Book Number 6 of the Big Book Read 2010
288 Pages
I've enjoyed Anna Quindlen's columns (which were featured on the back page of Newsweek magazine for several years) and was pleased to discover some compilations in book form... "Loud and Clear" is one that highlights her columns between 1993 and 2003 (which also includes some from her New York Times years as well) . Quindlen is a "fifty-something" like myself and someone on the same side of the political spectrum as well...she writes about things I can easily relate to..... from "Mom Quixote", describing her quest for a "must-have" holiday toy for her son , to "Life After Death" an ode to her sister-in-law dying of lung cancer at age 41..... pondering the impact of her death on her two young daughters. Considering this time period includes 9/11... there are of course several moving columns on this event as well.
Quindlen has written some fiction as well....I've read a couple of her books.... including; "One True Thing" which was turned into a movie with Rene' Zelwegger and Meryl Streep. I prefer her non-fiction. Her most recent book is a tribute to her departed beloved Black Lab, Beau......"Good Dog, Stay" which I haven't worked up the strength to read quite yet... love the line I read in the review though: "The life of a good dog is like the life of a good person, only shorter and more compressed"......
At any rate, I think Quindlen is at her best in her columns.......She divides them up in this book into sections labeled: Heart, Mind, Body, Voice, and Soul. I have a couple of favorites:
From the Heart section comes "No Privilege for Parents" .... in which she writes: "While the U.S. counts as commonplace privilege between attorney and client, priest and penitent, doctor and patient, and, of course husband and wife, there is no generally accepted protection for parent and child" ...and how, by not creating this protection: "we're suborning perjury" as she indicates that she would "be fully prepared to lie under oath if (she) considered it to be the best thing for my kid and I would consider that a more moral position than telling the truth." Wow.... this gave me something to think about.....
From the Soul section... "Imagining the Hansons" in which she focuses on a family of three on the flight from Boston to Los Angeles on September 11th.... mother, father, and two-year old daughter "sitting safe between them, taking wing" on the plane destined to be the second to hit the World Trade Center.... I love the paragraph when she talks about "when human beings allow their ideology to trump their humanity, when they elevate an idea above the lives of individuals. Anything can happen, and too often does." Thought-provoking stuff here... Most of Quindlen's columns really make you stop and think, or laugh, or shed a tear...
Finally, another from the Soul section, which brings me back to my re-immersion into poetry (see my review of Book Number 5 ) ... her column... "Poetry Emotion" which begins with the acknowledgement of recent (column written in 1994) Pulitzer Prize winner... poet Yusef Komunyakaa. Quindlen bemoans the lack of recognition in contemporary times for poetry in spite of the fact that we all grow up with the rhymes of: The Cat in the Hat, Goodnight Moon, and Where the Wild Things Are.
Her last line says it all: "Maybe it's (poetry) a need for us all and we just forget it, as we move past bedtime-story rhythms and into a world without rhyme or reason."
My grandmother once told me that she started every day with a poem..... In the spirit of my poetry-loving grandmother... I think I'll share a poem that I found while searching for poems to read at my mother's memorial service. Eventually we read a couple of poems by Robert Frost (a tradition at our family events) but in the midst of the search I found a poem by a poet my mother loved, Jane Kenyon called "Let Evening Come" It really spoke to me... in fact I have it on my desk at home and at work..... not a day goes by that I don't read it...
Let Evening Come
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don't
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
Jane Kenyon (1990)
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