Doc by Mary Doria Russell
Mary Doria Russell is one of my favorite authors because she tackles large topics fearlessly, humorously and with great compassion. I first read her many years ago in a novel called Children Of God; you can read it stand-alone as I did, but I should have read The Sparrow, which preceded it. That one is about the Jesuits who take the Gospel into outer space, and has some laugh-out-loud moments in the midst of utter hopelessness. Yes. She’s that kind of author, my kind of woman.
Here is the ending Question and Answer from an interview at the back of Doc, an interview with John Connelly:
Q: Authors are often asked what advice they’d give young writers. I would like to ask you a similar question: What do you think the worst advice a young writer could get is?
Mary Doria Russell: Major in English. Join a writer’s group. Blog.
My advice is to major in and do something REAL. Have an actual 3-D life of your own. And please, shut up about it until you’ve got something genuinely wise or useful or thoughtful to share. Then again, I’m a cranky old lady! What the hell do I know?
Reading a book about legendary heroes of the Old West is not something I looked forward to, so the book languished on my “to read” pile until one day I picked it up just because it is written by Mary Doria Russell, and because she has knocked my socks off with every book I’ve read by her.
It starts off slow, summing up the early genteel years of John Henry Holliday in Georgia, just prior to, during and after the War Between the States. At 22 he is diagnosed with acute tuberculosis, and is advised that a drier climate out West might provide him with a more comfortable life, as short as it was likely to be. He had trained as a dentist, so he had a skill. Times were hard, and while he was a very very good dentist, it was a good thing he also had skills with card playing, to supplement his income when people didn’t have the money to go to the dentist.
Don’t skip over the early years, because what happens in the early years resonates into his years living in the West. The majority of the book takes place in Dodge, a border town where laws are made over a card game and by the men who will profit from them. Lives are hard, and short. While it is surely the wild west, the focus is on the relationships Doc builds – Wyatt and Morgan Earp (all the Earp brothers), Bat Masterson, the gals . . . here is where Russell’s artistry shines; the cardboard figures begin to become real people. We start to like one or two, admire another, despise one more.
Here’s what I love about Mary Doria Russell – without being at all preachy, she makes you stop and think about some of the values you hold most dear. Once you get west, 80% of the women featured in the book are prostitutes. Most of the characters drink heavily, and routinely use drugs which are today restricted to prescriptions. There is corruption, and murder, and arson, and abortion, and contraception, and adultery, and there is no one character who is purely good or purely evil, they are all complicated, just as we are. She can lead you to dislike a character, who at just the right moment knows just the right thing to say, and suddenly, you see that character differently, because another facet of his or her character has been revealed.
In the questions at the back of the book, we are asked if we were to meet Doc Holliday, would we like him? I had to ask the question the other way around – if I were to meet Doc Holliday, how would he perceive me? I found myself thinking outside the box, found myself thinking that if I knew my life were going to be very very short, would I want to hang around with normal people, dull, predictable people? Maybe people who look better on the outside than they are, or think more highly of themselves than they ought? Doc Holliday hung around with lawmen and gamblers and prostitutes and bartenders; his patients were law-abiding church-going citizens. Who gave greater color and meaning to his life? Who were more likely to be down-to-earth and practical and unpretentious?
There is an absolutely delightful segment about a Jesuit priest from an old Hungarian aristocratic family who finds himself riding out to visit all the small Catholic Indian parishes on a donkey, replacing a highly popular priest who is very sick; he is teased and mocked and treated with disrespect. One night, cold and wet, covered with dirt and filth in the desert, he has an epiphany that changes his life. Mary Doria Russell books have these luminous moments, worth reading the entire book for, and which will bring a smile of memory to your face long after you have finished reading the book.
By Secret Ballot
I hear people talking back and forth; feeling one another out. Most assume their friends will vote Republican; it’s Republican country up here in the westernmost part of Florida. Yards are littered with Romney – Ryan signs, with a few timid Obama signs here and here in a yard or on a car fender.
My Dad taught us, when we were very young, that the only appropriate answer when asked how one would vote is “I am voting by secret ballot.” He taught us how precious the right is to cast your vote and to know that no one can intimidate you into voting for someone else, because we vote by secret ballot. No husband can command his wife, no father can command his family, no minister can command his church. We each vote our individual conscience.
So we have the luxury of worrying whether we will vote the right candidates into office. We can only do the best we can with the information we have. I don’t want opinions, I want to see where a candidate stands on the issues that are important to me. And, in the end, I trust in the Lord:
Psalm 20
Now this I know:
The Lord gives victory to his anointed.
He answers him from his heavenly sanctuary
with the victorious power of his right hand.
7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.
8 They are brought to their knees and fall,
but we rise up and stand firm.
9 Lord, give victory to the king!
Answer us when we call!
When I hear people moaning in the locker room, or jeering in the parking lot, I walk right by. It’s not my problem. I vote my conscience, and I leave the outcome in the Lord’s hands.
Fairbanks, Alaska or Brazil
I would have loved to be able to actually watch and see when the actual 2 millionth visitor visited, but as it does, life got in the way. There were things that needed doing, people that needed time and attention, and I by the time I got back to check, I had already gone over.
Using StatCounter, I was able to go back 78 people and figure out that it was either the visitor from Brasil or a visitor from Fairbanks, Alaska.
A couple times, I have thought I would quit blogging, like when I hit 5 years, then six, or maybe when I hit 2 million hits . . . Now, I don’t know. There are times when it is hard to get inspired, hard to think of anything I might have to say that you might find interesting, too.
I have a little trick. When I am stumped, I think of our aqua aerobics group in Doha, Qatar. We weren’t very serious, but we were very committed. We had to show up because the others counted on us. Our motto was “any exercise is better than no exercise” and on very cold days in January, exercise counted as sitting in the hot tub and kicking. We talked to pass the time, and not to think about exercising. We talked about books we had read, dishes we had cooked, movies we have seen, and events in the news. So when I can’t think of anything much to say, I think about my friends, the Aqua Babes (LOL!) and I can usually come up with something.
A long time ago, in Kuwait, there was a blogger called (something) Red, I followed, and she thought about quitting and asked us to give her reasons why or why not. I remember writing that we blog because it’s what we do, we write because it is something in us that needs to be written. Until I wrote that to her, I didn’t even know that I thought that. I guess that is why I keep on, because there is something in me that needs to do what I am doing, and when I don’t need to do it, I will stop.
Summer in Seattle Comes to Pensacola
(LOL, not quite there yet)
Today is a gorgeous Seattle summer day, lows last night in the low 40’s, and high today MIGHT hit 60. It’s a great day for being outside, trimming back the rose bushes, taking cuttings for some new starts. It’s a great day for mulching, weeding, all those things I dread when the weather is hot and humid.
Only tiny drawback is the mosquitos; we have both nile fever and dengue to worry about with those pesky mosquitos, as well as other mosquito borne illnesses. I actually have a beautiful mosquito netting we bought in Bruges for when we lived in Germany, with our windows open all summer, but we have our windows open so seldom it is hardly worth it to put it up, and I think it annoys Adventureman having to get in and out of bed with the net, LOL!
We still have tomatoes and peppers and eggplants ripening, our pomegranates are ready, and our lemons are beginning to ripen – it is a great day to be alive.
Not the Day I Expected
Last night just before we went to bed, I reminded AdventureMan to set his alarm clock back for the end of daylight savings time. It was so much fun, having an extra hour to do things, to read. It was so relaxing, waking up and knowing we had plenty of time to get to church. I got up, fixed my coffee and changed all the clocks downstairs.
As we drove to church, I noticed all the outdoor clocks along the way, still on the same old time. I was feeling very smug.
When we drove into the parking lot, it was full, which was odd, because it was early, even for the early service. When we saw people leaving, as we were driving in, I had the “aha” moment.
Oh wait. This isn’t the first week-end in November . . . 😦 I’ve gotten ahead of myself. I got the fruitcakes all done and I was ready for November, so ready that somehow, I thought it was a week later . . .
We missed the early service, LOL. We always think of the early service as Episcopal Lite; the express version. Instead, we attended the 10:30 service, and had a great treat at the end, Ken Keradin playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, you might know it as background music for other creepy movies.
You know how once a day gets started the wrong way, the rest of the day just seems weird? It is a gorgeous, chilly day, bright sunlight, and I can’t get started on any of my projects. I feel jangled, turned a little upside down. Now I have to go through all the clock changes again next week-end!
It’s Demographics . . .
I never thought I would see this day:
I remember when we lived in the Tampa area, we had a mortgage at 8%. We were selling the house, and I got a lot of calls from people who wanted me to take my next mortgage with them. I remember one guy, when I laughed at the rate he offered me, he asked what rate I thought I could get. I said 6% – and I told him, it’s demographics. The baby boomers are aging and are going to start selling or downsizing. There isn’t going to be the same market for housing that there used to be. He laughed at me and wished me luck before hanging up.
I think I got the next mortgage around 7%. We only had it five years and paid it off, and when we got the next mortgage, it was at 5.5% and we laughed every time we made a payment.
When we bought this house, we had a mortgage at 4%. To me, I had thought 6% was about the lowest mortgages could go, I was so so so so wrong.
Now, when I see these mortgage rates, I feel like I SHOULD buy something, but we are all paid off and we don’t need anything more. It sure is tempting, but it’s like Sam’s Club, where you get a great deal on nutmeg, if you need 10 lbs of nutmeg, but who can use ten pounds of nutmeg in a lifetime? It just doesn’t make sense, but the low rate is SO tempting . . .
Discover Relaxing Riyadh
I still get ads from Jazeera airlines, although I no longer live in Kuwait and have asked them for three years to take my name off their mailing list. I have unsuccessfully unsubscribed like fifteen times; now I just have it all sent to spam.
But today, as I was looking over the spam to be sure I wasn’t emptying my box of anything important, I saw this:
Discover Relaxing Riyadh – استمتع بعطلتك في الرياض
LOL – Relaxing Riyadh. A group of the ad guys must have been rolling on the floor when they created that one . . . Or maybe they meant that apart from the spine-tingling traffic, there isn’t a whole lot going on in Riyadh, especially on the social scene . . .
Your Vote – The Power of We (Blog Action Day 2012)
This year, in the United States we are going through a vicious process, that of choosing one candidate over another for political office. Many people are so put-off by the mechanics of the process that they opt out of the choosing altogether. Others are just too busy to vote, beset by the needs of family, job, car pool, church, social activities, etc. in spite of the ease with which one can ask for and receive an absentee ballot.
You need only live in a country where people have no meaningful vote to quickly learn the value of your vote. Your vote may be just one, but in a democracy, where just one vote can turn an election – your vote counts. Together, with other voters of your persuasion, your vote counts.
There has never been a country where women have the vote and men don’t. Sadly, the opposite is true; there are still countries where women are not considered fully qualified to vote. Less than 100 years ago, our own country was one of them. Yes, it’s true, we didn’t get the vote until 1920. I reprint the following from a post I wrote several years ago, a post I have never forgotten, because it was so shocking to me when I read the price these women paid that I might freely vote today.
“The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often
mistaken for insanity.’”
We may have different preferences for who gets elected; that doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is the power of we – that we care enough about our country and its policies to exercise our right as citizens, to get out there and vote.
This is reblogged from July 17, 2008:
WHY EVERY WOMAN SHOULD VOTE
This is the story of our Grandmothers, and Great-grandmothers, as they
lived only 90 years ago. It was not until 1920 that women were granted
the right to go to the polls and vote.
Thus unfolded the ‘Night of Terror’ on Nov. 15, 1917, when the warden at
the Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia ordered his guards to teach a lesson
to the suffragists imprisoned there because they dared to picket Woodrow
Wilson’s White House for the right to vote. The women were innocent and
defenseless. And by the end of the night they were barely alive. Forty
prison guards wielding clubs and their warden’s blessing went on a
rampage against the 33 women wrongly convicted of ‘obstructing sidewalk
traffic.’
They beat Lucy Burn, chained her hands to the cell bars above her head
and left her hanging for the night, bleeding and gasping for air. They
hurled Dora Lewis into a dark cell, smashed her head against an iron bed
and knocked her out cold. Her cell mate, Alice Cosu, thought Lewis was
dead and suffered a heart attack. Additional affidavits describe the
guards grabbing, dragging, beating, choking, slamming, pinching,
twisting and kicking the women.
For weeks, the women’s only water came from an open pail. Their
food–all of it colorless slop–was infested with worms. When one of the
leaders, Alice Paul, embarked on a hunger strike, they tied her to a
chair, forced a tube down her throat and poured liquid into her until
she vomited. She was tortured like this for weeks until word was
smuggled out to the press.
So, refresh my memory. Some women won’t vote this year because–why,
exactly? We have carpool duties? We have to get to work? Our vote
doesn’t matter? It’s raining?
Last week, I went to a sparsely attended screening of HBO’s new movie
‘Iron Jawed Angels.’ It is a graphic depiction of the battle these women
waged so that I could pull the curtain at the polling booth and have my
say. I am ashamed to say I needed the reminder.
All these years later, voter registration is still my passion. But the
actual act of voting had become less personal for me, more rote.
Frankly, voting often felt more like an obligation than a privilege.
Sometimes it was inconvenient.
My friend Wendy, who is my age and studied women’s history, saw the HBO
movie , too. When she stopped by my desk to talk about it, she looked
angry. She was–with herself. ‘One thought kept coming back to me as I
watched that movie,’ she said. ‘What would those women think of the way
I use–or don’t use–my right to vote? All of us take it for granted
now, not just younger women, but those of us who did seek to learn.’ The
right to vote, she said, had become valuable to her ‘all over again.’
HBO released the movie on video and DVD. I wish all history, social
studies and government teachers would include the movie in their
curriculum. I want it shown on Bunco night, too, and anywhere else women
gather. I realize this isn’t our usual idea of socializing, but we are
not voting in the numbers that we should be, and I think a little shock
therapy is in order.
It is jarring to watch Woodrow Wilson and his cronies try to persuade a
psychiatrist to declare Alice Paul insane so that she could be
permanently institutionalized. And it is inspiring to watch the doctor
refuse. Alice Paul was strong, he said, and brave. That didn’t make her
crazy. The doctor admonished the men: ‘Courage in women is often
mistaken for insanity.’
Please, if you are so inclined, pass this on to all the women you know.
We need to get out and vote and use this right that was fought so hard
for by these very courageous women. Whether you vote democratic,
republican or independent party – remember to vote.
History is being made.
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Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 