First Lines: January 2024 edition

Some of my parents' books, 2012

 

Below are the first lines of the four books I finished reading in January.

 

 

Book 1

Prologue: What Is America?

The American novelist and literary critic Ralph Ellison once remarked that, “Whenever we as Americans have faced serious crises we have returned to fundamentals; this, in brief, is what I have tried to do.”  Me too.  

 

Book 2

This book was born on a cold, drizzly, late spring day when I clambered over the split-rail cedar fence that surrounds my pasture and made my way through wet woods to the modest frame house where Joe Rantz lay dying.

 

 

Book 3

Serene was a word you could put to Brooklyn, New York.  Especially in the summer of 1912. 

 

 

Book 4

The Mercy Workshop

There are times in our lives – scary, unsettling times – when we know that we need help or answers but we’re not sure what kind, or even what the problem or question is.

 

 

The titles and authors revealed:

 

 

Book 1

First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, by Thomas E. Ricks.  416 pages.  Published 2020.

An interesting overview of the first four US presidents' relationship to classical (Greek, Roman) thought, and how that relationship contributed to the formation of the Constitution.  You'd think it would be a stodgy, slow read, but I found it quite engaging and easy to read.  At the end, Ricks put a 10-point list of “what to do now”. 

 

Book 2

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Daniel James Brown, 416 pages,  Published 2013.

 

This is a book about the 9-man rowing team (“crew”) that made it from underdog status to Olympic competition.  I will read a sports-oriented book only if it is chosen by book club.  And even then, I might not read it.  I did finish this one, but it was sometimes a struggle.  The personal story of the Univ. of Washington team members and how the Nazis used the Berlin Olympics as a propaganda tool were for me the interesting parts of the story. 

 

This book has been made into a movie, which is well made, but superficial compared to the book (as is usually the case with book vs movie).  The movie glosses over most of the heartbreaking story of Joe Rantz’s youth, which had a profound effect on his ability to work as part of a team.  The movie also ignores how Joseph Goebbels and Leni Riefenstahl capitalized on the Berlin Olympics as a propaganda tool. 

 

For me the most fascinating part of the story is the observation train.  On the day of the rowing team meets, a train ran alongside the water, with seats facing the water, allowing spectators to see the race in its entirety.  Pretty cool, yes?

Some boys in a boat

 

Book 3

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith.  493 pages.  Published 1943.

This book tells a coming-of-age story; the description of poverty is overwhelming.  The reading was slow going.  Wondering if it is me, because Boys in the Boat was also a slow read for me.   I read it for the other book club.  

 

 

Book 4

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott.  192 pages.  Published 2017.

This book was what I needed to read at that particular moment.  Here’s one quote:

Singing is breath that is larger than yourself, so it joins you with space, with community, with other realms and our deepest inside places. You are joining your strand to everyone else’s, weaving something with the whole, and this extends the community outward into a force bigger than itself.

 

And that is exactly how I feel about singing.

Singing fruit
Art at the Northside Common Ministries food pantry

Ring the bells that still can ring

All you life-loving folks who are celebrating the legislation in Texas, go ahead and rejoice that you’ve gotten your way.  Sing your hallelujahs.

Rejoice.

Your approval of vigilante action against women reminds me of the East German Stasi.  Look over your shoulder often because people are watching.  Be sure to turn your neighbor in, and collect your money.  Betrayal’s the name of the game for you now. If you don’t like your neighbor you can do something about it now. Anyone can betray another with a kiss and collect 30 pieces of silver.  

Betray.

If you seriously wanted to prevent abortions, you would pass universal health care in a big hurry.  You would make contraception free.  You would make good prenatal care free.  You would extend the child care tax credit so that it could be at least a little easier to raise a child. (And you would not send unvaccinated children into schools without masks like lambs to the slaughter.)  

Slaughter.

My friends know my husband and I have three lovely, wonderful, grown children.  What they probably don’t know is that I had four pregnancies.  Here's how the first one went. Missing my period, I went to our HMO, where they did a pregnancy test.  I was about eight weeks pregnant.  But all I can remember is that the doctor shouted at the cowering staff.  He seemed very angry.  Dr. Angry. He examined me, told me nothing, and got me out of there before I used up too much of his time.

Shout.  

A few days after my initial doctor visit, I found myself bleeding through pads at a rate of several per hour.  I called Dr. Angry, who told us to go to the emergency room at our assigned hospital.  We waited several hours in the overcrowded ER waiting room.  The bathroom was disgusting, filthy, with the trash can overflowing. I contributed much to the pile of trash. Soon I ran out of pads. I was not in pain, but I could not manage all the blood.  

Bleed.

Remembering this makes me shiver.  I did not really understand what was happening to me.  My main focus was the overwhelming bleeding. So much uncontrollable blood.

Shiver.

Once I finally got out of the waiting room and in to see a doctor (not Dr. Angry), things were a little better, although I continue to bleed profusely.  Every staff person treated me with kindness and professionalism.  Away from the ER waiting room, the hospital was quiet and clean.  They did some kind of test (a sonogram?), and explained that there was no evidence of a fetus.  The doctors explained that I would need to go under anesthesia to have a procedure, essentially to empty out my uterus.  Okay.  I prayed.  I felt the nearness of God as they wheeled me into the surgery room.

Empty.

Afterwards, I remember lying in a hospital bed, recovering from the procedure.  They had given me a drug to make my uterus contract to be sure all the detritus would be expelled.  That was painful.  Then a staff person, not a doctor, perhaps a nurse, but probably not, entered.  This person asked me, “Did you want this pregnancy?”  I sobbed and could not answer.  I only nodded.  Yes, I wanted this pregnancy.

Sob.

I did not realize until later that the question was probably designed to explore whether I had tried to abort the pregnancy on my own.  I have no idea if that person was asking for her own judgment of me, or if my answer became part of my medical history.  A miscarriage looks very much like a self-abortion attempt.  I can’t think of a way to distinguish one from another.  

Judge.

As far as I can remember, I was offered no counseling.  I can’t remember how much more time I spent in the hospital.  I recovered at our apartment, in the loving care of my husband.  I had told everyone at work about my pregnancy, and now I had the embarrassment of telling them about my miscarriage.  I asked myself what I had done wrong that caused the miscarriage.  Was it that time I dove into the swimming pool?  Was it something I ate?  Something propelled me to place the blame on myself.   In our culture, it must be the woman who is at fault.

Blame.

Every person who helps a woman undergoing a miscarriage will now be at risk of the new judicial system delivered by the Stasi of your state.  (Yes, vigilantism is likely coming in your state, too.) This also puts at risk the woman who is miscarrying.  Will that woman dare to ask for help?  Take a bleeding miscarrying pregnant woman to the hospital and you could be accused.  

Accuse.

Tonight when I try to pray, I will think of the women who need an abortion, for any and all the reasons a woman needs an abortion.  I will think of the dreadful Texas Stasi culture that this law creates.  But most of all I will think about the women who will have miscarriages and those around them who will be falsely accused under this so very, very pro-life law.

Vote.

We asked for signs 

the signs were sent: 

the birth betrayed 

the marriage spent 

Yeah, the widowhood 

of every government -- 

signs for all to see. 

….

Ring the bells that still can ring 

Forget your perfect offering 

There is a crack in everything 

That's how the light gets in. 

- Leonard Cohen, Anthem

Hope and Grieving
by Matt Sesow

Physics lesson

Welcome to my TED Talk.

Force equals mass times acceleration.

Wear your seatbelt.

Every object in a state of uniform motion will remain in that state of motion unless an external force acts on it.

Do not text while driving.  Just don’t.

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Leave a good distance between your car and the vehicle in front of you.

Newton’s Laws of Motion are true and cannot be repealed.

Do not, do not, do not drive while under the influence of a mind-altering substance.  Whether that’s alcohol, pot, antihistamine, opioids, or your mother-in-law’s comments, just don’t.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

* * * * * * * *

Please do not tell my mother about this.  I will tell her at the right time.

On an average day in the US, there are about 18,000 car crashes.  On Monday, I was in one of them.  On an average day in the US, there are about 90 fatal car crashes.  On Monday, I was not one of them. I walked away without a scratch.  Just achy, and very, very grateful.

The force with which the car hit me (from behind) felt stunning and sudden.  But the airbag did not deploy, so maybe it was not that large a force, in the grand scheme of Newton’s Physics Rules.  It felt pretty damn forceful, and it pushed my car into the opposing lane of traffic.  That lane was empty, so I did not get hit twice.  The other driver was not hurt physically, at least as far as I saw.

One of the few photos I have of my car intact.
Mine is the maroon car, third from the front.

One more photo, from back in February, moving
my son back home.  This is such a great car for me.

I do not think that God intended for this crash to happen, nor do I think that a car crash is a good thing.  But I do see some of the hand of God in this:  the hand of God that created the human ingenuity and the political will to invent and implement: 

·      seat belts

·      car bumpers

·      headrests/whiplash preventers

·      fire departments with large brooms to sweep up glass and metal shards

·      taxpayers who pay local taxes to support a trained Emergency Medical Team, trained police force, and trained fire department, with adequate equipment to handle car crashes

·      technology to make 911 calls possible

·      a church full of people to pray for me and the other driver

·      a gas tank that does not automatically explode on impact

·      windows, through which an observer in the nearby school could see the whole thing happen and who then came to me before any emergency officials arrived, to check on me and give me a hug, and waited around to give a statement to police.

 

Thoroughly smashed up. 

* * * * * * * *

A few other observations

O Best Beloved, do not become too fond of thy car.  You never know when someone will smash it to smithereens. 

After the crash, I could not stop shaking.  My husband told me afterwards that the shaking was probably an element of being in shock. 

I found out that the fire department was not particularly necessary for this incident, but the fire station was in a training period.  So this car crash was used for practice.  You done good, fire fighters!   Never have the shards from a car crash been swept up more quickly and thoroughly.

A friend tells me that air bags do not usually deploy in a rear-end collision.  Which makes that seat belt even more important.  Please refer to my TED Talk above.

It still looks pretty good from the front.

But it's all jumbled up in the back.

First Lines: July-August 2018 edition

I bought meself these roses to cheer meself up.

My reading during July and August centered on lamentation, with a smattering of redemption.  I was privileged to read some excellent writing on some difficult topics.  Here are the first lines of books I finished.

Book 1

How lonely sits the city

    that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

    she that was great among the nations!

She that was a princess among the provinces

    has become a vassal.

Book 2

Miss Jane Neal met her maker in the early morning mist of Thanksgiving Sunday.  It was pretty much a surprise all round.

Book 3

Born in 1984: Masha

On the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Masha’s grandmother, a rocket scientist, took Masha to the Church of St. John the Warrior in Central Moscow to be baptized.

Book 4

The winter had become a test of endurance and patience, especially for those living in northern Wisconsin. 

Book 5

Higher Ground

I wasn’t prepared to meet a condemned man.  In 1983, I was a twenty-three-year-old student at Harvard Law School working in Georgia on an internship, eager and inexperienced and worried that I was in over my head.  I had never seen the inside of a maximum-security prison – and had certainly never been to death row.  When I learned that I would be visiting this prisoner alone, with no lawyer accompanying me, I tried not to let my panic show.

* * * * * *

Titles and authors revealed:

Book 1

Lamentations, by Jeremiah.  ©586–520 BCE.

It is customary among some Jews to read the book of Lamentations during the period between some fast I never heard of and the fast of the 9^th of Av (which memorializes the destruction of The Temple).  Lamentations seems appropriate for us today, too.

Book 2

Still Life, by Louise Penny © 2005.  Read for the second time, for book club.  I still wonder if the painting that is so central to the story would be actually possible to paint. 

Book 3

The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, by Masha Gessen. © 2017. Very well-written.  Amazon says this is a 527-page book, but I read it in 5 days, although that was partly because it was a kindle version borrowed from the library, and it threatened to disappear from my reader if I did not truck on through it. 

The subject matter is unsettling and alarming.  Anyone who thinks they admire Putin and his Russia needs to read this book. It includes the stories of several people living through the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Putin’s regime. 

It also includes a Cliff-notes version of Hannah Arendt’s explanation of how totalitarian regimes employ terror: It substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.” Robbed of his individuality and therefore the ability to interact meaningfully with others, she wrote, man became profoundly lonely, which made him the perfect creature and subject of the totalitarian state.

I wonder if Arendt’s notions about loneliness relate to Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam.  I have that on my list to read. 

Book 4

On The River (Bassville Stories Book 2) by Melissa Westemeier © 2018.

I loved escaping to the riverbanks of the Wissapaw River in Wisconsin, to read about the lives of the fine people of the town of Bassville.  The machinations of Maw made me laugh out loud.  The novel includes a just treatment of people’s reactions to a difficult life situation.

Book 5

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption, by Bryan Stevenson.  © 2014.  What can I say?  Every American should read this book.  (I read it for book club.  It was helpful to discuss the book.) The stories here are gripping and important, and Stevenson tells them well.  He leads us through our justice system, which is no more “color-blind” now than it was in 1980 or 1940 or 1880.  Can we find “liberty and justice for all” in our nation?  And yet, in spite of our brutal history, Stevenson offers a note of redemption. Mercy is an undeserved offering of grace and forgiveness, and Stevenson finds mercy in the middle of terrorism and strife and injustice.  Read This Book.