this.)

The thing is, A Year In Provence is about how to enjoy life as well as where to enjoy it.   Mayle moved to France and, until the tsunami of popularity hit, enjoyed every minute there, even with frozen plumbing and a construction crew that demolished his kitchen in a day but took a year to rebuild it.  Yes, he got frustrated on occasion but nothing was worth staying angry about.  When the local butcher gave him an unrequested lecture on how to cook Pebronata, Mayle didn't tap his watch and get impatient; he relaxed and enjoyed the butcher's performance.  When a rug or wine salesman tried to interest him in a pricy product, Mayle understands a salesman's job depends on getting the customer to spend handsomely and the final choice to buy is his.  He even learns to relax about the house improvements that take a year to complete.  It will get done eventually and getting angry does nothing except raise the victim's blood pressure.

As I said, I could use a vacation and when this column is finished, I'll travel to the Luberon, if only in my mind.  The temperature will be warm, the roads dusty and the light will explain why Impressionists painted outdoors.  I'll stop at one of the little roadside cafes and park my espadrilles under some quiet table where I can watch the old men playing at boules.   The waiter will pour a glass of the  vin ordinaire and serve the bread and tapenade that goes to each customer while I consider the menu.   Am I cold?  Am I tired?  Don't be ridiculous.   I'm on holiday, lost somewhere in Provence.