Pastime

I'm at my son's baseball game, one of the last few games of the season and one of the last few games of my son's high school career. I arrived midway through the 5th inning with Rockville up 6-2. It's the top of the 8th now. 

It's a fun game. The weather is perfect and the teams are evenly matched in on-field and dugout trash talk talent. They're all very funny. They affect a growly deep voice and they shout things like "He's a very healthy boy!" And "Where's the ball? Right field can't see so good!" The idea seems to be to say the most innocuous and inoffensive things possible, in a tone and timbre suitable for the vilest insults. My son is very good at this. It's very amusing. 

*****

The play of the game belongs to a Richard Montgomery outfielder, who just made an insane running, diving catch. A sick catch, as the young people say. A filthy play. The batter tipped his helmet to the fielder who had robbed him of at least a double, and the Rockville dugout applauded. Respect. 

*****

The game is over now. Rockville held the lead and everyone is going home happy. I'm sitting in the bright late afternoon sunshine waiting for my son to pack up his gear and say goodnight to his team. I haven't looked at a schedule but I think they have five games left. 

Book snob

I’m reading Snobbery: The American Version, Joseph Epstein’s very long (well, it seems long) book about the history of snobs and snobbery and snobbishness in America. I don’t know how I ended up with this. It was published in 2002, which was pretty much centuries ago in terms of social commentary. 

Epstein approaches the subject from a (not the, but a) classic American snobby perspective. He’s an academic and writer (and kind of a jerk) who can’t conceal his disdain for most aspects of American life, including democracy and egalitarian social structures, both of which he tries to convince us contribute to snobbery - in other words, the more “classless” a society considers itself, the more prevalent snobbery will be in that society. And maybe he’s right although he doesn’t really make a convincing case, but even if he is right, I think I can live with a few snobs as the price of democracy so the point is moot. 

I have been slogging - slogging, I tell you - through this book for several days now. I’m only about a third of the way through and at this rate I’ll throw off my whole reading schedule for spring.  But I feel compelled to finish it. I have no idea why.  

*****

During the pandemic, I used to order groceries through Instacart. I was a very good tipper so my groceries were always delivered quickly and correctly. Then I started to feel bad about making other people do my shopping - even though I was tipping very well - and it also just cost too much money. But last week, Instacart sent me a postcard with a $20 off promo code. So now I’m waiting for my grocery delivery, with a $20 tip courtesy of Instacart. I feel like a plutocrat, sitting in luxury while others perform my household tasks. 

If you’ve ever used Instacart, then you know that the app offers suggestions - sometimes helpful, sometimes less so - for additional things that you might need to buy. Today’s suggestions included items for my “charcuterie board,” including Ritz-style crackers and a processed cheese spread. I could hear Epstein’s voice in my head, expounding on the connection between taste and snobbery. Do snobs shop at Aldi? Does Instacart snobbishly assume that Aldi shoppers are so lacking in sophistication that we don’t know the difference between charcuterie and an after-school snack? I feel like he could easily take a simple thing like a grocery order and dissect it and examine it 25 different ways, and both explain why a person’s grocery order ranks them as an educated professional or a plebe AND why such distinctions are inherently contrived and artificial but he’s still going to write about them. 

*****

I finally gave up on this absolutely insufferable book when I reached the chapter on college snobbery, a subject about which I know a few things, being the parent of a college student and a high school senior. Epstein, a scholar and college professor, is actually in a position to offer some real insight on the subject of Americans’ obsession with the “right” schools, but he’s too lazy to bother, and instead spends pages sneering at Ivy League pretension with no attempt to examine or illuminate the topic. I don’t often abandon a book less than halfway through but I have limited time on earth and I find myself unwilling to spend any of it thinking about Joseph Epstein’s analysis (lack of) of American snobbery. I feel good about this decision. 

*****

Except that now I'm reading something else that's almost as terrible, but not quite. It's a novel, a much quicker read, and I'm almost finished, so I'll just suck it up and read it until the end. In the future, I'll be a little more selective. I'm a bit of a book snob. 

Squirrel snacks

It’s Friday afternoon and I’m just wrapping up my work week. I worked from home today, with the windows open, feeling the balmy breeze and listening to the birdsong. 

My husband hung a new bird feeder in the side yard, right in front of my office window. We’ve had a hummingbird feeder in that same tree for some time, and I have to think that the sugar water that’s been in there for some time and that I am pretty sure has not been changed for at least a month is fully fermented now. Maybe that’s why I never see any birds at that feeder - it’s a nighttime spot now. But the new feeder is very popular. Every time I looked out the window today, I saw at least one or two birds enjoying a seedy snack. That is what I call entertainment. 

Even more entertaining than the birds was the determined squirrel who ran along the x and y axes of the fences between my yard and the neighbor’s, with a few forays into the tree branches just above the feeder, sniffing and stretching and examining the thing from all angles, trying to figure out how to reach the feeder and snag some seed for himself. 

A few minutes later, I saw the squirrel again. He was on the ground, vacuuming up some seed that had dropped from the feeder. And that seed was delicious, I’m sure, because a minute later, the squirrel had climbed the fence again and was scheming and planning its route to the feeder. He sat on the fence (literally) for a few minutes; wondering, I think, if he had a chance at the feeder. It hangs about a foot or so from one side of the fence and at least two feet or more from the other side. The drop from the tree branch where it’s suspended is about 18 inches. All of these distances are longer than the squirrel’s body, excluding the tail, but he’s stretchy and agile and unafraid to climb, even upside down. And that’s what he did. He got up on a branch and calculated the shortest distance between the branch and the feeder, and then stretched himself far enough to grab onto the hanger. And then he made his move, a half stretch and half jump that landed him upside down and just able to sniff under the lid of the feeder. But not enough to actually get any seed. 

Did you think I was kidding? 

I felt sorry for him. All that planning and scheming, all that work - and he came so close. SO CLOSE! Do squirrels feel frustration, I wondered - was he furious? Was he cursing our stupid bird feeder and and our stupid trees and fences? Did he stamp his little squirrel foot or punch the top of the feeder with his tiny squirrel fist? That’s what I would have done, of course. But the squirrel seemed to maintain his equanimity. He sniffed for a few minutes and then climbed back up into the tree, giving up for the time being. 

Later, my husband drilled a hole into an old frisbee and attached it to the feeder to serve as an anti-squirrel barrier. It’ll probably work. The squirrel couldn’t get past a single obstacle between himself and the seed, let alone two. Some seed will fall out of the feeder, dropped by the careless birds who can have as much as they want, as often as they want, so maybe that’s the best the squirrel can hope for. But I’m rooting for him. Why should the birds get everything handed to them? 

Everybody agrees

I have so many drafts in various stages of completion or lack of, so what am I doing writing something new? Writing a new essay is like buying a new jacket. I have too many of both. I need to just wear what I have. 

But even though I have a ton of jackets (so many jackets), I can always find a hole in my jacket wardrobe, some jacket use case that I cannot address with existing resources. And because I tend to write about the same things over and over again (books, swimming, handbags; and of course, jackets) there are also lots of everyday life situations about which I have not ever written so much as a word. 

Like songs. I write about music a little bit here and there, but not very often. And one day last week as I listened to my new favorite song for the fourth consecutive time, I thought that I should write about falling in love with a song. 

Songs usually have to sneak up on me. I like to sing along with music, and so I tend to listen to songs that I already know and love. There are a lot of them, and it’s a pretty odd collection. Eclectic as it is, though, my favorite songs list is well established. It’s a comfortable little clique. It’s not easy for a new song to break in. 

But it happens. Sometimes, I fall in love with an old song that I’d never thought much about when it was a new song. A few years ago, for example, I happened upon the Richie Havens recording of “Here Comes the Sun,” and it became an instant top ten favorite song for me. I can listen to that song any time. Just a few days ago, I was driving home from work and heard the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” a song that was on the radio all the time when I was a little girl, and it threw me for a loop. That song is so great, and so radically different from the Temptations’ earlier work. That ominous bass line, the gradual build-up, the syncopated hand-clapping, the alternating solo vocals (especially the falsetto) - it’s all so brilliant. Seeing that my own papa was also a rolling stone, I didn’t like that song at all when I was young. Even at age 7 or so, I knew all about men who spent most of their time chasin’ women and drinkin’. I didn’t need to hear the Temptations sing about it. When I heard it last week, it didn’t seem like a throwback. It seemed brand-new

Other songs grow on me. When I was young, I worked for a self-important, pretentious little chain of stores. This little company was so full of itself that we, the ignorant and provincial staff, were not allowed to change the music selection dictated by the “creative director.” (But we did it anyway, all the time). I could tell you some stories about that place, but I won’t, because it still exists and it’s still full of itself. I have to admit, though, that if it weren’t for that stupid store and its stupid artsy pretension, I might never have heard Erasure and The Sundays. Erasure, in particular, drew me in slowly but surely. It’s been almost 30 years, but “Hallowed Ground” and “Heart of Stone” remain among my very favorite songs ever. 

*****

“At teatime, everybody agrees,” OR “at tee time, everybody agrees?”

It could be either, right? I drink a lot of tea and so in my life, any time could be teatime. And I wouldn’t set foot on a golf course unless you paid me, and you’d have to pay me a lot. So for my purposes, it would always be the former. But I looked it up, just to be sure.

*****

Then there are those songs that take many years - decades, even - to worm their way into my affections. I am not an Eric Clapton fan, and will pretty much fling myself at the radio to turn off “Lay Down, Sally.” But “Promises,” which was on the radio all the time when I was a little girl, and which I ignored because it wasn’t the Carpenters or John Denver or Fleetwood Mac or Olivia Newton-John, is actually a great song. After forty or so years, I’m a “Promises” fan, and will always stop what I’m doing to sing along with that song. Same for Crosby, Stills, and Nash’s “Southern Cross,” and Chicago’s “Searching.” Actually, I’ve come to love almost all 1970s Chicago, almost as much as I hate 1980s Chicago. This is a point of contention between my husband and me. He likes the garbage Peter Cetera “Glory of Love” years. There is no accounting for taste. 

*****

And speaking of the 80s - throughout that whole decade, I avoided hair band metal. Everything from Van Halen to Def Leppard to Whitesnake - especially Whitesnake. What kind of name is that, anyway? I hated all of those bands and all of their music. Until suddenly, I didn’t. Sometime around 2007 or so, I was driving somewhere with my then-little children, who were strapped in their car seats in the back seat of my Honda, and Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again” came on the radio. And instead of reflexively hitting a preset button to switch to something else - anything else - I turned it up a little and sang along. I still sing along with that song. That song is awesome. Van Halen, Guns n Roses, even Def Leppard - I love them all now. Not every song, and not all the time, but 80s hair metal has finally, after 40 years, earned a place in my stone cold heart. 

*****

But the best thing is when I fall in love with a brand-new song when it’s still actually brand-new and not just new to me. When you turn on a radio and hear a song that you’ve never heard before and it just speaks to you, it feels like the world is wide open. It feels like anything is possible. 

It begins with a catchy melody, the kind that gets into your head so quickly that you’re singing along the second time you hear the chorus. Then a lyric, a turn of phrase that speaks to you for whatever reason - it’s funny, it’s beautiful or relatable, or maybe a little of all of those things. There’s that moment when the right melody and the right lyrics hit me at just the right time, and I know that a never-before-heard song will instantly be my jam. This is what happened to me the first time I heard Taylor Swift’s “Anti-Hero.” The first time, I tell you!

“I have this thing where I grow older but just never wiser.” Yes, Taylor - I know exactly what you mean, because I have that very same thing! Witness - remember when I said that I have too many jackets? Well I do but I just bought another one. Older but never wiser. 

The house dance beat and that opening line drew me in, and then the hook: “It must be exhausting always rooting for the anti-hero.” Oh my gosh, it totally is - you have no idea. 

The lyrics so beautifully capture the rueful self-awareness (it takes real self-awareness to admit to your own “narcissism disguised as altruism”), the growing dismay as a still-young but maturing woman realizes that she is no longer the ingenue, no longer the “sexy baby.” She cleverly uses a young woman’s language (“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem”) even as she skips ahead 30 years to imagine herself as a rich old woman with a scheming, murderous daughter-in-law. It’s a brilliant song, and only Taylor Swift could have written it; not because there are no other brilliant songwriters but because it’s about her own particular peculiar preoccupations, which she’s unafraid to admit to and even sing about. It’s about her life, past, present, and future - the girl who was once the sexy baby pop star and who is now the “monster on the hill,” a star so big that she has distant admirers rather than friends; a woman so rich that someone is probably already scheming to separate her from her money - maybe a crooked agent or accountant or manager, or maybe a greedy future daughter-in-law. 

I liked Taylor Swift very much already, but this is the song that made me love her. Her earlier music, while often lyrically and musically brilliant, always seemed to belong exclusively to the young. I could hum along with “Blank Space” or “We Are Never Ever Ever Getting Back Together” but I couldn’t claim them as my own. I’m way past the break up with a bad boyfriend stage, and I was never the romantic drama girl, never a nightmare dressed like a daydream. But the woman who will stare directly at the sun but never in the mirror? The person whose depression works the graveyard shift? Yeah, that’s me. I’m the problem. It’s me. Taylor knows. 

Current(ish) events

It’s been a while since I wrote about a book (really it’s been a while since I wrote about anything other than high school swimming and the cluttered inside of my own brain). It’s the day after the Trump indictment and I’m reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir. It seems appropriate. 

Defying Hitler is very much unlike any other first-person account of life in Nazi Germany that I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot of them. Haffner (born Raimund Pretzel) was just one of many educated, middle-class Germans who were first disgusted and then horrified by the Nazis; but unlike many of his compatriots, he not only left Germany, but spent much of his life afterward thinking and writing and speaking about what happened in Germany, and why, and what could and should have been done to stop the Nazis.  

*****

Jumping ahead a bit, Haffner escaped the Nazis and went to England, where he was promptly clapped into an enemy alien internment camp in Devon. He was eventually moved to the Isle of Man. In England, Haffner wrote about Nazi Germany, emphasizing not just crimes against Jews and political opponents, but what he saw as flaws in the German character that made Germans particularly susceptible to Nazism. Not just the things that we usually associate with “German-ness,” like discipline and organization and hyper-competence, but attraction to what Haffner calls “comradeship.” 

You would think that “comradeship” would be a good thing, wouldn’t you? But it’s not, not as Haffner describes it. Writing about his experience in a compulsory training camp for aspiring lawyers, he explains that by militarizing everything (including preparing for the German equivalent of the bar exam), the Nazis exploited the feeling of ride-or-die camaraderie experienced only by soldiers in battle. He further asserts that this experience - this comradeship under fire that exempts individuals from all individual responsibility and independence - is good and in fact indispensable in war, but inherently evil and corrupting in all other circumstances. Reflecting on his own experience in a Nazi training camp, Haffner writes that after a few weeks of training in quasi-military conditions, he and his comrades were no longer educated young men, but an “unthinking, indifferent, irresponsible mass.”

I’d never heard of Haffner until I found this book but according to the afterword written by his son, Oliver Pretzel, he was very prolific and very well known in both England and Germany, especially in the immediate post-war years. The manuscript for Defying Hitler was found among Haffner’s papers after his death, and his son published it, minus two missing sections, in 2000. It became an immediate best seller, much to Pretzel’s surprise. As Pretzel suggests, its success was partly attributable to its focus on answering, and not just asking the question “How could this have happened?” Haffner breaks it down in practical and philosophical terms, explaining exactly how and why a movement that was not universally popular and that was in fact repellent to many Germans, could still completely upend and destroy the country in practically no time. It is instructive and maddening and terrifying. 

*****

In less than 24 hours, the former President of the United States will face arraignment in a courtroom in New York City. As much as I loathe him and as much as I hated everything about his misbegotten presidency, I’m not looking forward to this, neither the arraignment itself nor the likely chaotic and violent aftermath. I think that Donald Trump is more than willing to upend and destroy the country to save himself or to enrich himself at the expense of his foolish supporters. 

*****

No, Trump isn’t Hitler, and 2023 America is not 1933 Germany. But it feels like everything could change in an instant, and if feels like we could all, a year from now, be asking ourselves how it happened, how it could possibly have happened, and so fast, too.   

Capsule

It’s about ten days into a new season, meteorologically speaking. Whenever the season changes, I find myself thinking about outfits and jackets and dresses that will somehow transform me, or I start looking for that one handbag that will fulfill every requirement that I have for a handbag, making all others unnecessary and obsolete. I’m not going to buy any handbags, or any clothes (except maybe a dress) but I’m noticing them. I’m thinking about them. 

*****

Merino wool dresses, for example. You’ve seen these dresses, right? The 100-day challenge dress, a simple merino wool shift that is allegedly resistant to microbes and so will supposedly be as clean and fresh and free from odors on day 99 as on day one, assuming that you want to wear the same dress every day for three months. And I find that I do, actually. 

Until recently, it had never occurred to me to shop for dresses in merino wool knit. I must have clicked on an ad for merino wool clothing at some point; or maybe I just whispered the words “merino wool” in the middle of the night when I was off in the woods somewhere, all by myself. (That’s metaphorical speech. I’d never be in the woods all by myself, much less at night.) Either way, my social media feeds are now filled - filled, I tell you - with merino wool clothing ads. 

The photos and stories are very appealing; women take the same simple dress and style it differently every day; some days with a turtleneck or t-shirt underneath, sometimes with a jacket or sweater over top. Dressy with stockings and heels; casual with leggings and flats or sneakers. Jewelry, scarves, bags, jackets - combinations of all of these make the same dress look different, look 100 different ways. Or maybe 20 different ways, but that’s still a lot of outfits based on just one dress. If you have 20 different outfits to cover 100 days, you’re only on repeat about once every three weeks. That’s just math. I’m probably going to buy one of these dresses but I’m paralyzed by indecision - it’s down to one of three possible styles and 3 or 4 possible colors. 

*****

Here’s another thing I’m noticing, though I’ve never seen an ad for one - yet. The Marc Jacobs Tote Bag (capitalized because the bag is printed with the words “The Tote Bag”) seems to be all over the place now. On Friday night alone, I saw three of these bags, all carried by millennial women, who are young women as far as I’m concerned. That’s the thing about being my age. Everyone is young.

These bags do not appeal to me, for several reasons. First of all, I don’t like the imprint. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny or ironic or what - I just don’t get it. Even worse, one of the bags that I saw on Friday wasn’t even really a tote bag. It was a messenger bag, emblazoned with the bold and erroneous claim that it was a tote bag. I’d feel silly carrying a tote bag that screamed to the world “Hey, look at me - I’m a tote bag!” I’d feel like a gosh-darn idiot carrying a messenger bag that calls itself a tote bag. 

And even if I liked these bags, I can easily imagine buying one and carrying it and growing tired of it within days. There is no possibility that this bag could ever become THE bag, the one that I’m always looking for, the bag to end all bags. It’s a flash in the pan, that self-proclaimed Tote Bag. 

*****

There’s this sweater, too. I can’t stop thinking about this sweater that looks like it could solve several of my sweater problems. It’s a cardigan, open front, but not too long. That’s the mistake I’ve been making with cardigans. I buy them too long and I look unbalanced. The length on this cardigan is just right and it has pockets, outside AND INSIDE. On the other hand, it only comes in gray, and I’m not a huge fan of gray. But the shape is just right and those pockets keep calling me. I imagine slipping my phone into one of the inside pockets and then shoving my hands into the outside pockets and going about my business. 

The thing is, though, that I can also go about my business without that sweater. Witness - I’m doing it right now. 

*****

Not long ago, I was part of a conversation about work clothes. One of us said that she needed skirts and pants for the office. Another person had plenty of work clothes but she needed workout wear. Yet another person was searching for a perfect rain jacket. The oldest woman in the group waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, I have enough clothes. I just need to repair a few things." This woman is probably about 70 or so and it occurred to me that when she said that she had enough clothes, she meant forever. Is that not a thing to aspire to? Is that not #goals, as they say on the social media? When I’m 70 or so, I hope to be in a similar conversation with young (or at least younger) women, and then to drop the mic with a casual “Oh, I have enough clothes. Forever.” 

And that woman was right, by the way - she really doesn’t need any clothes. I see her almost every day, and she always looks nice. 

*****

The thing about early spring, much like early fall, is that the weather is much more changeable and less predictable than usual, even for Maryland. And that is why I couldn’t figure out what to pack for a weekend trip last week. We went to Virginia Tech to see my son swim in a big-deal swim meet, and I drove myself darn-near crazy with t-shirts and leggings and shorts and pants and a nice top and a sweater and jeans and maybe a dress and one pair of sneakers or two and flip flops or not and a rain jacket for sure because it was supposed to rain all weekend (it didn’t) but what about another jacket? Do I need another jacket? I didn’t bring another non-rain jacket - a mistake - and I also brought clothes that were almost 100 percent wrong. I was unhappy with almost every single possible outfit combination that I could possibly assemble from the collection of way too darn much stuff that I brought with me, except for one dress and sweater, and a pair of shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt. I should have brought those things and only those things.

I read this French fashion book once, a long time ago, when I was young and thought that the French knew everything. I remember almost nothing about this book except for its distinctly bossy and dictatorial French tone, and a quote: “You can’t dress well if you have too many clothes.” I have too many clothes. This is why I feel like I never have anything to wear. This is why I can never figure out what to pack for a 2-night trip and so I pack it all, ending up with too many clothes and nothing to wear. To a swim meet, for crying out loud! 

*****

Seasonal changes and packing for a trip - those are the two situations that always make me want to replace everything I own, and just start the heck over. During these wardrobe crises,  I’m very susceptible to marketing pitches. 

The “capsule wardrobe,” for example. If you're on the internet at all, then you have heard of this new idea, which is first of all completely bogus and second of all not even remotely new. Back in the 80s and 90s, fashion magazines ran pictorial spreads of "mix and match wardrobe essentials" or whatever they called them. It was always a jacket and pants and skirt with a sweater or two, a blouse or two and maybe a t-shirt. By mixing and matching these key pieces you were supposed to be able to assemble an almost limitless number of outfits. The difference between those magazine spreads and the capsule wardrobe (why “capsule"? I don't know) is that the items in the magazines were from lots of different labels. The 2023 internet capsule wardrobe consists of a single label's pieces. Buy them all with one click, and you’re done. 

So why is this bogus? Setting aside the sustainability issue and the sheer ridiculousness of simplifying your life by BUYING MORE STUFF, it’s just impossible for one small collection of clothes - 15 pieces or so - to fulfill every clothing need a person could have, even a normal person who can get through the day without overthinking every conceivable course of action (and by the way, it’s also ridiculous to even think about weaning the same gosh-darn dress for 100 straight days). But wouldn’t it be nice if you could find the ONE perfect dress, the ONE perfect sweater and shirt and t-shirt and pants, and then just maybe buy a few of each in different colors and then never buy anything again? 

*****

I didn’t buy the merino dress but I bought another dress from a company whose dresses I really like, and I wasn’t disappointed. I now have three of these dresses, all very similar in cut and fabrication, in three different patterns. I’m probably set for dresses for the summer. Those three dresses will form the core of my summer work wardrobe. People will get sick of seeing me in those dresses. “There she goes again,” they’ll say. “Didn’t she just wear that one two days ago?” Count your blessings, imaginary colleagues - at least I’m not wearing the same merino wool dress every day for three months. 

And I kept checking on that gray sweater, too. I put it into my virtual cart a few times, and then closed the browser tab and walked away. Then the silly thing went on sale, so I just went ahead and bought it. Now I just have to plan another weekend trip. This time, I’ll know exactly what to pack. Or maybe I’ll just never leave the house again. 

Sectionals

It's Sunday morning and I suppose I should write about what's happening this weekend. I'm sitting in the stands at the Christiansburg Aquatic Center, home of Virginia Tech swimming and venue for the Speedo Eastern Zone Sectional Championship swim meet. 

Although he's been swimming his whole life, my son came to club swimming late. Baseball was his priority until just last summer, when he decided that he wanted to swim in college. Most potential college swimmers begin year-round swimming at age 7 or so and have already committed to a college team by junior year. My son joined a club team just last September at the start of his senior year and made the PVS and Eastern Zone cuts his first year. I'm given to understand that this is a big deal. 

He's been here since Wednesday (again with the craziness of kids missing school to compete in a swim meet) and we drove down on Friday afternoon, 4.5 hours of mostly very pleasant driving through scenic central and southwestern Virginia. It's pretty here, mountains and valleys and clean fresh air. 

*****

Blacksburg, where we are staying, is a small college town. Virginia Tech drives the economy. I don't know how many people work at Tech but the hotels and restaurants and stores serve the Virginia Tech community and its guests, all of the alumni who attend sports events, all of the high school kids who come to visit the campus and the families who come to visit their children. I hate to boil people down to sociological and political ideas but it's hard to be here and not see that there are a lot of poor and working class people working very hard to take care of a lot of middle class and rich people. 

On Friday night, we had dinner at a local chain restaurant. Our waitress was lovely, so kind and cheerful, taking care of a ton of tables in a professional and efficient manner.   She was also missing a few front teeth. It made me sad to think that people are probably sometimes unkind to her because of that. And it made me mad to think that someone can work really hard and make a valuable contribution, and still not be able to afford dental care. Welcome to America. Teeth are for rich people. 

*****

Every hotel in the area is filled with swim teams and swim families. There are clubs from Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia and North Carolina. My son's club is staying at a Holiday Inn. Because I am a new club parent and not as tuned in to the meet schedule as more experienced parents, I didn't realize that I should have booked a room the moment he got the qualifying time. Instead, I just waited until he signed up for the meet and then found that almost every hotel room in Blacksburg and Christiansburg was booked. I was finally able to snag a room in a just-barely two-star Comfort Inn. 

This would have been fine, really. I don't care where we stay as long as it's clean and free of vermin. And trust me when I tell you that I checked the beds very carefully when we arrived. It was a simple double room with a decent bathroom, a little refrigerator, a TV so my husband could watch the Sweet 16, and a nice view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Totally fine for a two-day stay. 

We came back to the room after Saturday prelims to change (and I did such a terrible job of packing, but that's a whole other story, which I'll probably tell you at some point). It was 1:30 PM and the room hadn't been touched. I asked about this, thinking that our room had been inadvertently overlooked, and the front desk person told me that room cleaning was sometimes late. Then when we returned from lunch and sightseeing and bookstore shopping, and the room still wasn't clean, he told me that they were short staffed and that they weren't cleaning rooms unless the guest was checking out. Note that we paid surge pricing (230 a night for a room that usually goes for 79).. Here's an idea - if you're charging surge prices then pay surge wages, and then maybe you won't have a hard time keeping your hotel staffed. I shall be making exactly this point when I speak to the hotel's general manager on Monday to request a 50 percent refund. 

*****

Holy cow, the woman sitting in front of me is carrying a giant backpack and she is putting things into it and taking things out of it every 15 seconds. A lip balm out and a sweater in and a wallet out and a bag of snacks back in and a water bottle out and a water bottle back in and the sweater back out. Exhausting. I need a nap after watching this for ten minutes. 

*****

This is a big deal swim meet but it's also pretty much like every other swim meet. Parents in the stands comparing notes, and abruptly dropping out of conversations when their kids' heats are called, swimmers elated after best-ever swims and sad after disappointments in the water. Most of the parents were cool. There were a few of the type who hold forth loudly on qualifying times and college scouts and officials and whatever else that they know more about than anyone else, but only a few. 

*****

On Friday afternoon I spent the first 30 minutes of the drive thinking about everything I needed to do st home and how I wouldn't be able to do any of it from Blacksburg. And then I stopped thinking about that. I looked at trees and mountains. I flopped on the hotel room bed and read my book while my husband watched basketball. On Saturday we took my son for lunch at a deli on the Virginia Tech campus and then took him back to his hotel so he could rest before the evening session, and then we wandered around Barnes and Noble shopping for books and drinking paper cups of tea. We watched a lot of swimming. It was a good weekend. I need to get out of town more often. 

*****

As for the swimming my son was neither elated nor crushed. He did fine, and scored a relay spot on the last day. He enjoyed the camaraderie and the giant catered breakfasts and dinners and the cool sectionals team gear. Meanwhile, I sent a very polite email to the hotel manager, who responded with an even politer email apologizing for the housekeeping situation. She processed a 50 percent refund to my credit card. I didn't even have to fight city hall. Swimmers aren't the only people winning around here, I tell you what. 

April, come she will

I’m finished with Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy, and not a moment too soon. Poor miserable Baba and Kate were getting me down. Now I’m reading Barbara Pym’s An Unsuitable Attachment, which is right up my alley. I read Barbara Pym for the first time last year, when Excellent Women was one of my favorite books of the year. An Unsuitable Attachment is more of the same, really - English clergy families in post-war Britain, women young and middle-aged and old preoccupied with class and busy morning to night with church bazaars and household affairs and - of course - food. Every single English female novelist of the postwar era wrote in great detail about provision gathering and meal preparation and serving. Food was scarce and they probably all thought about eating a lot. 

I was the only person home this morning, so I picked up my book to read as I ate my very Barbara Pym breakfast of soft-boiled eggs and a piece of toast. I was sure that food would appear within a page after I opened the book, and I was not wrong. The young librarian from the good clergy family was taking a Christmas parcel of chocolate, chicken breasts in aspic, and shortbread to the recently retired elderly library secretary. I’ve never understood the whole idea of meat jelly, but at least I’d heard of it. I had to look up fairy cakes, which appear in another scene. They’re basically British cupcakes. I learn something new every time I read Barbara Pym. 

I’m about a third of the way through the book, and the characters - the vicar Mark and his wife Sophia, the canon’s niece and librarian Ianthe, the veterinarian Edwin and his sister Daisy and all of their friends and connections in and around the Anglican church, are preparing for Lent, which they observe with rigor - no meat or sugar or butter, and not just on Fridays but every day. I’m also observing Lent and it’s hard enough just giving up sweets and sugar six days a week and meat on Fridays. Post-war Britons lived an abstemious life already, even without Lent, and a certain moral imperative surrounded their choices regarding what and how much to eat and what clothing to buy and wear and whether or not to turn the heat on. Read Barbara Pym or Muriel Spark or Elizabeth Jane Howard and you’ll find that all of the characters in the books that take place in the immediate post-war years and throughout the 1950s are preoccupied with thoughts of material comfort - not wealth, but comfort, because the moral imperative to live frugally and simply and rather uncomfortably applied even to the rich. 

I thought about this this weekend, the third weekend of my own personal Lent. After an unusually mild winter, it is of course sharply cold and damp, long days of gray dullness and chill, unrelieved by sweetness, not so much as a single Hershey’s Kiss, which would go a long way toward brightening up this rather dreary March. Yesterday was Sunday, so I had some chocolate but it’s Monday again, the Mondayest of leaden gray Mondays. My energy is so low on days like this. I took a walk around the track at the base today. It was more like a trudge. I took a trudge around the track, wrapped up in my coat and scarf, as two young Air Force officers practiced kicking soccer goals. These young people and their energy. 

But just as I’m settling into the cold early spring London gloom of a 1950s Anglican Lent, Mark and Sophia and Edwin and Daisy and Rupert and Ianthe and Penelope are all about to abandon me, flying off to the warmth of Italy where presumably they’ll look at paintings and eat pasta and drink wine and Rupert will probably fall in love with one of the two single women (Ianthe), while the other one (Penelope) falls in love with him and they’ll all revel in a romantic, sun-drenched, wine-soaked holiday and forget about Lent altogether. Protestants, I tell you. But it’s all good because it’s already March 50th, so we’re a third of the way through the third and longest month of the year. 

*****

It’s Tuesday now, just as cold as yesterday - maybe even more so because it’s very blustery today - but at least the sun is shining. I worked from home and now it’s 5:10 pm and I’m looking at a parallelogram of sunlight (that is Ian McEwan’s phrase, not mine, sadly) on the carpet, and rejoicing in the second full day of Daylight Savings, which means that we’ll have daylight until about 7:10 PM. We’re paying for it on the dark black coffee-bitter mornings when my son gets up for swim practice in what seems like (essentially is) the middle of the night, but it’s almost worth it. The days will get longer on both ends, and the warm days will be more frequent, and the figurative postwar gray London of early spring in Maryland will give way to the sunshiny Italy of summer, and I’ll stop complaining for five minutes. But now I’m going to go for a walk. I’ll need to bundle up first. It’s freezing out there. 

Housekeeping

Wednesday was one of those days, one of those work all day and come home and work some more days that draw me into my own little vortex of I-work-so-hard grievance, all cranky and huffy and put-upon. It took me 15 minutes just to get out off the base and then another 30 minutes on Connecticut from Jones Bridge to Randolph (IYKYK) so I would have been cranky already but I was really cranky because I had so many things to do, so much food to cook and laundry to wash and dry and fold and compulsive housecleaning to do. And I had to call our old lady to get her shopping list, too. Why me? I have to do everything around here! Sheesh.  

I hung up my coat and washed my water bottle and thought about each chore that I had to do, ranking them in order, the most odious to the least; and then I project-managed my way through a plan to work through my rank-ordered list and just get shit done. And yes I’m aware that I could have finished at least one and maybe two of these chores in the time it took me to rank them by relative odiousness and then plan out a whole PMP-certified Gantt chart timeline but then I’d be a whole other person and you wouldn’t be reading this. 

Long story short (yes, I’m aware that it’s too late), that totally worked. Not only did I get everything done in record time if records existed and they should, but my mood improved and my perspective returned and I was clearly able to see that I’m actually not the most overworked working mother in the whole world and that my life is actually pretty easy, relatively speaking. And relatively speaking is all we have, right? 

Sinead and Edna

It’s a rainy Friday, a WFH day for me, and I’m still in my pajama pants, though I am wearing a respectable business casual sweater and could pass muster as a working professional from the neck up, if an unplanned teleconference forces me to show myself. I was going to change out of the pajama pants but it’s almost three o’clock now and I have no plans to leave the house unless it’s on fire so I think I’m dressed (or half-dressed) for the day. 

The thing is that I’m tired because I was out until after midnight last night, a rare occurrence for me on a Thursday night. The AFI Silver is hosting an Irish film festival and last night’s feature was “Nothing Compares,” the Sinead O’Connor documentary. I suppose I could have rented it but an Irish film festival seemed a better venue than my couch. An opportunity to see it with my people, so to speak.

The evening did not disappoint, although full disclosure, I did fall asleep for a bit in the rather long interval between our dinner at the Limerick Pub in Wheaton and the 9:45 movie time. We arrived at the AFI at 9 o’clock, to an almost empty lobby. The box office person told us that the early screening was running late and that our show wouldn’t start until 10, leaving us with an hour to sit and wait. An hour at 9 PM, which is when I always hit the wall, especially after a hamburger and 1.5 Smithwicks. And we were sitting there in the nearly deserted lobby, on a pair of comfortably cushioned movie theater chairs, and there was nothing stopping me from closing my eyes for a few minutes, and so I did. My husband sat next to me, scrolling through his news feed. He might have napped for a few minutes, too. I don’t know because I was fast asleep, sitting right in the middle of a movie theater lobby in downtown Silver Spring. 

And then another movie let out and all of a sudden the lobby was a whirlwind of Irish film festival energy, and the ushers and concession stand employees were strolling amid the crowds handing out pints of Guinness in plastic cups. 

My husband, who is not a documentary film fan nor a particular admirer of Sinead, was very impressed with the free Guinness, although “free” is a pretty loose term considering that the movie tickets cost $22 each. I thought for a moment, as I held my free plastic pint cup of Guinness, which I don’t especially like, that maybe as lower middle-income parents of college students, we might have been wiser to just stream the movie at home. But sometimes you need to get out. 

I’m a very very very introverted person but that doesn’t mean that I don’t love people. I love being out among people. I have to plan ahead and muster my energy and maybe take a nap in public just before the people descend upon me but with enough preparation, I can really enjoy a crowd. I was wide awake as soon as the people filled the lobby, the people leaving the early showing and the people arriving all at once for the later showing, all of them excited to be out on a Thursday, dressed in jeans and sweaters and skirts and t-shirts, some in Irish sweaters. It was cold, so there were lots of interesting jackets. Women outnumbered men by 2 to 1 or so (not every man is as good a sport as my husband) and so there were also lots of interesting handbags. People were laughing and talking and hoisting their “free” pints of Guinness. There was lots of energy. It was something of a scene. 

The movie was excellent. I read Rememberings last year, and most of the events depicted in the movie were covered in the book (including the now-infamous SNL performance, though why infamous I don’t know because what did they think that Sinead O’Connor was going to do, just stand and look pretty and sing her little song and go home?), although not the reverse. The movie didn’t get into Sinead’s difficult professional relationship with Prince, except for an ending credit explaining that Prince’s estate refused to allow the filmmakers to use the song for which the movie was named. But that’s not my favorite Sinead song anyway, and there were lots of clips of performances during her early stardom, when her extraordinary voice was at its best. She really is one of the greatest female singers of the 20th and 21st centuries. Definitely worth leaving the house on a cold Thursday night in March. 

*****

And Sinead is not the only rebellious Irishwoman on my radar this week. I’m reading Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls trilogy and although I can see its literary merit and can understand why it has become a modern Irish classic, I also cannot wait to be done with it and will not miss Caithleen and Baba, not one bit. Or rather, I won’t miss the mid-20th century Irish misogyny that shaped these two hot messes in female human form. 

Caithleen (Kate) Brady and Brigid (Baba) Brennan, although they both live well outside the very restrictive circa 1955 Irish Catholic social norms, do not enjoy their rebellion. Kate, in fact, is not rebellious at all; she’s just a book-smart and street-stupid girl with no emotional self-control who falls for the wrong man and proceeds to make her life miserable over him, and his as well (spoiler alert - he deserves it). Kate’s lifelong friend Baba is the spoiled daughter of a prosperous Irish country veterinarian. Baba is hilariously funny, as mean as a snake, and completely without morals of any kind. She is almost nihilistic in her lack of normal human sympathy and her boredom with everything and everyone. Baba is also married to a terrible man with whom she lives a miserable loveless existence. 

The trilogy was apparently extremely controversial in Ireland when it was published, and it’s still shocking in places. But the most shocking thing about it is that it’s not just a whole novel, it’s three whole novels, about two characters who are so unlikable that they can’t even stand themselves. I kept reading until the end because I generally do that, and because the trilogy has enough page-turning need-to-know-what-happens-next appeal that I wanted to keep going. But I will not miss these books or these characters at all, and I can’t wait to not read another Edna O’Brien book, pretty much ever again. 

I didn’t plan for this to publish on International Women’s Day but here it is, a serendipitous coincidence in which I finish a post on the perfect day to publish it. St. Patrick’s Day might be just as appropriate but if you have seen “Nothing Compares,” or if you’ve read The Country Girls and its sequels, you won’t feel much like celebrating Irish culture, especially if you don’t have a Y chromosome. 

State champions

My eight-year career as a high school swim parent is over, and it ended on a high note. After Metros, Rockville's boys' team went on to win the Maryland Public Secondary School Athletic Association (MPSSAA) Class 3A West Region Championship. One week later, they walked into the state final meet at the University of Maryland and walked out as state champions, the first-ever state title for Rockville swimming and the school's first state title in any sport in over 30 years. 

Eight of the boys qualified for the meet, including my son, and those eight boys won three individual events, scored points in every event they swam, and swept the three relays. They took down a dynasty, beating a school that had been expected to win and that had won for the past ten straight years. Eight boys standing together on a podium, crazy swim hair and Rockville hoodies and medals around their necks and huge smiles on their faces, holding the trophy that they worked so hard for. We walked out of the aquatic center high-fiving other Rockville parents, thrilled for our boys. It was a memorable afternoon, a memorable season, and a wonderful eight years. 

Bibliography 2022

I know you’ve been anxiously awaiting my 2022 book reviews. A word to the wise: “Review” is a loose term. Lots of things could be called a review. Anything from an observation to a comment to a rumination could be described as a “review” vis a vis books. 

Normally, I write something about every book I read during a year but I didn’t quite manage to do that this year. And I started writing this post with a story about thinking that I had paid a bill then realizing that I hadn’t after fighting with the company whose bill I had neglected to pay. Because I did the same thing with a book, too. I started to write something about Cloud Cuckoo Land and then something about my own words seemed familiar to me so I searched my Google Docs and realized that I had already written about it, at some length. It’s only two things but I’m a worst case scenario kind of person. If I wasn’t, I’d probably laugh these two things off. I’d consider them unrelated incidents. But being me, I see these two occurrences as illustrative of my growing tendency to do or not do things and then to forget entirely the things that I did or think that I did the things that I did not do. It’s troubling. But I can still read and write, so here we go.

These are most of the books that I read in 2022. It is as always an odd and haphazard little collection, most of the books chosen for no reason other than that they happened to interest me for one reason or another. 

*****

Irreversible Damage, Abigail Shrier. I don’t know about this book, in several senses. I read it at the beginning of 2022, and I don’t really remember it that well, except for its rather urgent tone. Abigail Shrier is a journalist who became alarmed at what she saw as an epidemic of young people claiming to be transgender, especially young girls and women claiming to be trans men. 

I haven’t studied the science behind gender theory. And I won’t, because I’m not a scientist. Shrier’s assertion that it used to be extremely rare for children and teenagers to claim trans identity is certainly true. It’s also true that this is fairly common now, in the sense that almost everyone knows or knows of someone who is trans or whose child is trans. 

Here’s where her thesis breaks down a bit for me. Shrier believes that the recent emergence of trans children is a cultural phenomenon attributable to mass hysteria. One girl comes out as trans and a whole slew of others follow, like lemmings to the sea.  I don't think it works that way. 

*****

Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard. I read this early in the year, and it took me a long time. I remember sitting around on the pool deck at high school swim meets, reading a page or two during warm-ups. As with every other work of philosophy I’ve ever read, I retained practically nothing, and can tell you only what every Cliff's Notes explanation could tell you, which is that Fear and Trembling is an examination of faith through the story of Abraham and Isaac, a story that has always troubled me. It is difficult to have faith in a God who would demand that a person sacrifice his only child, and that is why I have always chosen to take the story of Abraham and Isaac (and almost everything else in the Old Testament) as allegorical. Anyway, I read it very slowly, a little at a time; stuck with it until the end, and was profoundly relieved when I finished it. That’s probably what Kierkegaard intended. 

*****

Cloud Cuckoo Land, Anthony Doerr. A very memorable book. I have no idea how I could have written a whole post about it and then forgotten about it.

*****

Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Rule of the Unruly Woman, Anne Helen Peterson. I never can remember the whole title of this book, so I think of it as the Unruly book. You can probably just read the title, and you’ll get the point. That is not to say that it’s a bad book. It’s very well written and very well researched. And I don’t dispute the premise that women are expected (still) to be thin and pretty and sweet and generally pleasing to men. I guess I’m just tired of thinking about this, having lived it for over half a century. 

*****

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, Hilary Mantel. The title story in this compilation of short stories is one that only Hilary Mantel could have written, an imaginary what-if story about a gunman killing Margaret Thatcher from the apartment window belonging to an innocent bystander who admits the assassin, who claims to be a news photographer, into her home. All of these stories, in fact, just like everything else Hilary Mantel ever wrote, could only have been written by her. I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone, and that there will be no more essays and stories and historical epics. The Wolf Hall trilogy helped get me through the summer of 2020. It’s been long enough now that perhaps I’ll just read the Thomas Cromwell saga all over again. I know how it ends but of course, I knew how it would end the first time I read the books and that didn’t stop them from being wonderful. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. "You know how fear spreads? Danton thinks there must be a mechanism for it, a process that is part of the human brain or soul. He hopes that, by the same process, along the same pathways, courage can spread, and it can go out from him. Mme. Recordain sat in a high-backed chair and surveyed the opulence of the Minister of Justice's palace. She sniffed. They began digging trenches round the city walls."

This is Hilary Mantel, stirring and inspiring and terrifying in about 75 words. Danton is Georges Danton,  Minister of Justice in revolutionary France. Danton knows what the trenches are for; he just does not yet see their direct relevance to himself. He doesn’t yet see that the sans culottes will soon need a place to dispose of his body. Danton knows how fear spreads. He knows that courage can spread, too, but he doesn't know how. Courage can inspire more courage but it can also inspire fear in those who are already fearful, especially people in power. 

The end of A Place of Greater Safety was just like the end of Wolf Hall and the Mirror and the Light, reminding me that no one but Hilary Mantel could have made a foregone historical conclusion nearly unbearably suspenseful. Everyone knew what was going to happen to Anne Boleyn (Wolf Hall) and then to Thomas Cromwell (The Mirror and the Light), just as I knew exactly what Robespierre was going to do about Danton and Desmoulins. Heads rolled. This is well-documented historical fact. But Hilary Mantel made it page-turningly suspenseful. 

Suspenseful and sad all at once. Mantel takes us inside the still-attached heads of the doomed and makes us feel - really feel - their realization that the last-minute reprieve is not coming. We experience the fear and sadness of people who know with certainty that their lives will end at a known time, and that that time is very soon, and that the end will not be peaceful. Rest in peace, Georges Danton and Claude Desmoulins. Rest in peace, Hilary Mantel. 

*****

Rememberings, Sinead O’Connor. “All I wanna do is just sit here and write it all down and rest for a while.” What an astonishing book, and an astonishing life. Sinead O’Connor is one of the greatest pop singers of the 20th and 21st century. An outstanding lyricist (the quote is from “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” one of my favorite songs), she is also an outstanding memoirist. She had an incredibly difficult childhood, with an abusive, mentally ill mother and an absent father; and she has the kind of personality, colored by mental illness, that makes her constitutionally incapable of making things easy for herself. She is a fighter; the kind of fighter who throws herself into and up against any and all pain and injustice. The most famous example, of course, is the 1992 SNL appearance when she tore up the photo of Pope John Paul II. “Fight the real enemy,” she said, looking right into the camera. And then all hell broke loose. 

It’s hard to imagine now, but almost everyone was outraged at the “disrespect” to the Catholic Church, of all things. Note that I am a Catholic, but I wasn’t really in the Church at that time, and knowing what I did about the Church’s actions in Ireland, I cheered for Sinead. Shockingly, few others did. SNL banned her for life. Joe Pesci, the host of the show, threatened to punch her. Even Madonna took a potshot at Sinead, and Madonna’s work was far more transgressive and even sacrilegious than Sinead tearing up that picture. The Pope isn’t Jesus. I remember at the time thinking that I’d never thought one way or the other about Kris Kristofferson but I became a fan of his because he was the only celebrity who stood up for Sinead O’Connor. 

Possibly the most heartbreaking part of this book that contains so many heartbreaking stories and memories is Sinead’s observation that children of abuse tend to have a hard time with their siblings as adults. As a younger sister, Sinead knew that her older siblings wanted to protect her but they could barely protect themselves. As an older sister, Sinead was in the same terrible predicament with her younger brother; she is still guilt-ridden at what she considers her failure to protect him when she was only a child herself. Apparently, Sinead and her younger brother bore the worst of the abuse. By the time that Sinead’s mother’s mental state deteriorated to the point at which she no longer could or would control her violent temper and outbursts, the older siblings were old enough to fight back or to get out of the house and stay out. The siblings all share terribly painful memories and don’t see one another very often. And yet the most beautiful chapters are the ones dedicated to each of the individual siblings, whom she still loves. Heartbreaking. Highly recommended. 

*****

Bagman, Rachel Maddow. I had this on my 2023 list but that was a clerical error on my part because I read this when I was in Florida, and that was the end of December. 

Did you know that Spiro Agnew was possibly the most corrupt member of the Nixon administration, even worse than Nixon himself? I knew that he’d been forced out of office because of corrupt dealings but until I read Bagman, I really had no idea how corrupt. He was Mafia corrupt. He was Byzantine Empire corrupt. He was Trump corrupt. He was so corrupt that the Nixon Department of Justice felt duty-bound to force him out of office knowing that the President faced likely impeachment and possible removal from office and they believed that an Agnew presidency would be an existential threat to the United States. I won’t recount the details (not just because I don’t want to spoil the book for you but because I’m just not very good at recounting details) but this was as shocking as a 50-year-old political scandal could possibly have been, at least in our wide-eyed exceptional American experience. And it reads like a Rachel Maddow monologue - this is a feature, and not a bug. 

*****

Corrections in Ink, Keri Blakinger. For a few years, on the surface, Keri Blakinger was the epitome of white upper middle class American girlhood. A champion figure skater and a Cornell student, she was likely an object of admiration and envy for many people. But nothing is ever as it seems on the surface. Mental illness drove Keri to self-destructive behavior beginning with an eating disorder and spiraling downward into drug use, petty crime, sex work, and abusive relationships. It’s kind of a wonder that she lived to adulthood. She did survive, but ended up in prison for several years - Ivy League to incarceration, the ultimate American downfall. Happily, she came out of prison clean and sober and capable of using her considerable intelligence and brilliant writing talent to tell her story and document the injustices of the prison-industrial complex. She now writes for the Los Angeles Times, after a time at the Marshall Project, and is a tireless critic of privately run prisons, unjust (and unfairly applied) drug laws, and the death penalty. Her story is compelling and really well told - sad, sharp, and funny all at once. Highly recommended. 

*****

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith. I cannot imagine how I, a bookish girl who grew up in mid-century America, never got around to reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. And I’ve been meaning to read it for some time. Caitlin Flanagan mentions it frequently, and even without her recommendation, I was conscious of this major gap in my reading. I finally picked it up and read it late last year and I’m so glad I did. First of all, it’s so very different from what I expected. I imagined Francie Nolan to be an idealized rosy example of innocent but brilliant girlhood - like an urban American Anne of Green Gables. And nothing against Anne, whom I love and always will love, but Francie Nolan is an infinitely more complex and nuanced and interesting character, whose early life is almost unbearably hard but whose intelligence and wit take her to places that I didn’t imagine were possible for a poor Irish-Catholic Brooklyn girl in the early 20th century. Betty Smith was an amazing writer, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is an almost-perfect novel. 

*****

Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino. Just the opposite of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I was sure that I had written something about this very sharp and funny book of essays, but a search reveals that I did no such thing. And I read this many months ago so I don't really remember much about it, except that the titular trick mirror has something to do with social media and how people create idealized and downright false personal narratives and how others judge their own lives against these false ideals. I remember being impressed by the writing, not necessarily the thinking, behind most of these essays, and that is not a criticism. Tolentino writes about important things; it's just that most of what she has to say has been said in one way or another. But she's a fine writer. 

*****

Hons and Rebels. Jessica Mitford

*****

The Nineties, Chuck Klosterman. Here's one that I did write about, at length and in detail, but what I wrote is not ready to publish. However, I am done with this book list for now, so I'm going to have to depart from my usual practice and publish a review in 2023 of a book that I read in 2022. In fact, it could take me until 2024. The thing is already five pages long, with a bunch of bullet points at the end, and I could very well take the rest of this year to finish it. I have a lot of feelings about the nineties. And the book was very good, by the way. 

*****

Cool, Calm, and Contentious, Merrill Markoe 
Poison Penmanship, Jessica Mitford. 

I wrote about both of these right here, for no reason other than that I finished them back to back. But Markoe and Mitford go together very well anyway. 

*****

City of Girls, Elizabeth Gilbert. A book that I read by mistake. 

*****

Miss Aluminum: A Memoir, Susanna Moore
Invisible Ink, Guy Stern
The Lion Is In, Delia Ephron
So Sad Today, Melissa Broder
Big Summer, Jennifer Weiner
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym

Six books, one post. It's kind of a long one. 

*****

Brooklyn, Colm Toibin
Carrie Fisher: A Life on the Edge, Sheila Weller
You're on an Airplane, Parker Posey
Life on the Line: Young Doctors Come of Age in a Pandemic, Emma Goldberg

I read this little odd grouping of books when I was on vacation in August, so I also covered them all in the same post. 

*****

I read a few others that I won’t bother to list. A few of these not-to-be-listed books were just not very good. Not every book is a literary masterpiece, of course, but just because I wasted the time reading a bad book doesn’t mean that I need to waste additional time writing about it. And then there were a few others that I know I read because they’re on my list and I don’t put a book on the list until I have finished reading it but I don’t remember a thing about them so I can’t write about them. 

And also because it’s almost the end of February for crying out loud and it’s time to finish the half-baked reviews of books that I read in 2022 and start on my incompetent reviews of books that I’m reading right now, in 2023. So mark your calendars for my next book list. Preview: Zadie Smith will feature prominently. It’s going to be a good reading year, I tell you what. 

Metros

I'm in the middle of several drafts, which are all in varying hot messy stages of incompleteness. One or two of them are almost ready to share with my reading public. The others might never see the light of day. But right now, rather than try to clean them up and sort them out, I'm going to clear my head for a bit and just write about whatever. 

It's Saturday morning and I'm in the passenger seat of my husband's car. We're on our way to Metros, the high school championship meet. Metros has a full formal name but I don't remember it. I'll look it up later. 

OK, I looked it up: Washington Metropolitan Interscholastic Swimming and Diving Championships. That’s quite a name, which is fitting because it’s quite an event. Katie Ledecky swam Metros, and still holds several records. Several swimmers who competed yesterday will go on to Olympic fame, too. It’s a fun meet to watch. 

*****

My son is a senior. He just missed the Metros cut time when he was a freshman. In his sophomore year,the meet and the entire season were canceled because of the COVID. He made the cut last year, but no spectators were allowed, so we watched the meet from home on a dodgy live stream, grainy video fading in and out and our son in the lane farthest from the camera. It's hard enough to tell these kids apart in the water even when you're there in person. On a live stream, any one of those rangy boys in tech suits and caps and goggles could be my kid. Now we get to watch the meet live. He’s swimming in three events, and the program will tell me which lanes to watch. 

*****

It’s Sunday morning now. The Rockville boys placed 11th at Metros, one of the best public high school finishes, and it would have been even better had it not been for a few rule oddities that kept them out of the championship final in the medley relay. This is the thing about Metros - a relay that broke Rockville’s school record and has lowered its own new record twice this season is still not quite top-ten material at Metros. 

My son’s co-captain and senior teammate, and possibly one of the future Olympians I mentioned earlier, tied the Metros record in the 200 IM. We returned last night for finals, just to watch the medley relay, which is event 1. We’d been at the aquatic center all morning for prelims, so our plan was to watch the relay final and leave. But our son told us to stay through the IM - “Toby’s going for the record, and he’s going to get it,” he said. And he did. The senior boys gathered at the turning end to cheer on their teammate, and they screamed themselves hoarse. Even though I was in the stands on the opposite side of the pool, I could still hear those boys over the already-deafening Metros finals din, cheering with such intensity that they were almost a physical force propelling their friend through the water just a tiny bit faster. I’m sure that Toby felt their energy. They all wanted that record. 

The 200 freestyle events precede the IMs, so we got to watch a tour de force performance by another likely (almost certain) future Olympian, Erin Gemmell of Stone Ridge Academy of the Sacred Heart (Katie Ledecky’s alma mater and a girls’ swimming powerhouse team). The Stone RIdge girls had been upset in the medley relay, falling to third place behind two public school teams, to my great delight. I am frankly and unabashedly prejudiced against the private school teams in interscholastic competition, especially at Metros. I spent the entire morning at prelims rooting for the public school swimmers, even in races that Rockville had no part in. I’m especially prejudiced against Stone Ridge because they’re around the corner from the base and I get stuck behind Stone Ridge drop-off traffic almost every damn morning. They need to move that school because it’s in my way. 

But even though I hate Stone Ridge, it was hard not to root for Erin Gemmell. She went out first and maintained a small but commanding lead for the entire 8 laps, finishing short of Katie Ledecky’s record but with an impressive time. What was so amazing about that swim was not the speed or the first place finish against very tough competition, but the graceful and calm manner in which she propels herself through the water, long and elegant strokes and beautiful turns executed so neatly and quickly that you almost miss them. It was obvious that she was not going anywhere near as fast and hard as she could - she had other events to swim and was wisely conserving her energy, knowing that if anyone threatened to pass her, she could open it up and easily reclaim her lead. Instead, she maintained a steady pace and cruised to an easy first-place finish. Stone Ridge or not, I was rooting for her and I was delighted when she won. And she was right to dial it down. My son texted me later that she broke the 100 freestyle record and anchored Stone Ridge’s 400 freestyle relay to another record finish. I almost wish that I’d stayed to watch. Well done Ms. Gemmell. I’ll be watching your future career with considerable interest. 

That was a fun meet. Regionals next week, states the following week, and then we’re finished with high school swimming. I’ll miss it a lot.