Jeannette Walls: The Glass Castle
The Glass Castle was a hugely popular best seller in the USA, and it must have been while I was gone. A part of me remembers reading a little bit about it and deciding it wasn’t my kind of book, but after reading Half Broke Horses, I had forgotten what the subject matter was and was excited to have another Jeannette Walls book I could read.
Big mistake. This book is nothing like Half Broke Horses.
Or maybe it is. Maybe what I loved about Half Broke Horses was the voice of an amazing woman, and maybe what kept me reading The Glass Castle is the voice of an amazing child who tells a heart breaking story. Or maybe it isn’t so heartbreaking, because the children survive. They are scarred and damaged, but never so damaged or loony or self-deceived as their parents.
I don’t like reading books about kids whose parents don’t take good care of them. Oprah chose a lot of those books in her book club. These books depress me. I cannot imagine how parents can be so self-absorbed, how they can take on the responsibilities of children and then not put those children first. How can they?
The Glass Castle stars the daughter of Lily Casey Smith, who is the mother of Jeannette Walls, and her husband, who is Jeannette’s father. The book opens with little three year old Jeannette proudly cooking up a hot dog. Her mother is busy painting and has told her to find something to eat. Her nightgown catches fire, and she is terribly burned. She spends a long time in the hospital, which ends with her father taking her out in a hurry, bundling her into the car, already loaded with her family, and “doing the skedaddle” which is leaving town just in front of the bill collectors.
This is her life. From time to time, their alcoholic Dad will take a job and bring home some of the paycheck (he drinks and gambles most of it) and when he won’t work, on rare occasion, their mother will take a teaching job, but the kids have to get her out of bed in the morning, have to grade her papers and make her lesson plans. Often there is not enough for the family to eat. They don’t stay in one place; they ‘skedaddle’ before they are evicted for non-payment of rent. They eat cold food – when they eat – because the parents didn’t pay the electric bill.
The Dad is smart, charming and cajoling, and when he is sober, the kids learn amazing things from him, and educated engineer. Unfortunately, he is not often sober. He chases after alcohol and he chases after women; the people in the towns where they live know it and the children learn to know it, too, to their constant humiliation. When he wheedles money off his kids, and promises to repay, he asks “Have I ever let you down?” The answer is so stunningly obvious as to be heartbreaking – Yes. Yes, again and again and again.
The Mother is equally irresponsible. One time, when the family is starving, she is in bed and occasionally goes under the covers, where Jeannette discovers her mother has a chocolate bar hidden that she can eat – while her children go hungry.
The author’s voice is never self pitying, she just lays it all out and leaves us to draw our own conclusions. Each child escapes the family as soon as possible; the children plan and save their money to get out, first sending off the oldest sister, then Jeannette, then the son. They all head for New York, where they find work and support themselves. Like bad pennies, Mom and Dad show up in New York, cadge meals and money and join the ranks of the homeless in New York, going from food pantry to soup kitchen, and diving dumpsters for their worldly needs.
This is not a feel good novel. The good part about it is that children can survive this kind of criminal neglect, and become a successful author as Jeannette Walls has done. I am so glad I read Half Broke Horses first, because her grandmother is such an admirable character, whereas her parents are scum and I just felt so angry when I read the matter-of-fact descriptions of their behavior that I was glad they were not where I could get my hands on them.
I don’t know any parents as bad as Rose Mary and Rex Walls, but I know I believe this – if you choose to marry, and if you choose to have children, know that children require time, and love, and energy, and patience. Know that if you have grand ambitions, or an addiction, or a character flaw, you won’t be able to provide for your children’s physical, emotional and spiritual needs, unless you are willing to sacrifice your own needs and wants. While the children in the book loved their parents, they recognized that their parents were sadly lacking in the parenting roles. The way these children were neglected will make me remember this book for a long time.
Would I recommend it? Yes. It is a gripping book, at times even horrifyingly humorous, as when Jeannette figures out how to find lunch food in the garbage cans when all the other kids have finished eating. It is not a feel-good book. It is a horrifying indictment of self-absorbed, neglectful parents, parents you will love to hate.
If I sound a little overwrought, it’s because I worked with the homeless. We were able to help many, but I also ran into families like this family, families who would prefer not taking any help if it meant they had to play by the rules, you know, rules like “you have to take care of your children.” We had all kinds of classes and forums and mentors to help with learning skills, like feeding children well on a small budget, learning to discipline, simple skills, survival skills.
The problem is that these skills require self-discipline, and many of the parents would rather not take help than have to exercise self-discipline. I saw women who would sacrifice their children for their current boyfriend, a woman who was severely angry with her daughter for reporting a family member had molested her, a man who didn’t want to take a job that would ‘tie him down’ when his family was starving. I saw this, with my own eyes, and there is no way you can MAKE people take good care of their children. You have to ask if the children are better off with these parents, or ‘in the system.’ Not a pretty choice.
This book, too, is on Amazon.com. Reading it is like watching a disaster on CNN. You don’t want to believe it is happening and you can’t look away.
Jeannette Walls: Half Broke Horses
About a month ago, I picked this up off the stack of “Read Me’s” . . . ummm . . . errr . . . one of the stacks of “Read Me’s.” (If there is some sort of emoticon for mild embarrassment, insert it here; one of my fatal flaws is acquiring book I WANT to read and having more books than I have time to read.)
I think Amazon recommended Half Broke Horses to me, and I didn’t know why. They keep track of what I buy and make recommendations, which over the many years I have been using Amazon.com to buy books has become more and more relevant to the kinds of things I actually buy and read. So I bought Half Broke Horses, and another one recommended by the same author, then put them in the stack. It is only because I had read whatever I put on top of them that I ended up reading.
I casually started reading, without a lot of anticipation. The first chapter starts off in the early early days of our country, in the wilds of West Texas, as a girl and her younger brother and sister are out checking the cows, who suddenly go crazy, even jumping over fences which under almost every circumstance successfully pen them in. The young girl recognized something strange was going on and figured it was a flash flood coming, got her siblings up in the tree and keeps them awake all night, as the flood hits, hoping the tree will hold and not wash away.
What is your first thought, reading that? Mine was – Where are her parents?? No one is out searching for them?
The next day, the flood recedes enough for them to make their way home back to a primitive dwelling hollowed out in the high side of a riverbank, dirt floors, dirt crumbling down on them, dark, small, smokey. Yes, there is a mother and a father, and they love their children, but these are very different times. These are hard times, where there is no grocery store, no nearby doctor, where babies die and children have fatal accidents all the time. Life can be short and brutal. The kids have some schooling, mostly at home, they learn to read and write and add and subtract, so they can keep track of home related business. They also work hard, every child has work around the ranch that needs doing, and work comes first or the family won’t survive.
The heroine, Lily Casey Smith, is a real person, the grandmother of the author, Jeannette Walls. This is called a true-life novel. From all the stories she heard about her grandmother growing up, and from knowing her grandmother, and from all the legends about her grandmother she was able to verify, she built a skeleton, and then filled it in with conversations and even a few events that she had to imagine.
Lily Casey left her family at 15 to ride her horse 25 days across Texas to take a teaching job in a one-room schoolhouse. (My jaw dropped, too!) After several years of teaching, she goes to Chicago to become educated and licensed as a teacher, marries, annuls the marriage, returns home, finds a teaching job, races horses, marries again, has children, has a huge ranch, loses the huge ranch, manages a huge ranch . . . her story is bigger than life, but so is the person of her grandmother, who never falls apart, but looks life in the eye and copes with it. Better than coping, she dominates.
Her major opponents are tough economic times, and dramatic and devastating weather conditions. Rain can fail to fall for months, cattle can die in an unexpected cold snap. At the best of times, you have enough to eat and a roof over your head.
I never wanted the book to end, and, in a sense, it didn’t. Jeannette Walls big best seller, The Glass Castle, takes up with just a little overlap where Half Broke Horses leaves off.
Here is what I loved: I loved the voice of Lily Casey Smith. She’s the kind of woman I want for a friend. She’s smart. She has a sense of how things work in the world. She experiences tragedies, but she doesn’t let them hurt her self-confidence. She can be beaten, but she always gets up again. She’s a problem solver. She never once lets being a woman get in the way of being the person she was born to be. She overcomes. She doesn’t sugar coat; she tells it as she sees it. And you know you can count on what she says to be the truth as she believes it. I truly hated for this book to end.
You can find this book at Amazon.com used under a dollar to new hardcover around $15. It is worth every cent.
Saudi Women Drive Today
From today’s BBC News:
Saudi Arabia women drive cars in protest at ban
Women in Saudi Arabia have been openly driving cars in defiance of an official ban on female drivers in the ultra-conservative kingdom.
The direct action has been organised on social network sites, where women have been posting images and videos of themselves behind the wheel.
The Women2Drive Facebook page said the direct action would continue until a royal decree reversed the ban.
Last month, a woman was arrested after uploading a video of herself driving.
Manal al-Sherif was accused of “besmirching the kingdom’s reputation abroad and stirring up public opinion”, but was released after 10 days having promised not to drive again.
“All that we need is to run our errands without depending on drivers,” said one woman in the first film posted in the early hours of Friday morning.
The film showed the unnamed woman talking as she drove to a supermarket and parking.
We can’t move around without a maleβ
Maha al-Qahtani
Female driver
“It is not out of love for driving or traffic or the experience. All this is about is that if I wanted to go to work, I can go. If I needed something I can go and get it.
“I think that society is ready to welcome us.”
Another protester said she drove around the streets of Riyadh for 45 minutes “to make a point”.
“I took it directly to the streets of the capital,” said Maha al-Qahtani, a computer specialist at the Ministry of Education.
Religious fatwa
On Twitter, Mrs Qahtani described the route she had taken around the city with her husband, saying: “I decided that the car for today is mine.”
Her husband said she was carrying her essential belongings with her and was “ready to go to prison without fear”, AFP news agency reported.
One woman who asked not to be named told the BBC driving was often considered to be “something really minor”.
The ban is one of a number of restrictions Saudi women face in daily life
“It’s not one of your major rights. But we tell them that even if you give us all the basic and big rights, that you are claiming are more important than driving, we can’t enjoy practising those rights because the mobility is not there.
“We can’t move around without a male.”
The motoring ban is not enforced by law, but is a religious fatwa imposed by conservative Muslim clerics. It is one of a number of severe restrictions on women in the country.
Supporters of the ban say it protects women and relieves them of the obligation to driver, while also preventing them from leaving home unescorted or travelling with an unrelated male.
But the men and women behind the campaign – emboldened by uprisings across the Middle East and Arab world – say they hope the ban will be lifted and that other reforms will follow.
Amnesty International has said the Saudi authorities “must stop treating women as second-class citizens”, describing the ban as “an immense barrier to their freedom of movement”.
The last mass protest against the ban took place in 1980, when a group of 47 women were arrested for driving and severely punished – many subsequently lost their jobs.
The women were angered that female US soldiers based in the kingdom after the war with Kuwait could drive freely while they could not.
Doha Debates and Where Are You From?
The Baked Salmon Dijon for last night’s dinner took a little longer to cook because Joe Patti’s cuts the salmon steaks so thick (we cook two, split one and freeze the other for another night), so while I was waiting, I flipped around and found WSRE’s Doha Debate coverage.
Who knew?
I didn’t know I could still watch the debates in Pensacola! This one was about whether or not Egypt should postpone elections in the interest of forming a more representative democracy. The vote was 84% in favor; the two young supporters carried the house. π This was the March debate and you can hear the entire 48 minutes by clicking here.
The winning female debater used a slogan I had not heard, but I love, because it is graphic and memorable – “we do not want a fast-food democracy that brings only indigestion.” The younger debaters want to scrap the entire constitution and re-write it, claiming the current structure needs to be thoroughly revised in order for democracy to have a chance of success.
I love it that these issues have a forum for debate in Doha.
Following the debate was a cringe-worthy video about asking people where they are from. His point was that when he is asked where he is from, and he answers ‘The Bronx,’ people say “No, where are you REALLY from?’ and the implication is racist. He says it is the same as saying that his color is darker, therefore he is not like us, so he must not be from around here.
I’ve asked that question. Never meant it to be insulting, but I will stop now. Or I will only ask those with a slight accent, maybe. Wherever we have lived, we have been asked that question – but then, in Kuwait and Qatar, most of the work force is not Qattari or Kuwaiti. Even in Germany, however, where we might look a lot like them, we are asked where we are from. It used to be a courteous way of showing interest, or initiating a conversation.
One time in Doha, a local man asked me about my breeding, LOL. I told him I was a product of the American melting pot, and from the earliest settlers to the latest, my family includes just about a little of everything. We were at the veterinarian’s office, and I knew the purity of his dog’s blood lines mattered, and probably his own, but I also felt a little insulted, and I haven’t forgotten it. Doesn’t science teach us that diversity in blood lines is a good thing?
We are in the middle of a heat spell in Pensacola, early this year, and because we haven’t gotten anywhere near the normal rainfall, there are also wildfires. The firefighters are struggling to put out the fires, and also fighting heat exhaustion. AdventureMan is out watering all our new plantings, and our tomatoes, every morning, God bless him, because when the temperatures go high, I just want to stay inside.
Baked Salmon Dijon
We took separate cars to water aerobics this morning as my computer kept telling me I didn’t have an aircard (?????) and AdventureMan had his own errands to run. First, though, I had to make a run to Joe Pattis to pick up some salmon steaks . . . I have a yearning for Baked Salmon Dijon.
So easy to prepare. So good!
Baked Dijon Salmon
Serves 4
Ingredients
β’ 1/4 cup butter, melted
β’ 3 tablespoons Dijon mustard
β’ 1 1/2 tablespoons honey
β’ 1/4 cup dry bread crumbs
β’ 1/4 cup finely chopped pecans
β’ 4 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley
β’ 4 (4 ounce) fillets salmon
β’ salt and pepper to taste
β’ 1 lemon, for garnish
Directions
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F (200 degrees C).
2. In a small bowl, stir together butter, mustard, and honey. Set aside. In another bowl, mix together bread crumbs, pecans, and parsley.
3. Brush each salmon fillet lightly with honey mustard mixture, and sprinkle the tops of the fillets with the bread crumb mixture.
4. Bake salmon 12 to 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until it flakes easily with a fork. Season with salt and pepper, and garnish with a wedge of lemon.
This recipe, like many of the recipes I try comes from allrecipes.com, which sends me an e-mail every day with recipes I might like to try. At least once a week there is something of interest.
Once at the Geek Squad, my computer worked just fine. He mentioned sometimes an aging router can play tricks like that. Oh aaargh. I’m just glad everything is working fine for now. It’s all a mystery to me, why these computers work sometimes and sometimes they don’t, it’s all like smoke and mirrors, or magic.
Very Long Lunar Eclipse June 15
I found this on AOL news/ Huffington post where the article goes on to say that weather permitting, those in the Middle East have a good chance of experiencing the entire eclipse, which will be longer than most lunar eclipses.
LOS ANGELES — The year’s first total eclipse of the moon will last an unusually long time, a rare celestial treat for a wide swath of the globe.
Except if you’re in the United States and Canada. North America will be left out of Wednesday’s lunar spectacle, which will be visible from start to finish from eastern Africa, central Asia, the Middle East and western Australia β weather permitting.
The period when Earth’s shadow completely blocks the moon β known as totality β will last a whopping 1 hour and 40 minutes. The last time the moon was covered for this long was in July 2000, when it lasted 7 minutes longer than that.
You can read the rest of the article HERE
Atlanta: Ethiopian Adventure and Macy’s
One last entry from our recent trip, a happy ending to a happy trip. This is how sweet my husband is to me.
We find Pensacola a very comfortable place to be, and have only found two things lacking. There is no Macy’s, and I do like Macy’s. There are no Ethiopian restaurants, (remember, I just read Cutting for Stone) and we like Ethiopian food. We know Atlanta has both, so we plotted our return trip with a just-enough-time-for-Ethiopian-food-and-shopping.
Isn’t life funny and wonderful? We know Atlanta has Ethiopian restaurants – several – because an almost-niece who has worked in Ethiopia lives in Atlanta, and could recommend several. Using the handy iPhone, we found a Marriott Residence Inn hidden away in a quiet neighborhood near Macy’s and not far from the Queen of Sheba. Although the hotel was full, they had a wonderful room for us, with a view of downtown Atlanta:
We found the phone number for the Queen of Sheba, called – and they were open for lunch!
When we got to the plaza where the Queen of Sheba was located, we just laughed. We were back in Kuwait!
And here is what the Queen of Sheba looks like from the outside:
Inside, daytime, the atmosphere is serene:
Nights and weekends, they have jazz and lively evenings:
We ordered the Vegetarian mix, a variety of Ethiopian vegetable/legume based dishes, a variety of tastes and heat, served on Injera, the large, pancake-like bread. When it came, it was beautiful, and it tasted as good as it looked. They gave us a tray of extra injera, and we ate almost all of it!
It was so good. SO good. We decided we would go back for dinner, after shopping. AdventureMan took me to Macy’s, and only called me twice in the hours I was looking and trying on.
Here’s the problem. I have a style, but I am terrified someone is going to recommend me for What Not to Wear, so I try to find a couple little things now and then to update my look. I have a tactic: take armsfull of clothes into the dressing room. Try on quickly. You usually can tell immediately.
Here is what you hear. “No.” “Oh, NO!” “No” “No” “No” “Hmmm, maybe” “no” “Holy Smokes, NO!” “Hmmm, maybe” etc. Then I try on the maybes, and out of twenty or thirty items, I might come out with one or two. Some young styles are just too young, some skirts just too short, some camis just too revealing. I don’t want to be one of those pathetic older women trying to be hot, I just want to look decently attractive, that’s the goal.
Meeting up hours later with AdventureMan (I know, I know, I owe him big time for this) we laugh to discover we are neither of us hungry for dinner. We decide to go back to the hotel, but dinner time comes and we are still so full from lunch that we can’t consider dinner. Even though the dishes were vegetarian, that injera must have swelled in our bellies. We can’t eat another bite!
A Different Kind of Sadly Hilarious
I was just checking if there might be anything on TV tonight worth watching, and I got caught watching – in horror and fascination – Rock Pop and Do-Wop, on National Public Television.
Horrified – because these 60’s and 70’s bands are playing to full concert houses full of people who look OLD like my parents – oh wait – they look like me! Horrors! The music still makes me feel like a teenager! All these people in the audience are looking like true believers, singing along with the songs, getting up and dancing, like they can’t resist the music. No dignity! They are acting like teenagers! Horrors! I still know all the words, even to songs I don’t even remember any more, once they play the first few notes, I know all the words!
Hilarious, because these acts have to strain a little to hit all the notes, but most of them have had eye-lifts, and some of them can even still dance. They can still rock the songs, and they are totally wowing the audience. The hair styles – so awful they are almost cool again. It’s just wrong to have OLD people singing these young love songs.
Poison Ivy! One Fine Day! Blue Moon! I Only Have Eyes for You! Step-by-Step! This Magic Moment! Only You! Twilight Time! The Great Pretender! (Holy Smokes!The audience is going crazy!)
The costumes – oh my heavens. I remember when my high school BF was in a band and my father was horrified by his turquoise blue band jacket, and now . . . I can sort of see what he meant. Pretty awful, but oh – what fun. I remember the fights over whether we should be listening to this music, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the bad boys of rock. They all look so innocent a hundred years later.
There is a part of me that is still 12 years old, listening to this music, and there is a part of me watching me watch the program that is horrified at my fascination.
Sadly Hilarious
Peaches, sweet, juicy peaches are coming into season, and I couldn’t resist making up a peach crisp for a lunch I am giving today. Since I was making one, I made several, some smaller ones to give away. Dropped one off with a friend, then went by to see our son and his wife and Baby Q, the Happy Baby.
As I walked in, Happy Baby came running, screeching happy sounds, so happy to see . . . me? No, he ran right by me, did not want my hug, he was looking for AdventureMan. As I stood with my arms open to hug him, he was desperately looking out the window, looking for the fun guy who really matters. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry; I wanted that hug all for myself, but it is truly hilarious how much he loves AdventureMan, and how he watched and watched and watched out the window, hoping he was coming, too. The longer he watched, the funnier it got.
Later in the evening, we both went by, so Happy Baby got some time with his “Ga Ga”and then, guess what, I also got my hug once he had had his special time with his Grandpa. π
Dancing and Drinks
Yesterday was our 38 year wedding anniversary, and it was a great day. Last night, we went for dancing and drinks.
LOL.
Our dance class at the YMCA . . . and this month we started the waltz, which we already know how to do, but now we are learning some extras, like turns. It is barely air conditioned in the gym, if at all, so dancing is EXERCISE in the heat we are experiencing – record highs – this year.
And drinks – don’t McDonald’s smoothies count? I totally love the Wild Berry, and I try to tell myself it might even be healthy, it might even have berries, and I try not to think about the sugar. It is only now and then I have one, AdventureMan too, so our anniversary was celebrated in style. Our style, LOL, not exactly the high life, but it works for us.
Recent Comments
intlxpatr on Shampoo Ginger tigerbutterya0c5ff1d… on Shampoo Ginger intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… John on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… intlxpatr on British Soldier Kidnapped, Esc… Wikipedia Donate Button
Amazina
Early Voting in Florida
Here There and Everywhere 