Hi Friends,
I had a dental appointment this week and found the appointment card in my purse pocket. The substitution of “Victory” for “Victoria” made me laugh. I hadn’t noticed it six months ago when the receptionist gave it to me. I just tucked it in my purse without looking.
I didn’t have any particular victories this week, but the dental assistant told me my teeth were strong and healthy, so I’ll take that as my win. Other than that, my body is going sort of crazy. I have mosquito bites on my toes, ankles and shins; a rash of unknown origin covering my torso, back of my neck and part of my right arm and my legs; and burned skin on my chest in the process of healing from a Fluorouracil treatment for basal cell carcinomas. None of this is serious, but my entire body has been itchy and driving me pretty crazy for quite a while now. I’m quickly going through a four-pack of cortisone cream from Costco and also have rediscovered calamine lotion. I tried eliminating pineapple from my diet, quit a doctor-approved nutritional supplement, started using Gold Bond eczema lotion, changed my laundry detergent, etc. So far, nothing has helped. If you have any advice, please comment! I’m trying to see the dermatologist, but can't get an appointment. I can see the primary care doc in a week. Maybe she can schedule some allergy tests and prescribe an anti-itch cream that actually works.
Actual Suffering
The whole mess reminded me of something I hadn’t thought of in decades. When I was young, the seven of us lived in a little house in Hacienda Heights, CA. Our nextdoor neighbors were also a Catholic family of seven. One of the boys had a skin disease that made all of his skin peel off all the time. His top layer of skin over his entire body was always peeling. He was covered in triangles and squares of clear and white skin that had lifted off and hadn’t quite finished separating. The flesh under it was angry pink and red. He was small for his age, and I was given to understand this was because a great deal of his efforts to grow were concentrated on skin regeneration.
This boy’s mother had the smoothest hands I’d ever seen. My mother told me it was because she was applying Vaseline several times a day to Dickey’s skin in an effort to relieve the dryness. That family moved out before we did—not far away—to a bigger, much cooler house with a sunken living room. (Remember those?) Not long after, I heard that Dickey had died. I was told that his body just couldn’t keep up with the energy it took to constantly generate new skin.
As a kid I never thought about whether he was in pain, suffering. He was just a kid playing on the street with the neighborhood gang. I didn’t want to eat any food at their house because flakes of skin were easy to see, and I was afraid there would be bits of it in the food. And now I’m thinking about him, placing that thought in the ‘Kids and Suffering’ section of my brain.
I have Doctors without Borders and The UNHCR (UN Refugee agency) on automatic monthly donations, but I change up other donations monthly based on who seems to be able to provide services to those suffering as the result of war and hunger (READ: as the result of political decisions. Did you see Ann Telnaes’s cartoon this week?). I pick Oxfam a lot not just because they work around the world, but because they’re suing the Trump administration over the decimation of USAID. Save the Children because—children. I keep returning to World Central Kitchen because they seem to be ready to serve at a moment’s notice. I know they’re serving meals in Texas. They’ve run out of food supplies in Gaza twice this month (politics, not a lack of supplies), but even when they didn’t have food, they were providing purified water.
Every day I see articles on Gaza and Ukraine, but also on Syria, Sudan, and now Thailand and Cambodia. Sometimes it feels like the history of the world is a sort of whack-a-mole challenge with evil being the mole.
Actual Good
If you need something to remind you this week that good also exists in the world (all those Doctors Without Borders! All those people working in those World Central kitchens!), you’ll like this story of the development of off-road wheelchairs, making trails accessible to wheelchair users. From the LA Times via their The Wild newsletter.
Inspired by organizations across the U.S. that are advocating for public access to trails for those with disabilities, Nicassio launched the nonprofit Accessible Off-Road in October. His plan is to expand free access to off-road wheelchairs for Los Angeles County residents with mobility disabilities to use at popular trails across the region. The chair he’s using, he said, is the first of many. …
Similar to how a tank moves, the off-road chairs use two rubber tracks to guide the user along. It provides substantial traction over a wheelchair. The controls are similar to that of an electric wheelchair, with settings that allow the user to move their center of gravity as they navigate over rocks and branches and up and down steep hills.
What I’m Reading
My father-in-law was a Mexican immigrant who lived what my generation was schooled in as the American Dream. You know, give me your tired, your poor, etc., and I will give them the chance for an ordinary life—a life that includes joys and successes as well as sorrows.
As you might imagine, I think about his life a lot these days because he was such a hardworking, stand-up guy and because I wonder about opportunities like his being available to today’s immigrants who have the same ethics and desires.
I’ve been thinking for quite a while that I’d like to write a middle grade or YA book based on his life, but fictionalized. This is one of three ideas for books I have right now, but I’ve been unable to get going on any of them. I think that I might be able to start outlining or writing (it doesn’t matter which—just start!) if I read some books about the world he was immersed in.
Just before the end of World War II, he was in the Army and shipped out to Okinawa. The atomic bombs were dropped and the war ended. He then spent time on the island. I wondered what that was like. My library has a ProQuest subscription (research materials—we used ProQuest as one of the databases for our high school libraries when I was a teacher librarian). I found a book about that time and place by an Army colonel.
In the Philippines and Okinawa : A Memoir, 1945-1948 by Robert H. Ferrell and William S. Triplet (U of Missouri Press, 2001)
I’m about 100 pages into it. It’s very interesting, but so far it’s set in the Philippines. The service people have ingenious ways of getting things done (using a motor from a Japanese Zero to power a hand-rigged washing machine, for example). Their larger mission seems to be to take in Japanese soldiers who would surrender. However, the Japanese soldiers had a hard time getting to them and were dying of starvation, had malaria, etc. In addition, Filipinos were angry over their treatment by the Japanese and would sometimes kill soldiers if they found them. And the, the soldiers in the jungle did not believe that the war was actually over, so some refused to surrender.
My Book Whisperers
I’m thinking about how I find my ‘next read’ these days. When I was working as a school librarian, I read a lot of book reviews in professional review sources. This was necessary because I needed to know if the titles I was purchasing fit our mission and were appropriate. I read Booklist, Library Journal, and School Library Journal regularly. And I’d find books there for my students, but I also found books that I wanted to read.
Now that I’m not in the library, I tend to buy books that are recommended by Ron Charles in his “Book Club” newsletter from the Washington Post. I just bought the audiobook Don’t Talk about Politics: How to Change 21st-century Minds by Sarah Stein Lubrano based on Ron Charles' story of serendipitously meeting her in a bookshop. But other than Charles, I choose from the suggestions of other book-loving “Substackers.”
I subscribe to Kathleen Schmidt’s Substack Publishing Confidential, which is about the publishing industry. She often points out that legacy media reviews are far less influential than they used to be. I think my behavior is exemplary of this fact.
I know Kelly Turner through a cowriting group and enjoy her book recommendations. I recently read How to Survive a Bear Attack by Claire Cameron on her recommendation. (I talked about it here.) This week, I bought Winter Thunder by Mari Sandoz based on Peter C. Meilaender’s discussion of it in his Substack From My Bookshelf. It hasn’t arrived yet.
A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst
I enjoy Jan Harayda’s Jansplaining. She reviews honestly, which means she will also includes what she doesn’t like about widely popular books. I like that because I feel seen when my take on a widely popular book doesn’t match the general response. Recently, she wholeheartedly recommended A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck by Sophie Elmhirst, so I listened to it while I was avoiding any sort of work as I was recovering from a migraine. (It has not been a great week, friends.)
It’s been on a lot of lists, so you might be familiar. It’s about a couple who, in 1972, quit their jobs to sail from England to New Zealand with stops along the way. They spend years planning and preparing. They sold their house in order to afford a 31-foot yacht. They decided not to have a radio because the husband, Maurice, wanted to rely on his nautical skills for navigation. Things go well for almost a year. And then a (possibly breaching) whale knocks a hole in their boat. They end up in a rubber raft and pulling a dingy with provisions. They fish using safety pins repurposed as hooks. They also kill a few birds and several sea turtles. But the stars seem to be stacked against them—starting with those missing fishing hooks and moving into flares that were ‘duds’ so that they couldn’t signal passing ships.
When they are finally rescued (not a spoiler—we know it’s coming) after 118 days in the raft, they are emaciated and near to starving. That they lived is attributed to the wife’s, Maralyn's, unbreakable optimism, ingenuity, and leadership. So, the publisher’s back cover summary tells us this is the great test of a marriage (true) and a “gutting love story.”
I was hooked by the survival story. It’s hard to imagine surviving as they did and each new setback seems like something that would have been the end of a lesser spirit. But “gutting love story?” Maurice is a loner. He’s very awkward and most people don’t get along with him. I found his personality repellent. That Maralyn loves him as she does is more a story of grace, a thing unmerited. It’s a story of Maurice’s incredible fortune in Maralyn having chosen him.
Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda
I listened to Ecstasy by Ivy Pochoda because I loved her novel Wonder Valley. Ecstasy is about a wealthy widow, her son and daughter-in-law, and her old, wilder friend (who is losing her eyesight) as they visit their soon-to-open hotel, the Agape Villas, on the Greek island of Naxos.
The son is a privileged SOB with no redeeming qualities, a flat character. I can’t say this entirely bothered me as I am seeing the antics of such characters daily IRL. The widow is trying to shake off his control after having been controlled all her life by her now dead husband. She's a little flat as well, the human embodiment of a list of wrongs against women. However, neither seems to be the central character in this story. The pull of the ancient ecstatic cult of Dionysus (and its current iteration in drug use) is at the center. Does it offer freedom or another form of control? Ecstasy leaves you to decide for yourself, but it takes you on a pretty wild ride in the meantime. Short, and outside of character development, highly original. Fun summer read.
Wonder Valley by Ivy Pochoda
It’s been about seven years since I read Wonder Valley. I looked back to see if I had made any notes on it. I happened to have read it as my old wolfish dog, Fletcher, was dying. So the only notes I have from that month are about him. But I remember the feeling that the novel was a wonder in itself. All the characters are in crisis. It opens with a naked man running through rush-hour traffic on an LA freeway. (110? Not sure.) In disconnected vignettes, we met the characters. There’s a weird cult in the Mojave Desert and a teen, Ren, who is on the run from it and from its leader, his father. He lands on Skid Row and his life intersects with characters who, at first, seem unrelated. The language is beautiful, rich in imagery. The characters are full and realistic as is their dialogue. It’s Southern California under a baking sun, in all its grime, blood, and glory. Highly recommended. If you live in So. Cal, don’t miss it, particularly if you like experimental elements.
Coming Up
I’m still working on the religion titles. I’m reading a little bit of Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity each night before sleep. I think next week, I’d like to discuss Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus by Elaine Pagels.
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