Pat Conroy and South of Broad
I don’t know where to start, telling you how much I like this book. I couldn’t wait for reading time to read it. It never flagged, every page kept me glued. I want you to read it, I want to be able to talk about it with you, but there is so much in this book that I don’t want to spoil it for you.
There are huge themes. There are some very bad people. There are some very good people. Sometimes the very good people can do very bad things, and sometimes the bad people can have some redeeming moments.
We meet the main character as he is about to begin his senior year in college. On the day we meet him, his life changes. Several new people come into his life. Two orphans. A beautiful sister and equally beautiful brother. A black football coach and his son. Three rich kids kicked out of the best private school in town for doing dope.
There are two ‘characters’ who are not people. One is the city of Charleston, SC, and there are entire paragraphs in this book which will make you fall in love, through Pat Conroy’s eyes, with this complicated, beautiful city. Another is Hurricane Hugo, which is as destructive as Charleston is beautiful.
South of Broad covers a time of tumult and change, and you see it through the eyes of of Conroy’s endearing characters. Times changes, society changes and change comes hard for those who stand to lose the most. Conroy deals with segregation, integration, child abuse, suicide, gay sex, economic discrimination, and psychiatric illness, a psycopathic criminal, who happens to be the father of two of this friends, and a hurricane.
For me, what was most engrossing was the complicated question of who is righteous? It’s what I want to talk about with you. Who is most like Jesus? (LOL, give examples) Which characters would you expect think themselves closest to God? Do you think they are? (Be prepared to defend your opinion.) What is a good parent? In this book, who do you think was the best parent?
If you decide to buy this book, please buy a copy with the Reader’s Guide in the back – an interview with Pat Conroy and questions that help you think about the book. I’d like to share with you a segment of the interview which I found so brightly illuminating:
. . . . I found the Parisians rarified, vigilant, hypercritical and fabulous. They had made themselves worthy of the great city they lived in. They oozed style and they ate like kings. . . . The Parisians seem special to both the world and themselves. Then it hit me: My God, they are like Charlestonians.
As I see it, you can take out Charlestonians and substitute Kuwaitis. Or New Yorkers. Or Romans. In fact, just about every society I have visited have their elite, who consider themselves rarified and special, and fight to keep themselves so.
So not only is the book dealing with spiritual righteousness, but also with themes of entitlement and deprivation, bullies and the bullied, parenting, self-fulfillment, and the very real and over-arching theme of friendship and the power of a close circle of friends.
I don’t want to tell you too much. I loved this book. I’m still thinking about it. I hope you’ll read it and think about it, too, and then come back and tell me what you’re thinking. 🙂
Wyoming to Colorado Springs
We are eager to get going, but oh, we are shivering, and happy we brought a little fleece with us:
It is a glorious morning, bright sunshine, clear air, a day when we are glad to be alive and on the road.
Across South Dakota and Montana, we saw the huge round rolls of hay that we saw in France and Germany, but across Wyoming, most of the bales are the old fashioned square ones. We are thinking square is easier to store, but there must be some advantage, also, to the round ones, as they seem to be the latest invention. Anyone know why?
We find a rest stop so we can change drivers, and there is a set of sculptures there called The Greeting and the Gift, just as you are exiting Wyoming and entering Colorado:
I love this one. It looks noble. The First Nation (Native American) is offering a pipe of water. When I was a kid, I would have thought it was a peace pipe, but the explanation says otherwise. The Greeting statue I don’t like as much for two reasons – his hands seem out-of-scale large to me, and the hair does not look like a mountain man or explorer (to me) but looks sort of Hellenic. What do you think?
At the end of a very short drive is a city I love, Colorado Springs. I love it because (most of the time) the air seems clear and clean to me. I love it in the winter, when it is cold, and in the summer, when it is hot, it is dry heat, like Kuwait, but not so hot, so it doesn’t bother me. There are a million quilt shops here, all of which I intend to hit today while AdventureMan does some consulting and I drive the gypsy-mobile. There are also Macy’s department stores, which Pensacola doesn’t have, and Sephora, which Pensacola may be getting soon but did not have when I left.
We went to see George Clooney’s new film, The American, which gave us hours of conversation, and on our way to our Marriott home picked up a feast from Whole Foods – all vegetable! Balsamic grilled brussel sprouts, marinated grilled beets, a vegetarian meatloaf that really tasted like meat (!), guacomole, a pico de gallo with some bite, pita bread, sauteed garlic spinach, and some wonderfully tasty olives. AdventureMan picked up a really good bottle of Colorado merlot (yes, it exists, and is called Two Rivers: Chateau Deux Fleuves Vineyards.
Crowning our day was a sunset over Pike’s Peak. I don’t like a lot of drama in my life, but I love a lot of drama in a sunset. I loved this one so much that I am going to show you three different shots, because I can’t choose the one I like the best.
Cockroaches VS Drug-Resistant Bacteria
You have to know, I truly hate cockroaches. They give me the creeps. When I see one – and cockroaches are a part of life in Florida, even with a pest service – my knees feel weak, and I feel shaky, but I have to force myself to stomp on them and flush them away. Now, AOL News tells us cockroaches can help us fight serious infections, including the one I hate the most, MRSA. You can read the entire article by clicking on the blue type above.
(Sept. 7) — Cockroaches, the creepy critters reviled for invading kitchens the country over, might be modern medicine’s best option for fending off dangerous, drug-resistant bacterial infections.
British researchers at the University of Nottingham’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Science are behind the discovery, which entails harnessing molecules from the tissues of cockroaches and locusts to combat bacteria like E. coli and MRSA (drug-resistant staph infections).
Chemicals found in the brain and central nervous tissues of cockroaches are able to kill 90 percent of dangerous bacteria in lab-based tests.
The potent chemicals, found in the brain and central nervous tissues of the critters, are able to kill 90 percent of E. coli and MRSA in lab-based tests.
“Superbugs … have shown the ability to cause untreatable infections and have become a major threat in our fight against bacterial diseases,” Dr. Naveed Khan, who supervised the work of lead researcher Simon Lee, said in a press release. “Thus, there is a continuous need to find additional sources of novel anti-microbials to confront this menace.”
In a twist that’s an ironic upside to our own revulsion for roaches, it’s their “unsanitary and unhygienic environments,” Lee speculated, that spurred the critters to develop toxins against the bacteria.
You can read the rest of the original news article by clicking here.
Edmonds Market Day
It’s all rush rush rush but we make time on Saturday morning to go to the Edmonds Market, my very favorite thing to do. First, I wanted to show you how my little home town decorates the street lights with hanging baskets:
Street pots:
And one of my favorite vendors, the Cedar Creek Soap lady. 🙂
(My favorite soaps are Clove, Cinnamon Orange and Safari)
Edmonds, Washington Street Gardens
In a time where states and counties and cities and towns are cutting back, I am infinitely grateful to my little home town that they find the resources to maintain the street gardens. In the town, you find huge baskets of flowers hanging from poles along the main streets (one of which is called Main Street, in true small town fashion). These are from the street level gardens; they are so beautiful.
Nearby, two of our favorite stores are side by side:
Woo HOOO, Half Price Books is having their annual Labor Day Sale, 20% off everything in the store. Like we need more books. 😉
“Why Are Barns Painted Red?”
This is what I love about long road trips with AdventureMan. We have hours together in the car, and you just never know where the conversations will go.
We saw a lot of barns. Most of them are red.
“Why are barns red?” AdventureMan asked. “Like we just accept that barns are red, when we are kids and we are told to draw a barn, we reach for the red crayon, why is that? Why red?”
So we looked it up at the next wireless stop and found the answer on Wiki answers:
Centuries ago, European farmers would seal the wood on their barns with an oil, often linseed oil — a tawny-colored oil derived from the seed of the flax plant. They would paint their barns with a linseed-oil mixture, often consisting of additions such as milk and lime. The combination produced a long-lasting paint that dried and hardened quickly. (Today, linseed oil is sold in most home-improvement stores as a wood sealant).
Now, where does the red come from?
In historically accurate terms, “barn red” is not the bright, fire-engine red that we often see today, but more of a burnt-orange red.
Farmers added ferrous oxide, otherwise known as rust, to the oil mixture. Rust was plentiful on farms and is a poison to many fungi, including mold and moss, which were known to grown on barns. These fungi would trap moisture in the wood, increasing decay.
Regardless of how the farmer tinted his paint, having a red barn became a fashionable thing. They were a sharp contrast to the traditional white farmhouse.
As European settlers crossed over to America, they brought with them the tradition of red barns. In the mid to late 1800s, as paints began to be produced with chemical pigments, red paint was the most inexpensive to buy. Red was the color of favor until whitewash became cheaper, at which point white barns began to spring up.
Today, the color of barns can vary, often depending on how the barns are used.
My dad and grandpa have been farmers their entire lives and they used to tease us kids that the barn was red because it was the most noticeable when the snow was falling sideways and you could barely see because of the sleet and hail.
Spokane and the Grill-Creamery
“Hey! AdventureMan said, “how about barbeque?”
“Sounds good to me,” I responded. After years of doing without, we are still vulnerable to the siren sound of barbecue.
On entering the parking lot, we got a clearer view of the sign.
Hmmm. Nope. Not quite what we had in mind.
Not sure where we were going, we drove further into the strip mall and there we found it:
Quirky. Individual. Not your franchise . . . just what we like, something new. It doesn’t always work out, but this one was pretty good. I had the Moussaka, and AdventureMan had the Gyros:
After dinner we hit the Spokane Fred Meyer where I found just exactly the right pants I was looking for – long pants for the Happy Baby, who is now crawling, and very very fast, so fast he gets rug burns on his knees. I always love shopping at Fred Meyers, especially when what I want is on sale, and then they take money off the sale price. Wooo HOOO, it brings out the cave woman in me, bringing home the bargain!
Leaving Spokane, the scenery changes again, back to warm and toasty, with lakes and windmill farms:
As we near Seattle, we see the Cascades, and Mt. Rainier:
The rest of the day wouldn’t interest you. It was hard work. When we opened up our storage locker, I looked at it in dismay . . . how had I let so much stuff accumulate over the last few years? I had survival stuff – laundry detergent, hair shampoo, a back up hair dryer, fingernail polish remover, envelopes, wrapping papers and ribbons, and all kinds of treasures I have brought back with each trip from overseas, to store until we live once again in Seattle. Now, we must get rid of what we can, and take the rest to Pensacola. Oh aargh. It was hard work.
We were rewarded with a beautiful Seattle sunset:
Short Day to Spokane
After breakfast, we hit the road early, stopping after a couple hours for a leg stretch and coffee. The weather is in the 50’s as we hit the road, and we are both ready for a warm-up. I was all set to order my normal ‘short non-fat Mocha, no whip cream,’ when I saw that they already have the fall specials on the menu, and oh, I love Pumpkin Pie Spice Latte . . .
While the roads are nearly empty, just us and an occasional truck, or pickup, the weather has turned ugly, rain coming down in drizzle, or torrents, or sheets, changing by the minute. By the time we stopped for lunch, I was ready to give up the driver’s seat.
Lunch was at the Fat Belly Deli, in Alberton, Montana, where we had Turkey Pastrami and Swiss sandwiches, oh, and ummm. . . . fries. They were having a little trouble getting the fryer hot enough to fry the fries, so I had time to take a couple photos:
On our way in, AdventureMan spotted a huge used book store – like catnip for cats, we could not resist. I found a copy of Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s book “A View of the Nile.” If you have never read Elizabeth Warnock Fernea (Guests of the Sheikh, A Street in Marrakesh) read her biography in the link above. She was an amazing woman, who shared her insights in a very readable way. A View of the Nile is hard to find. I want it for my lending library. AdventureMan and I both found books. . . Too many books. We had to drag ourselves away.
(Update: AdventureMan reminds me that HE found the Fernea book and asked me if I wanted it. I promised to correct this entry and give him proper credit. 🙂 )
Soon we left soggy Montana to enter an equally soggy Idaho, although the weather cleared by the time we got to Coeur d’Alene:
By the time we hit Spokane, the sun is out and we are starting to feel warm once again. We could go on; we have gained an hour, but we see another Mariott Residence Inn along the road and decide to hit the pool and kick back for the rest of the day, with another short day on the road tomorrow to get us to Seattle, where the hard work will begin. We have accounts to close, a storage locker to clear, rugs to gather and plastic carrier boxes to pack. We are hoping we can get everything into AdventureMan’s Barcelona Red (the name of his Rav4) for the long haul back to Pensacola.
Our reward for good behavior will be a few meals with friends and family before we depart. We are looking forward to that part. 🙂
Tuesday, Wyoming and Montana Skylines
On the road by seven this morning, feeling energetic and optimistic, for the best day of driving yet. Even the smaller state road is fast, most stretches being 75 mph or more, all the way from Hot Springs to Rapid City, and then on through Wyoming into Montana.
The passing scenery is spectacular; the weather is mostly clear and sunny, with a few dramatic exceptions coming through Montana.
At the end of a long day, we spot a Marriott Suites, with a pool, and wireless internet, Wooo HOO. Then, the helpful desk clerk tells us about the free breakfasts and free ‘light’ dinners, which tonight was tacos and salad bar, for which we have a weakness. We can swim, we can eat, we can use the internet, and we don’t even have to leave the hotel.
In their little market, I searched for some microwave popcorn, but couldn’t find any. Maybe they were just out, so I asked at the desk and she reached under the counter, handed me a package of popcorn and said it was free.
It doesn’t take much to make me happy. Life is sweet!
Sunday in South Dakota
We were on the road out of St. Joseph by 7:09 a.m. and I was driving. Conditions could not have been better – few cars, we zip from Missouri into Iowa, up into South Dakota, turning west at Sioux Falls, where we learn that South Dakota has a speed limit of 75 mph, wooo HOOOO!
We have been watching all the American farmland – we’ve seen a lot of farmland:
Once we got into South Dakota, we began seeing signs for the Corn Palace. You may not have heard about the Corn Palace, but it is built every year from corn, by local artists, and is a big deal in Mitchell, South Dakota. We can’t drive by Mitchell without going to see it; it changes every year, but is always . . . hmm . . . sort of spectacular, in a very corny sort of way. It really does grow on you.
So we exit the highway to go see the Corn Palace and discover that it is also a big street festival this weekend, so it was really a fun place to be as I was snapping a few photos of this year’s Corn Palace decorations . . .
And then we ran across town to visit the big Cabelas so AdventureMan could buy a new hat:
There are dead stuffed animals everywhere, displayed . . .
From there, some of our joy of arriving in South Dakota paled as we slogged all the way to Wall. It’s my fault. I had found a town called Kadoka, at the head of the Badlands Loop, and I was sure there would be hotels there, but since we don’t really know where we are going to land every night, I hadn’t really checked or made any reservations.
It gets worse. AdventureMan carefully got all the AAA information for our trip, but then somehow left the travel books by his side of the bed. I was supposed to get an iPhone so I could find places and make reservations as we travelled, but I never got one, mostly because no one ever has any. So sometimes AdventureMan will tell me to look it up on my iPhone and sometimes I will tell him to look it up in the AAA books, but that is a really, really bad idea when we are both tired and wishing we had a place to stay.
So I did what I often did, and prayed for a miracle.
I feel kind of bad wasting God’s time on my frivolous needs, like a nice place to spend the night, when he has a lot of more important things on his plate, but in desperation, I flat out prayed.
And a miracle happened. When we drove into Wall, we went left, and there were some little cabins and a man who wanted to show them to us. They were brand new, and utterly clean, and full of charming attention to detail, with a great big good bed, and TV, and wireless internet and . . . well, everything, including a discount. Now that, my friend, is the grace of God, a miracle, a prayer answered even better than anything I could have asked for.
We love the Badlands. This is our second time in the area; it has a weird, ascetic kind of beauty. It is the passion and fury of weather and seasons against natural elements and stone loses. Tomorrow we will drive through, and end up at a spa in Hot Springs, SD, where all these hours of driving will be massaged away. You can check it out here: Red River Rock Resort Hotel and Spa. Come visit the Badlands. Come stay in these lovely cabins and drive through the haunting environment.
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