It occurred to me a little while ago that I hadn’t written anything about what I’ve been reading lately, and so maybe I’ll do that because I have to write something and because that’s a way to avoid thinking about the end of summer and the day that I have to send my son off to college and not have him around every day. I just can’t do it.
So I’ve been reading. By my estimation, I’ll probably have finished 25 or 26 books by the end of this calendar year. It’s not very many. When I was young, I tore through a book or two every week. Those were the days, I tell you - my eyesight was excellent, and I had all the time in the world. Then I had babies and I didn’t have any time to read. Then the babies grew up a bit, and I had spare moments here and there. Then there were years of sports and school concerts and birthday parties and doctor visits and parent-teacher conferences, and I’d read in between innings at baseball games or in the waiting room at the dentist’s office or in the parking lot while waiting for a kid to finish practice or rehearsal. And then the kids just up and left and now I have all the time in the world again. It sucks, really.
But back to the books. Books are good. Well, they’re not all good, but books in general are good, is what I meant.
*****
Against Memoir, by Michelle Tea. I myself am going to come out very strongly against memoir pretty soon if I end up reading just one more shock-the-normies overly frank too-much-sexual-information memoir. I was really about to just give up on this one, and not because I was shocked or disgusted (well, I was a little disgusted but not even a tiny bit shocked because I've read all the same stuff in at least five other memoirs proving that I never learn) but because I was bored. Bored and skeptical. It's not that I didn't believe Tea's stories because why would she make these things up, but because I didn't believe her voice. She was trying so hard - SO HARD - to be daring and outrageous and shocking that I couldn’t really even hear what she was saying. But then she wrote this - or said it, because this is from a talk she gave to an lgbtq writers' group: "Give us your goofiness and your dark depths and your weird family and when you stay up eating cheese on the couch watching bad TV and crying, give us when you feel stupid and the big angry fight you had, give us everything…" in addition to all of the sex and drugs and outre transgressiveness and I thought "Yes, exactly, Michelle Tea, now why not follow your own brilliant advice?" Later, she does exactly that in an unflinching and rather lovely essay about her difficult relationship with her working class hard luck mother and stepfather. The essay is suffused with sadness and guilt but the guilt is unnecessary. Tea clearly loves her mother even though she finds her impossible. So the book wasn't a waste, but I probably won't read any more of Michelle Tea’s work.
*****
I started writing this on Monday. Five minutes later it’s Wednesday and my son leaves for school tomorrow, making tonight his last night at home. I swam last night and the water was still nice but the air was very cool, making getting out of the pool much harder than getting in. Today it’s warm, but not hot outside, and the breeze has an edge of Canadian coolness that suggests the imminent arrival of fall. Actually, at my house, the falling part of fall has been in full swing for a week. Our cherry trees are shedding their leaves and I’d crunch through them but I don’t want to crunch through leaves. It’s still August. So let’s talk about another book.
*****
Two Souls Indivisible, by James Hirsch. Our medical students read this during orientation week and so I joined them. It’s an inspiring story about two POWs in Vietnam - Porter Halyburton, who is White and from the South; and Fred Cherry, who was Black (he died in 2016), formed a deep friendship during their shared captivity, which sustained them through terrible suffering and pain. Cherry would likely not have survived without Halyburton, who cared for him through illness and infections resulting from dreadful injuries. The book was originally published in 2005, and in some ways, it does not hold up particularly well. Fred Cherry was apparently rather conservative in his attitudes on race, at least according to Hirsch, and preferred to distinguish himself from Black people involved in the civil rights movement, whom he saw as agitators. This is not to criticize Mr. Cherry, who was clearly a product of his time; but the author’s tone in discussing Cherry’s beliefs is condescendingly approving. Without looking at the publication date, I’d have guessed 1981. It’s a very good story but not such a great book.
*****
July seems like ages ago, doesn’t it? All-Star weekend (Prince Mont Swim League All Stars, that is) was the last Saturday in July. Our son won one of the League scholarships that day and we left the meet very proud and happy though a little sad, since it was our very last summer meet. It was very hot that weekend and after a swim, we went to the first half of Barbenheimer, a 7 PM showing of "Barbie," which was great but would have been worth the price of admission, even if it wasn't great, just for Ryan Gosling's performance of "Push." Hilarious. We saw "Oppenheimer," also great, the next day. Anyway, this is apropos of nothing, except that it was just a few weeks ago, the very heart of summer, but it seems like ages ago, and summer is all but over. I swam last night and the water was very cold. And we just moved our son into his dorm, and we're driving home without him, and I feel lost. Bereft.
*****
OK so the Barbenheimer digression wasn't really apropos of nothing, because now I'm reading American Prometheus, the Robert Oppenheimer biography upon which the movie is based.
*****
The drop off itself wasn't so bad really. I had been dreading it all summer and it hit me hardest when we finally made our way through security and pre-clearance at the Dublin airport last week. As much as I love Ireland, the best part of that vacation was being together, all four of us, every day. That was over. I knew that the boys would be right back at work and doing their own thing as soon as we returned home, and when planning the vacation, I had only left us a few short days between the end of the trip and college move-in day for our youngest. It was all so fast, so rushed. I’m sure that the flight crew and other passengers wondered about the lady who was sitting and crying quietly in her seat, but no one asked me any questions, and I was OK after a few minutes. I tried to watch a movie but the video screen quality on this rather old and beaten-up plane was very poor and so I just returned to my book.
*****
American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin, is what critics used to call a “sweeping biography,” the story of a larger-than-life figure with the events of the day as backdrop. Oppenheimer, one of the greatest scientific geniuses who ever lived, not only witnessed the cataclysmic history of the 20th century, he created it, at least in part. You can admire Oppenheimer or despise him. His life story is compelling either way.
I mostly admire him. One of the most interesting things about Robert Oppenheimer was his self-transformation, from dreamy genius stereotypically absent-minded professor to brilliant administrator and leader. Authors Bird and Sherwin give almost as much attention to Oppenheimer’s remarkable personal gifts - frequent and unexpected kindness, charisma, social brilliance, communication skill - as to his unequaled intellectual gifts, and rightly so. And added to that is that he was just born at the right time and in the right place - the son of sophisticated, wealthy, indulgent Jewish parents, born at the turn of the 20th century, he had all the advantages of travel and education and culture that that background afforded him, combined with timing that placed him in the middle of the most important events of the century. His Jewish background made the race to beat the Nazis in the nuclear weapons race personal, a matter of life and death in the most personal sense.
This is another book published in 2005, and once again, certain aspects do not hold up. 2005 was longer ago than I thought, I guess. For example, Oppenheimer had the brilliant idea to hire local indigenous women to help the Los Alamos wives with housework, thus freeing the white women to help as lab assistants and secretaries and technicians. The authors present this in the most uncritical and unquestioning terms possible, as just another ingenious solution to a practical problem, a win win. Everyone's working and everyone's happy. Never mind that the local women might have preferred to have a chance at one of the lab or office jobs rather than the poorly paid domestic jobs (the book makes no mention of comparative pay rates but I think it's safe to assume that the domestic workers made much less money than the project employees). And there's also very little discussion of how few women (almost none) had real jobs at Los Alamos in the first place.
The book is also almost completely preoccupied with the question of whether or not Oppenheimer was a Communist and although the authors return again and again to the conclusion that he probably was not, they also don't really consider the idea that it should have been OK for Robert Oppenheimer to be acquainted with Communists without having his loyalty to the US constantly questioned.
Outmoded thinking aside, though, the book is very good. The was-he or wasn’t-he inquiries into Oppenheimer’s political background are balanced by long and thoughtful discussions of his accomplishments, his personality and his mind, and his relationships with friends and family and colleagues and enemies. He was interesting enough to merit this much thought and consideration.
*****
It’s Monday now, and Labor Day is a week away and I really miss having my son in the house. It’s a little harder now that the reality has set in and I know that I won’t see and talk to him in person every day. We’re texting back and forth all the time, and he’ll probably come home this weekend, but this is just the beginning of the process of separation, as more and more of his life will be his life, opaque to us except for whatever details he chooses to share. It’s right and normal and natural that this should happen but it’s not easy and it’s not pleasant.
The pool closes in a week. Right now it’s cloudy and dull and not particularly warm but I’m going to swim anyway.
*****
And I did. That was Monday, and now it’s Tuesday, still cloudy and dull and not particularly warm, but I swam last night and I’m going to do it again tonight. Even when the water is cold and the sky is gray and I can feel the summer slipping away, a swim always helps. The pool is open for just six more days and even though I can swim indoors after next Monday, it’s not the same. Swimming indoors is an exercise; it’s a thing to cross off your list, just like any other task. Swimming indoors is lap swimming. It’s not going swimming. You have to be outside somewhere if you want to go swimming. Lap swimming is good for your body. Going swimming is good for your soul. After next Monday, I won’t be able to go swimming anymore. But at least I’ll still be able to read.
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