Tag Archives: short stories

Snow, rocks, and stories.

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I’m still in Colorado, a little longer than planned, because of a change in my airline ticket; I decided to rebook with a different airline for my return trip, to reduce the risk of being affected by the recent spate of flight cancellations and chaos at airports. My new reservation is for a later date.

The family here is happy to have me a couple more days, and I’m quite content to be pampered by the family generally, to have extended cuddling, reading and game time, and two outings I’d otherwise have missed. Plus, we watched the TinTin movie together tonight. Laddie and I sat together scrunched into a recliner, with the kitten Clyde occasionally jumping on the back and trying to get us to play.

It was an action packed film, of the sword fighting, metal crashing and body-flinging sort, and little Clara worried at times for the safety of Snowy and TinTin especially, but she was too brave to want to leave and go to bed.

The three boys are very fond of their collection of TinTin books, and enjoyed seeing favorite characters and story elements recombined in the movie. Last week, shortly after Kate arrived here, I found her animatedly reading the Spanish version of this rare tale of Tin Tin en el Congo to Raj, found on the shelf here. I don’t think I’ve ever read an entire story of TinTin from beginning to end, but all my children became fond of them over the years, and we have become a multigenerational TinTin fan club.

Yesterday I went with Soldier and the boys on one of their favorite short hikes, to the Siamese Twins rocks up the mountains from Colorado Springs. The boys have favorite places to scramble there, and I found plants my Seek app was able to identify: Colorado Pinon, Utah Juniper, and Rocky Mountain Juniper.

Rocky Mountain Juniper

Soldier pointed out to me that you can see Pikes Peak through the gap between the Twins.

We woke this morning to a new, thick blanket of snow, much more than had fallen last week. I actually helped Joy and Liam to shovel the driveway clear, and then Soldier and I took a nice walk up the hill where the trees are tall and thick.

In the afternoon Joy and I took the boys to the neighborhood hill that is most famous for good sledding. Brodie and I made a snowman, and all the boys hiked up and sledded down the several runs for a couple of hours. It was fun to watch them from a place under pines where scattered slushy drops blew down from the trees on to my head. When the sun went down along with the temperature, we went home and ate popcorn.

Every day we spend hours reading aloud, and the boys all read to themselves, too. When Brodie unwrapped Old Yeller on Christmas morning he started in right away and hasn’t stopped. Liam received several volumes in the Redwall series which he is devouring.

This anthology of Christmas stories from Plough, Home for Christmas, has blessed us immensely. Last night while others were cooking dinner, I read “The Christmas Lie,” and could barely finish for choking up. Joy read “The Empty Cup” aloud at the breakfast table this morning; it is a story about a particular “Rachel weeping for her children” at the time of Christ; the Rachel in the story did find comfort. I have also read to the children “The Guest” and “The Chess Player,” both of which are stories of hearts changed by divine Love, so that they can enter into “the Spirit of Christmas.”

In the collection are selections from Henry Van Dyke, Elizabeth Goudge, Madeleine L’Engle, and Pearl S. Buck, in addition to many writers I was not familiar with before. I haven’t read half of them yet, but every one has pleased.

Likely this is my last post from Colorado, this year. By the time I get back to this site, it will be 2023. Dear Readers and Friends: Happy New Year!

In Colorado, the stars above my bed.

Stories and dreams in the night.

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I was slightly embarrassed to tell about my recent story-listening, because of the time of day I’ve chosen for the vicarious experience, of living in India, caught up in the web of dysfunctional families and disordered souls.

It’s when I wake in the middle of the night and am unable to go back to sleep; I find I am not up to praying near as long as my mind might be wakeful, so I listen to stories. I have run through all that’s available of my latest favorite storytellers, and lately settled on a collection by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, because she is very good, I already know that. It won’t do to listen to writing that is likely to annoy me for any number of reasons, in the wee hours.

It’s the sadness of the stories that makes me think they might not be the best fodder for my mind, which I’m trying to lull back to sleep. But — you could say that sad feelings and events play a part in all human stories, and Prawer Jhabvala’s are not dark in a modern way; many people point out the humorous and kind aspects. I won’t try to assess how this author’s point of view differs from others who are skilled at drawing characters and pulling you into their worlds, but many of the stories end suddenly with disappointment or a feeling of hopelessness. She wrote about this:

“I think most of my novels do end on a deep note of pessimism. Shadows seem to be closing in. The final conclusion isn’t that life is wonderful and everything is bright and cheery and in the garden.”

Whether or not you recognize the name of Prawer Jhabvala, you might be very familiar with her work as a screenwriter for Merchant Ivory Productions. From their beginning she worked with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant on more than 20 films, including “Room With a View” and “Howards End,” and adaptations of several of her own novels, such as Heat and Dust, which was the first of her works I ever read, with amazement, quite a while ago.

Her early life was full of drama and suffering. In 1939 Ruth the adolescent fled with her Jewish parents from Germany to Britain, and lived through World War II and the Blitz in England. After the war, when her father learned that 40 members of his family had died during the Holocaust, he took his own life. About this trauma she said, “All my stories have a melancholy undertone. That’s probably why.”

Ruth Prawer married an Indian architect and raised three daughters with him in India. Later she moved to New York and became a U.S. citizen; she died in 2013 at the age of 85. She was a shy and quiet woman, which I imagine contributed to her powers of observation. “I’m more interested in other people than myself.”

I have had only happy dreams since beginning to listen to this collection of her stories, At the End of the Century… until last night. If it weren’t for the dream I had, I wouldn’t try to tell you anything about someone whose writing I hold in such high esteem. And at first I did not connect the dream to my reading material; I just thought it hilarious. But then, thinking about it as I woke, it made me (a little) sad in a way that these very human stories could never do.

The presenting problem of my dream was that I could not find my “favorite emoji” on my phone. I ended up at a big warehouse store where one could browse extensive catalogs of parts that were somehow both physical and digital, from which to concoct one’s own emoji, such as faces that had been “discontinued,” because only the most popular emojis were part of the default options on the apps. The dream ended before I ever managed to restore my old emoji habits, and I’m not sure but I was about to give up and just do without. But which emoji do you think I felt so in need of? The simple “crying face.”

Isn’t it odd, what the mind will do with all that goes into the mix throughout the day (and night) to produce dreams? (For the record, I do not have a favorite emoticon.) Our prayers of Compline and Prayers Before Sleep lead us to pray that God would “quench the flaming arrows of the evil one” and “lull to sleep all our earthly and material reasonings,” that we may be granted “a tranquil sleep, free of every fantasy of Satan.”

Truly, over the last few years when I’ve been living my own story of loss, which might have been full of flaming arrows and bad dreams at any hour of the day or night, I have been well protected from darkness of the spiritual kind. And I do not claim that God gives me my dreams, but they are often quite amusing, the way they capture some crazy truth.

The contrast between Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s nuanced and exquisite writing, with — an emoji? Well, if that’s the best the “forces of evil” can throw against me in the night, I should be grateful. But I also feel amused and insulted, to have waked with those simplistic images and a self-service version of an Apple Store in my thoughts. The whole experience confirms what I just shared yesterday, about being fed up with screens. And of emoticons? I’m considering a boycott!

gulab jamun
Indian sweets called gulab jamun.

 

How knitting is like dying.

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This month our parish women’s book club is reading Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” I finished it this morning, in an old anthology from 1947 that I had kept from our homeschooling years, when twice my late husband and I taught a short story course to our children. That collection is A Treasury of Short Stories edited by Bernardine Kielty. When I closed that volume I opened The Norton Reader, Seventh Edition, to see if it included any Tolstoy stories, but when I saw the title “From Journal of a Solitude,” I continued reading the first few excerpts taken from the book by May Sarton.

Her musings in the first paragraphs were on topics that were also among those so powerfully treated in the story of Ivan Ilyich: depression, dying; the perceived absence or presence of God, both “too frightening.” I don’t have any comments on those themes, but I would very much recommend Tolstoy’s story to your own reading. I thought I had read it before, but maybe I only started once. It is powerful.

I don’t know anything about May Sarton except what I read just this morning, but I appreciated the thoughts below; these came just down the page, after she’d moved on from writing about her dying friend. They are not so obviously linked to the Tolstoy story, except perhaps by their highlighting the need for patience in every stage and situation in life, not least at its end. “By your patient endurance you will gain your souls.” (Luke 21:19)

“In the mail a letter from a twelve-year-old child, enclosing poems, her mother having pushed her to ask my opinion. The child does really look at things, and I can write something helpful, I think. But it is troubling how many people expect applause, recognition, when they have not even begun to learn an art or a craft. Instant success is the order of the day; ‘I want it now!’ I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines. Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start on the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.”

-May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude