Jennifer Egan: A Visit From the Goon Squad
Amazon.com kept telling me I needed to read this book, so finally, I ordered it and waited a couple months before I was ready. I just finished a major project AND I caught a miserable cold, so what better time?
I loved this book. It had a lot going against it; you know irrational factors like how you feel when you have a cold and your sinuses are all stuffed up and your chest is tight? A Visit From the Goon Squad took me out of my misery. While it appears random, it is tightly plotted, and I loved seeing how different strands intertwined. I also loved the effects of the goon squad (no, I am not going to tell you anything specific) and I loved how technology drove differences in how different generations thought and acted.
The last act takes place in a future where (this makes total sense) there is a high value placed on “pure”, no tattoos, no swearing – it is truly hilarious, the lengths to which we will go to NOT be our parents. Babies have their own hand-helds, which is already happening. My eyes have been opened, watching our own 18 month old grandson working an iPad and iPhone. It’s amazing to me the aps that are created to entertain, divert and teach our little ones.
This is not a straight line book, so there are times I had to go back and read a section again to remind myself where I met this character before, and how he tied into the plot earlier. It is a fascinating creation, this book, and I would love to sit down for coffee with this author, and her outside-the-box kind of thinking.
Bad Grandparents: Disaster Averted
“No! No!” he shouted, and pushed away the spoon full of rice and beans which he normally loves. No. He wanted BaBa to walk him around the restaurant some more, showing him serapes and sombreros and gaudily crowing roosters.
‘More. More,’ he signed.
“It’s dinner time, time to eat,” GaGa said calmly, signing for ‘eat.’
“No! No! Done!” He may not have a large vocabulary, but Happy Baby knows how to communicate pretty clearly. BaBa goes to pick him up, but I say no, it’s dinner time. Very calmly. The shrieks begin, the arched back, the tears. Baba looks at me accusingly; what to do? I know we need to hold our ground, but it is so hard when the piercing shrieks start.
And then, a miracle. The waiter shows up with a small plate of whipped cream with chocolate sauce over it.
What self-respecting grandparent would allow a child to feast on whipped cream??
Desperate grandparents. Grandparents who can’t bear to hear him shriek. We let him eat the whipped cream, but he had to eat it on his own, with the spoon. He’s not very efficient with the spoon yet, so he couldn’t really get much. And, between tiny spoon tastes of whipped cream, BaBa and I have discovered he will eat beans and rice after all. He ate all the beans and rice, and only got a little of the whipped cream, but he was happy. And so were we.
On some deep level I feel like we have shirked our responsibilities, but oh, those shrieks . . .
When we are at home, we can ignore the shrieks. One time he was shrieking, and when we ignored him, he stopped, came closer and then flopped down and started shrieking again. We couldn’t help it, we just laughed. It was so hilarious. When he saw us laughing, he gave up and got involved with something else. He is so much fun. 🙂
Foolish Worries
I am a believer. I am not a superstitious person. Neither am I a big worrier. Having said all that, and I think it is important to put the forementioned on the record, so you have context, I have recently suffered a series of losses, and it troubles me.
First, I lost my YMCA card, which I always keep in the same place, and suddenly, it just wasn’t there. Not only was it not there, but it wasn’t in any logical place, where it might have dropped, or where I might have placed it in a careless moment. Just gone, totally gone.
Second, my credit card disappeared. I know exactly the last time I used it, and I remember seeing it NOT in my wallet, in its accustomed place, and picking it up and thinking “I need to put this in its accustomed place, so it doesn’t get lost.” Then, I noticed it wasn’t there. Just not there. There isn’t any other place I would put it, even to keep it safe. I spent a couple days going over just about any place it could be, and it is simply gone gone gone.
Third – and I hope last, because we have a saying that bad things come in threes (yes, yes, I know, it’s pure superstition) I can’t find my treasured silver thimble from Oman. I bought it at the Al Bustan Hotel gift shop, and I paid way too much for it, and I have never regretted it. It fit perfectly. I love using it. It has beautiful silver filigree embellishment, not a lot, just right, so it is both beautiful and useful. It’s not that I LOVE my thimble (I really do) but I appreciate that it is so beautiful, and it works so well for me. And it is gone. I always keep it in the same place, and it is not there. I am thinking I might have put it in “a safe place” as I was cleaning off my quilting area to be able to quilt a large quilt, but it’s been a couple weeks I’ve been looking, and it isn’t in any obvious ‘safe place.’
I am a very organized person, bordering precariously on obsessive-compulsive. I think about where to put things, and then I put them there conscientiously. It sounds prideful when I say it this way, but I always know where to find things. If they are not in the first place, they are always in the second or third. I am not in the habit of losing things.
It’s just my husband and me in the suite of rooms where thee things went missing. Oh yes, and the Qatari Cat, who shows absolutely no interest in my Y card, or my credit card, or my silver thimble. I totally know these losses are on me, and I am at a loss. Am I beginning to lose my mind?
No! No! I won’t even go there!
I trust that I have thoughtlessly misplaced, even lost these items. I replaced the Y card, and the credit card, but my silver thimble is irreplaceable, and I can only hope that it shows up, once again, in a place I never expected. I do have other thimbles. Still, I mourn the loss of my beautiful Omani silver thimble.
Making My Doctor Happy
“You can cheat, you know,” my younger sister told me. “Just don’t eat meat for the week before your blood test.”
No, I didn’t know that! But I forgot, so I put off my appointment and blood test for another week, but I forgot again. Oh well. I took the test, cataloging all my mistakes (too much sugar, too much salt, too much meat, too much processed food) and went to my appointment with a sinking heart.
My doctor looked happy. He was kind of bouncing up and down with a big smile.
“Look at these readings!” he crowed! “We don’t often see turnarounds like this! Have you been exercising?”
“Yep! Three days a week!” I responded.
“Your blood pressure has dropped substantially.”
He is right. I am supposed to take it daily, and I’ve watched it fall back to where it was in my twenties.
“And your cholesterol dropped to 166! That’s 45 below your last reading!”
Holy cow! And I didn’t even cheat!
Even better, my triglycerides level has improved to optimal.
What surprises me is I haven’t had any side-effects, or not much. I had been concerned I would have a reaction, but I don’t feel any different, I don’t feel more health conscious or virtuous or like I’m being careful. It’s kind of amazing to me that small doses of medications can make such a difference.
I am switching my sources, however. The last refill I got (free) from the Navy Pharmacy disintegrated in the bottle. Maybe it’s the humidity in summer in Pensacola, but I ended up sort of estimating how much powder would equal a pill and licking it off my palm rather than go back there – again – and have to negotiate for a replacement. They make me feel like some kind of cheat or druggie when I ask to get a refill early because I am traveling. The last time, I had to show my airplane ticket to prove I was refilling early because I had to travel. (!) Is there a big black market for blood pressure medication???
I’m still dancing on air to have my readings come back so good . . . without cheating, LOL. 🙂
The Value of the Trivial
“Be sure to use your full name, First, maiden and married, on your quilt labels,” our presenter instructed us.
Oh-oh. I’ve been lucky just to get labels on my quilts, and I haven’t used my maiden name at all.
“Years from now, if someone is trying to track you as a quilter, it will help to have your maiden name to distinguish you from other quilters who may have similar names,” she continued.
OK. So now I will include my maiden name. (For my Moslem friends, it is our custom to take our husband’s names when we marry. Some women don’t, but even now, the majority do. I know, I know, it seems backward to you, it is irrational, it is just the way it is. We also don’t have marriage contracts.)
At lunch with a long-time friend this week, she mentioned she still has her mother’s diaries. I suggested she offer them to a major university near where my friend grew up, to their historical collection, and my friend said “oh, it’s just daily weather, who’s sick, stuff like that.”
Stuff like that is just exactly what historians treasure. When I was at university, I worked for a time in the copying department of the library, and I specialized in the historical collections, many of which were from people who came west. The papers were fascinating – letters home, lists of supplies they asked to have sent West, to-do lists, old photos. The scraps of paper you and I throw away – there in the Northwest collection.
They become valuable, at least for historical research, for writing period fiction, for medical research – because we do throw them away, and so few survive.
Keeping up with this blog has become more problematic. I just don’t have the time in my life I used to have. My life is interesting to me, but now that I am no longer living in exotic locations, I don’t believe I am so interesting to others. My internal debate is whether or not to continue. I would let it go in a heartbeat and not miss the time, but . . . I think I would miss your feedback.
I’m not writing this for you. I’m sort of writing more for my own record-keeping, it’s why I include news articles and scraps of daily life (not my own) and all the oddities and irrationalities that catch my eye. I love having a place to store it all (this blog) and I love your comments, which can sometimes completely turn me around in point of view; you give me perspectives I hadn’t considered.
The point of all this is the ephemeral nature of our daily lives, and the records of our lives. There are things worth keeping.
I wish someone in Kuwait were doing oral histories on the older people who were living there ‘before oil’.
As Bad as the Rest of Us
I laughed out loud while listening to my NPR station, WUWF in Pensacola. The interview was on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, and if you click on the blue type, it will take you to the 12 minute interview. I laughed because he starts out telling us that we’re all pretty much the same, and that people who live longer have some tiny genetic differences.
I think of how hard we work to live long and prosper, how we try to control our fat foods, our salt, how we try to exercise more and to live faith-filled lives, all of which have been shown to correlate with longer lives. Only 7% of the long-lived people studied claimed a spiritual foundation. One 95 year old woman continued to be a heavy smoker. A good portion of the long-lived women did not have children. Men who survived to a ripe old age, they tell us, tend to be in much better shape than the women.
My grandmother lived to 105, and I have always wondered if I would be one of those who also lived long. Author Nir Barzilai discusses his study of people who live long lives and tells us that counter to popular wisdom, most of them had the same bad habits the rest of us had – many smoked, right up into their old age, drank, and ate sugary and fatty foods.
“We humans age at different rates,” the author states, and those who live long have good genetics – particularly a high HDL, the good cholesterol.
Now they are studying the particulars of the genes to further unlock the secrets to longevity.
AdventureMan and I love these Toyota commercials about older people and social networking 🙂
Statistics Anomaly
Yesterday, I had over two thousand hits on the blog, after a year of sliding statistics, which I attribute to being less interesting now that I no longer live in exotic locations, post the Kuwait sunrise (I used to have a loyal clientele of Kuwaiti students off at university who loved seeing the sunrise in Kuwait every day), and that blogging is not so new and exciting. I’m not blogging as conscientiously as I used to – I don’t have the time I used to have.
This morning, as I check the blog, I can see I have almost as many hits by nine this morning as I had yesterday. It makes me smile – here is what the most hit-upon posts are:
Ramadan is coming! Ramadan Mubarak, Ramadan Kareem to all those waiting so eagerly for Ramadan to begin.
Last night we had a big dinner for my Mom’s birthday, and got to hear a shred of conversation I wanted to share with you. I was sitting next to an old family friend, famous for asking questions that will start a conversation that could last the rest of the evening, and across the table was Little Diamond, my niece, actually now Professor Diamond. 🙂 If we were German, we would call her Professor Doctor Diamond 🙂
Our friend asked her what had surprised her the most about teaching on the college level and she answered that as she is teaching her culture classes, she brought up plural marriages, and it was simply a non-issue. She said there are a couple of shows, Sister-Wives and Big Love, and all the kids have seen them and know what plural marriage is all about – at least in the United States. She said it was a big change, that plural marriage used to be a hot topic, but now, not-so-much. It was fascinating.
Waking Up Cold
I shivered as I woke up; about a thousand gulls screaming past, up from the water, circling the town, loudly gossiping. It is a shiver of delight – I can sleep with the window open, no air conditioning needed, and the morning air is very cool. I am in heaven, also called Seattle.
It is so totally different coming in from Pensacola. As I showered the night before, I was thinking “about now I would be landing in Amsterdam, with several hours wait for my next flight. Being able to sleep in my own bed, get up early in the morning, five minutes to the airport, a breezy check-in and then a bare half day of traveling – so easy.”
Er . . . almost. I still trip the full inspection triggers, and got the complete pat down yesterday. The TSS lady was very professional, although much more thorough than ever before. It is annoying, but on the level of swatting a mosquito away; one minute later you’ve forgotten all about it.
Flight leaves late out of Pensacola, I have to RUN in Atlanta to make my connection, but it’s good to get some aerobic exercise in the middle of a long day of flying. 🙂 Unfortunately, my bag doesn’t make it, so when I reach Seattle they tell me it will come in on the next flight and they will deliver it. After all these years of back and forth, I have learned to have a nightgown and a change of clothes with me, and there are stores where I can pick up mascara and small things I need short-term. The bag arrives in the early evening, so all is well.
As I entered the Seattle airport from the A-concourse, I had a big grin. Where am I? This looks so much like Doha; there is a roundabout near the airport with the same collection of water gourds:
Seattle is cool and beautiful, and has rolled out a sunny day for my arrival. It’s always a thrill to see the Seattle skyline, and even more of a thrill when the roads are dry:
I pick up lunch on my way to my Mom’s, Ivar’s, as is our tradition, oh yummmm – halibut and chips for Mom, and a Salmon Ceasar for me.
I guess I’m a little more tired than I thought – it was an early flight. I grab a quick nap, and I feel like myself again. Mom and I head out shopping – we have a week of errands and appointments ahead of us, and some fun stuff too. Mom turns 88 this week – something to celebrate!
An Old Dented Bucket
THIS IS NOT MY STORY. 🙂 This is from my long time friend Kit Kat who passed it along to me and I loved it so much I want to share it with you:
THE OLD DENTED BUCKET
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of
Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore . We lived downstairs and rented
the upstairs rooms to out-patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the
door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly
taller than my 8-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped,
shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from
swelling, red and raw.
Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to
see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this
morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ’til morning.”
He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no
success, no one seemed to have a room. “I guess it’s my face …. I
know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments
..”
For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could
sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the
morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch.. I went
inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old
man if he would join us. “No, thank you. I have plenty.” And he held
up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with
him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man
had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he
fished for a living to support his daughter, her 5 children, and her
husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence
was preface with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that
no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin
cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going…
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I
got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little
man was out on the porch.
He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly,
as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay
the next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can
sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your
children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but
children don’t seem to mind.”
I told him he was welcome to come again.
And, on his next trip, he arrived a little after 7 in the morning. As a
gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had
ever seen! He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so
that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. And I
wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us, there was never a time
that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special
delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or
kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk 3 miles to
mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly
precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a
comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning.
“Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away!
You can lose roomers by putting up such people!”
Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But, oh!, if only they could
have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.
I know our family always will be grateful to have known him; from him
we learned what it was to accept the bad without complaint and the good
with gratitude to God.
Recently I was visiting a friend, who has a greenhouse, as she showed
me her flowers, we came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden
chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms. But to my great surprise, it was
growing in an old dented, rusty bucket. I thought to myself, “If this
were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!”
My friend changed my mind. “I ran short of pots,” she explained, “and
knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind
starting out in this old pail. It’s just for a little while, till I can
put it out in the garden.”
She must have wondered why I laughed so delightedly, but I was
imagining just such a scene in heaven.
“Here’s an especially beautiful one,” God might have said when he came
to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this
small body.”
All this happened long ago – and now, in God’s garden, how tall this
lovely soul must stand.
The LORD does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the
outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7b)
Monday Night Blues at Five Sisters Blues Cafe in Pensacola
We kept wanting to go to Five Sisters Blues Cafe – everyone tells us it is a really fun place with great food – but it takes us a while to find it. I’m printing the Google map for you; it is at the corner of Belmont and DeVilliers. Not that hard to find if you know Pensacola, but we are still learning Pensacola.
Five Sisters exterior:
“Where’ve you been?” our waitress, Lisa, asked as we were seated. We must have looked goofy, we’ve never been there before, so we said, “this is our first time” and she laughed and said “I know that! I haven’t seen you before! We’ve been open a year! Where’ve you been?”
We just laughed, she had really caught us off guard. The place was packed, on a Wednesday afternoon, people all around us eating giant salads, plates heaped with fried chicken, everything we saw coming out to the tables looked delicious. Lisa brought us iced-tea, and I lost my heart, look, REAL mint in the tea, just like home . . .
We were overwhelmed. There is a lot going on in the restaurant, people laughing, art works on the walls, a new menu to peruse and we don’t know what we want. We finally decide to share the sampler platter with two fried green tomatoes, 4 crab cakes and 4 shrimp, which came with three very tasty sauces – WOW. Wowed right off the top:
AdventureMan even said, in wonder “This crab cake really tastes like crab with a C!” and it was. You know, the other kind, that calls itself crab, but is really flavored Alaskan pollock, and not crab at all? This was real crab, and it tasted crabby. Yummm.
AdventureMan had a vegetable platter. Now this is Southern cooking at it’s best, so don’t expect ‘vegetable’ to be Vegan. Even Mac and Cheese qualifies as a vegetable, and beans usually have some pork to flavor them, etc. He said the entire plate was delicious.
I tried something I had never had before, catish over grits. I never thought I liked grits until our daughter-in-laws stepmother (I know, I know, it sounds complicated, and it is another thing we have in common with people all over the world; we all have complicated relationships) made Smoked Gouda Grits one night with her Barbecued Shrimp and a whole new world opened up to me. Wooo HOOO. Anyway, I didn’t eat all the grits; the catfish was filling, but this dish knocked my socks off and I don’t think I could duplicate it, so I’m just going to have to go back to Five Sisters every time I get a craving for it:
If we are what we eat, we are becoming very Southern. 🙂
Lisa, the waitress, was a lot of fun, helpful in making recommendations, quick when we asked for anything, and she told us about an upcoming special jazz night that we really needed to attend. OK. That sounded like fun.
Lisa was right. It was really fun. We walked in, early, and every table was taken. There was a Jazz Society of Pensacola membership table at the entrance, and the lady just laughed and said “Look! There are lots of chairs empty, just go to a table and ask if you can join them.”
Hmm. We’re actually used to that, living in Germany all those years, but I didn’t know you could do that here. 🙂 We ended up at a table with another couple, and as we chatted, we had a really good time with them. They were so gracious and welcoming to people they had never met and who aren’t even members (yet) of the Jazz Society. We laughed a lot. He told us that they didn’t have a lot of rules, but that when things got lively, no oxygen machines were allowed on the dance floor because they might explode, LLOOLLL!
This place was ROCKIN’. People were dancing between the tables, people from young to old, just having a great time listening to some very very good music. Within an hour, there were no empty seats at all, some people were standing, and others were eating out on the covered patio. It was raining (rain in Pensacola during a drought is a good thing) and the evening was called Monday Night Blues. How cool is that? The atmosphere was perfect.
Of course we had dinner. AdventureMan had BBQ on Red Beans and Rice and I had the Shrimp Basket. No Mom, I did not eat the French Fries.
I did eat ONE of the hushpuppies. I could not resist. 😉
Five Sisters Blues Cafe is just a really fun place, immaculately clean, great food and great service. We can’t wait to go back again.
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