The grocery bag Mom is checking out is the stash o’ candy we gave her.Mom and her purple housecoat, earrings, and snowman pin. Again.Suzanne and Mom talked about something serious which they wouldn’t tell me about, so I know they must have been talking about me. I don’t yet know if I’m in trouble with either and/or both of them.
With all due respect to the recently departed Queen Elizabeth, Queen Helen is NOT dead. We made a jaunt down the road to visit with Mom, and she is as alive as can be. In fact, she’s unstoppable. At some point in our lively conversation Mom mentioned she’s “quite content” to spend time in her room. She says she doesn’t “jingle” like she used to. She quickly corrected her mistake, saying she meant to say “mingle.” Then she went off on a rift about how she’s had a good, long life and she has—in her words—”jingled, jangled, and mingled all over the place.” She kept repeating that she had jingled, jangled, and mingled. I said, “Gee, Mother, you make it sound like you were a stripper!” To which she replied, “And your dad loved it!” Talk about wearing your feelings on the sleeve of your purple housecoat! That’s how Queen Helen rolls.
Mom assured us she’s not ready to die just yet, because she knows exactly where she’s going to go when she does: to Hell, of course, according to no one but her. We told her not to worry because we and Skitter will be there, too, so that works out okay. That got us all talking about sitting around and making s’mores over the fires of Hell, and Mom was all for that. Suzanne reminded us that Hell can be hot, but it can also be “as cold as Hell.” Suzanne said this is a good thing, because we can make those s’mores when we’re in the hot part, and we can eat ice cream when we’re in the cold part. Either way, I’m positive it’ll be nothing less than tasty as Hell. 🔥 🍫 ❄️ 🍦
An ice cream headache is a good reminder to slow down and smell the ice cream. This is way yummier than a picture can convey.It is triple-dog-daring me to eat it all NOW.And so I did.
Bow Tie o’ the Day can vouch for me that I am not generally a quitter. When I took the lid off the 30-ounce tub of White Raspberry Truffle-flavor Fat Boy ice cream, the message written on the blue safety foil tightly covering it implied that if I were to scoop the ice cream into dish after dish over a series of days, before finishing every last bit of it, I would be labeled a quitter. Like I said—I do not quit. I try to be a woman of solid character. I have a somewhat upright reputation to uphold, and my integrity matters to me. In short, I had no choice when I ripped the blue foil from atop the ice cream but to eat it in one sitting, straight out of the container until it was gone. All of it. I am not a lemming or a sheeple, but—like almost every human being I know—I can usually and easily do what I’m challenged to accomplish when it’s something I already wanted to do in the first place. 😉 🍦
Note: The ice cream headache I had when I snapped my photo was simply necessary collateral damage, resulting from my heroic effort to not be a quitter. You’d think a grown woman who is old enough to belong to AARP would know how to avoid the novice move of incurring an ice cream headache—which I, in fact, do know how to avoid when I am in my right mind. I solemnly declare my bigly ice cream headache was earned by accident, but also on principle. Forgive me—I was temporarily overcome by 30 fluid ounces of delectable chill. I’m pleading “ice cream intoxication” as my excuse for the whole gluttonous affair. But just to be sure that’s what caused my gluttony—in the name of scientific experiment—I think I am obligated to do this implied ice cream challenge again. Y’all know how much I will hate it. 🍨 😏
Last night, we went to the Eccles Theater in SLC to watch a performance of the play, To Kill A Mockingbird. I went black-tie with my jumbo black flip-flops Bow Tie o’ the Evening. (You’ll note that I posted a photo of my white-background flip-flop bow tie earlier this week.) The production was fine. The play was fine. The acting was fine. The narrative was fine. The issues the play dealt with—racism and bias being the bigly general issues—were certainly still relevant to what is going on in the USA in 2022—unfortunately. I had a pleasant enough time at the Eccles. I would even say I enjoyed myself at the play. But I’m not sure the play needed to be written and produced in the first place. It didn’t shed any new light on what’s contained in the novel. The book had already dealt with its topics brilliantly. The movie version, with Gregory Peck as Atticus, was somehow able to bring out added nuances to the ideas the book laid out so skillfully. But the play? It was not a profound piece of theater in itself, in any way. It was a nice night out, and if you liked the book, I think you’d enjoy the play. But don’t expect any new revelations about prejudice and reconciliation to come flying into your mind from what occurs on the stage. I suppose the play could serve as a nice introduction to the book, for anyone who hasn’t yet read it. The book wins!
Harper Lee’s novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, is a model piece of literature. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it is brilliantly structured, especially from a writerly point of view. If you want to read a couple of books of fiction that can teach you how to construct (or deconstruct) the bones of a novel’s plot, narrative, voice, and characters, these are two of the most helpful pieces of fiction to read closely and learn from. The novel is also full of ideas to chew on: ideas about race, peace, injustice, community, and the individual. Degrees of freedom is a key subject, too. I could go on about it, but I won’t. I will say that To Kill A Mockingbird is a book I have read more times than I can count. I probably first read it when I was 8 or 9. I have taught the book to middle-school classes, to university-level classes, to incarcerated male and female felons, and to the locals in book groups all throughout the state of Utah. It is a book I know well, inside and out. The stage version of the book did not dwell much on the book’s rich plethora of eccentric side characters, except for the character of Dill, who was true to his character in the book by being both annoying and hilarious at the same time. As in the book, Dill provided comic relief and some spot-on wisdom. The character of Mrs. Henry Dubose showed up, but for only one scene. For those who know the book well, let me just say—SPOILER ALERT—there was no penultimate event from Chapter 10 in the play. In my opinion, it’s a sin to kill Chapter 10.An interesting note about this stage production is that Atticus is played by John-Boy Walton, of “Goodnight, John-Boy” fame—aka Richard Thomas. Nearly 50 years after The Walton’s, he was as recognizable by his voice as by his face. He was more than adequate in the role, but his performance was nowhere in the vicinity of Gregory Peck’s Atticus Finch. Suzanne and I were astonished to discover that two of the younger members of our five-member, theater-going group didn’t have the slightest cultural clue who John-Boy Walton is. I know The Walton’s television series aired way back in the Dark Ages of the 1970’s, but it’s been shown in re-runs almost continuously since then. Culturally, “Goodnight, John-Boy” is still referenced often on television and in movies. Did it make Suzanne and I feel super ancient that these younger whippersnappers were clueless about the character of John-Boy? Heck Tate yes, it did. 🤠 🤓
My ice cream bar Bow Tie o’ the Day was an appropriate selection for when we went to Sunday brunch at Plated Dreams—a new restaurant that opened a month or so ago in Woods Cross. It was our first foray into the place. My pal, Darci, had posted about eating there with her lovey-dovey hubby, Dan. When I saw her photos of their visit, I knew from the decor that it was a Suzanne place we had to try: it is very pink and flowery. There is even a rose-covered retro phone booth, which makes for a nice spot to take a photo. I purposely did not snap a picture of it, so that I can have a really good excuse to go back soon.
The place did not disappoint. I had the Smoked Rainbow Trout Roses, which dish is described on the menu as follows: “Sourdough Bread, Feta Cheese Mousse, Pickled Mustard Seeds, Caramelized Shallots, Puff Baby Capers & Pink Peppercorns, Dehydrated Lemon & Fresh Dill.” I had them add a poached egg on top. Suzanne had the Chef’s Benedict, which came with corn & cheese bread instead of the traditional English muffins. She said it was delicious, but she will order it with English muffins next time. She didn’t like the texture of the corn & cheese bread.
We were too full to eat dessert at Plated Dreams, so we took home four of their decadent-looking dessert offerings to try at our leisure. I’d like to say some of the four confections lasted a full 24 hours, but I cannot say that truthfully. They survived in our house for just under 10 hours. I only got a picture of two of the creations to show y’all because we were dessert piglets and ate the first two treats before I even thought of my TIE O’ THE DAY responsibilities. I am pleased to report they were all yummerrific to the palate. I included a photo here of the kids’ menu because I liked the clever-yet-somehow-perfectly-accurate names of their various kid meals.
BTW Whenever I make reservations at Plated Dreams in the future, I will ask them to seat us in the “Feed me cake and tell me I’m pretty” booth you see behind me. If that booth isn’t available at that time, I will make our reservation for a time when it is.
Flip-flops Bow Tie o’ the Day has convinced me to come clean about something I have done for decades. I admit it. I did it. A lot. I confess: I have hit my mother almost every summer, more times than I can count. I have hit her with The Chronicle, The Salt Lake Tribune, and my notebook. I have hit her with a flip-flop, a dish towel, and a fly swatter. In fact, I have hit her mainly with fly swatters. To be fair, I have only hit her at her own request—whenever she’s said something along these lines: “Sis, there’s a fly on me and I can’t reach it. Hit it! Hurry!”Mom cannot abide a fly anywhere, especially on her.
At first, I couldn’t swat the fly on Mom hard enough to kill it because I worried I’d hurt her. It is antithetical to everything I am to raise a hand—or fly swatter—to Mom for any reason whatsoever, but when the gentleness of my swatting merely urged the fly to go somewhere else, Mom fussed at me bigly for being tentative and not annihilating the offending fly dead, dead, dead when I had the chance. She gave an order: “If there’s a fly on me, hit me as hard as you need to, but kill that fly!”
I must tell you I have never seen anyone enjoy seeing a dead fly as much as Mom. She relishes it. Seeing a squashed fly with its guts dangling from the head of the fly swatter has always reduced Mom to a primal glee I can barely describe, no matter who killed it. More than once, I have observed Mom so elated about killing an annoying stalker fly in the house that I thought she was going to drive up to Curley’s and dance on the bar in celebration. If I could have, I would have had the head of every fly she ever so happily obliterated mounted and hung on the wall in the family room right by where Dad’s moose, elk, antelope, and deer heads hung in all their taxidermy glory.
And so, over the years of purposely hitting my mother with any available swatting devices, I became a pro at swatting any fly who dared light on Mom—all the way to their flattened deaths, while doing as little damage to Mom as possible. It’s all in the wrist, as they say. I hit Mom for so many summers that I believe it qualifies as a full-fledged family tradition. I hate flies landing on me, too, so I plan to hand down this semi-violent-but-necessary summer tradition. Thus, I will pass down my cherished quiver o’ fly swatters to the next generation—along with the order to kill dead, dead, dead any fly dumb enough to land on me. Mom will be so proud to know the family tradition will live on past us both.
FYI You can never have enough fly swatters. When you see one, buy one. They are like reading glasses. You use both of these items for a few minutes at a time, then you lay them down when you’re done, and then you forget where you last had them. I say, cut to the chase: make sure you have a fly swatter and a pair of reading glasses in every room of the house. It’ll be incredibly useful for weeks or months. Eventually, you won’t be able to find any of the reading glasses or fly swatters in any room, yet again. You’ll lose them all. When it gets to that point, it is a sign it’s time once again for you to clean and organize your house. Some people do “spring cleaning.” I do “reading glasses and fly swatter” cleaning.
When I was a wee sprite, Mom rarely commandeered the living room television. Before cable, satellite, streaming, and even VCR’s, we had a grand total of 5 channels in Utah from which to chose what to watch: ABC, NBC, CBS, KBYU, and KUER. That was it. Televisions were pricey back then, so most families I knew only owned one, and we were no different. Eventually, Mom and Dad got a color TV (with remote!) in their bedroom, and I got a clunky and tiny black-and-white TV set (remote-less) in my bedroom.
In the evenings of my single-TV childhood, Dad was kind of the unofficial boss of what the family watched, although he generally let whoever had a strong preference for a certain show watch whatever they wanted. I guess you could say Dad let anybody who was at home figure out what we were going to watch between ourselves, and he went along with it. He did exercise ultimate veto power whenever he felt it necessary to our benefit or for his own viewing sanity. When it was down to just me, Mom, and Dad left in the house, I fully admit I pretty much chose our nightly living room TV schedule. Dad and Mom both seemed fine with my choices, mostly. However, I give Dad props for enduring hours of TV shows he would rather have missed. When faced with a program like The Smothers’ Brothers Comedy Hour, Laugh-in, Chico And The Man, or The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour, Dad sat in his chair, silently gritting his dentures, and reading The Salt Lake Tribune, his hunting magazines, the encyclopedia, and volumes of Popular Science. He read harder when I chose to watch shows like Mod Squad, One Day At A Time, All In the Family, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues, Police Woman, Facts of Life, and Columbo. He read extra hard when I wanted to watch artistic PBS offerings on KBYU or KUER—like Masterpiece Theater, classical music concerts from Carnegie Hall, and ballet and plays from Lincoln Center. Eventually, I took pity on Dad and decided arts programming was too problematic for him to watch, so I regularly retreated to the tiny, remote-less, black-and-white TV in my bedroom for the majority of my bigly art-viewing choices.
It was universally understood in our house—like the Law of Gravity—that the unalterable living room television default for Sunday day viewing was NFL football or NBA basketball, depending on the season. LDS General Conference weekends were the exception to the NFL/NBA rule. Likewise, the living room TV was always tuned to the national news (usually Walter Cronkite) at 5 PM, and the local news at 6 and 10 PM, every day. No exceptions. Other than that, what we watched was a mostly civil whoever-calls-it-first matter.
Mom liked to watch Hawaii Five-O, Barnaby Jones, and a show called Petrocelli, which was a remarkable TV show on NBC that didn’t make it past its first season. Mom rarely had a programming preference—except when it came to a handful of occasionally shown movies. When any one of these movies was going to be broadcast (usually on KUER), Mom was adamant about watching it on the bigly living room TV, no matter what else anybody might have wanted to watch. The list is small, but clearly I remember it well: A Summer Place, An Affair to Remember, any Doris Day/Rock Hudson film, The Days of Wine and Roses, I Want to Live, The Student Prince, and Picnic. I loved watching Mom sit down to completely immerse herself in watching these movies. I loved seeing how much she loved letting the cooking go, letting the dishes go, letting preparing her Sunday School lesson for the Sunbeams go. For these films, Mom stopped flitting around the house from one duty needing to be done to another duty needing to be done, if only for a brief while. For my part, I would secretly take the phone off the hook, so there could be no outside interruption to Mom’s state of movie grace. Throughout my life, I rarely saw Mom light somewhere and let it all go for a couple of hours. But for the duration of these only-occasionally-shown movies, Mom was enthralled and perfectly still.
It’s Picnic that prompted me to write this post. The events in Picnic take place on a Labor Day weekend. I have long had the Picnic DVD, and I have watched the movie on almost every Labor Day since I managed to find it. Suzanne is not impressed with the film, so she’s watched it with me only once. So I am usually an audience of one when I throw it into the DVD player—unless you count whatever dog(s) we have at the time. I like the movie, separate from how I associate the movie with indelible memories of watching it with Mom. Yes, William Holden is too old to be the character he’s playing, And the scene with the-train-racing-through-the-tunnel symbolism is a bad cliche. But the writing is otherwise generally strong. William Holden and Kim Novak give fine performances. I would dance to the song “Moonglow” at a Labor Day picnic with either one of them. The air sizzles when they dance to it. Above all else with this film, what will stand the test of time is Rosalind Russell’s performance as an aging-and-looking-for-love school teacher. Her acting is beyond fantastic. I mean—Russell’s acting in this flick approaches Meryl Streep realms at times. She makes her character a dynamic blend of spot-on smarts, biting humor, and devastatingly desperate and perpetual disappointment. The movie is hilarious and sad and and hopeful. With a small side order of cheesy.
Oh, I know none of y’all are ever going to sit down and stream Picnic, and most of you have likely never even heard of it before. But I watched my mom watch it a couple of times when I was in my kidhood, and that alone has sealed it as one of my all-time fave films. If you had ever watched Picnic with Mom, I have no doubt you’d feel exactly the same way I do about putting it on a movie pedestal. Every Labor Day when I watch it again, I feel like Mom is sitting right here beside me—content and still and entirely unconcerned with any world beyond the movie. She is purposely—but temporarily—not doing something for somebody else. She is relaxed in her soul, and the wrinkles fall away from her face. The wrinkles fall from both our faces, really. Mom and I are exactly how I always see us.
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I are on our way over to take a dip in the swimming pool. I would snap photos of our swimming exploits, but I know better than to take my phone anywhere near a swimming pool. My age-related, intermittent hand shakiness would likely send the phone right into the pool if I attempted to shoot an aquatic selfie. You’ll have to make do with a photo of me in my old timey swimsuit, before I get to the pool. The swimming pool belongs to the HOA, but this week every year, it’s almost exclusively mine. The neighborhood kids are back in school, and their parents are so relieved the kids are out from underfoot that I think they are staying home to recuperate from their child-filled, hectic summer. I’m glad the kids are back in school, and I’m equally glad the parents seem to have no desire to visit the pool right now—because the pool is once again almost mine-all-mine. It closes for the season after Labor Day. But during this week—and before the Labor Day weekend—it is usually deserted during the day except for me and Bow Tie. The pool might as well be in our back yard, which I guess it already sort of is because there’s only one house between us and it. The only thing I’m sad about when I’m alone in the pool is that there is no one to witness my spot-on, dead Rasputin pose, which I feel compelled to re-create every single time I am playing in water. (I am convinced I was Rasputin in a former life.)
You have no idea how acutely I am tempted to let Skitter play in the pool with me. I fight the temptation every year, and so far, I’ve been able to resist its lure. But I know who I am, and if I were you, I would bet bigly money on it that one of these coming summers I will sneak Skitter into the swimming pool—infuriating the HOA and incurring a hefty fine for me to pay. It will be so worth it to me to do it. It will be a phenomenal tale to tell y’all when it finally happens. I’m just not up to the hassle it could stir up this year. There’s currently too much contention in the American air already. I don’t want to add to its pollution. Maybe next summer I’ll be bad. 🏊♀️ 🐶
The next time I spout off about how we need to remember that the bigly commandment which encompasses the essence of all the others is to love our neighbor, poke me in the eye. Twice. Remind me of the poet, Robert Frost’s line about how “Good fences make good neighbors.” Tell me about how boundaries can be a blessing. Oh, who am I kidding? I understand Frost’s point about boundaries, but—schmuck that I am—I will always err on the side of looking out for my neighbors, especially if they are my literal neighbors. You see, I was raised in the vein of John Donne’s “No man is in island,/ Entire of itself,/ Every man is a piece of the continent,/ A part of the main.” See how I blather on about our connectedness and responsibility to each other? So—like I said initially in this post—when I get honking on about looking out for literal neighbors, poke me in the eye. Twice.
Tuesday is our weekly garbage day. Every Monday night before I go up to bed, I drag our garbage can out to the curb. Every other week, I put out our recycling can with it. The cans are usually emptied by 8 A.M. Tuesday morning. Yesterday, however, no bigly trucks came to empty either can. We live on a sort of obscure Centerville street, and about once a year, the garbage and recycling company misses our row of town homes. At noon, I called the company to let them know our street had been missed for collection. They were able to send out a garbage truck to do the missed garbage pick-up immediately, but the recycling would have to wait to be collected until the next day, which is today. I wanted to alert my neighbors to leave their recycling cans at the curb for one more night—despite what the HOA rules say—so they won’t have to hold onto their recycling until the next scheduled recycling day, which is in another two weeks. I didn’t want to interfere with my neighbors’ days by knocking on each of their doors to explain the situation, so I opted for the ever-useful Post-It Notes route. I wrote a note (as seen here) on a Post-It, which I stuck on the lid of each recycling can on the street—where they would see the note before rolling their still-full recycling can back into their garages. (Please note that I chose to use the newer “Extreme” Post-It Notes which stick through all manner of wind, rain, snow, temperature, and Mormon crickets, so there would be no possibility of unstuck and lost messages.)
So there I was—ambling down the street, placing a handwritten Post-It message on each neighbor’s recycling can. I stuck the last note on the last garbage can. No sooner had I placed it when some guy I vaguely recognize as one of my neighbors yells out the window of his approaching car, “Why are you touching my recycling? You have no right to touch my recycling.” So much for doing a silent good deed with the intention of not wanting to disturb my neighbors. I don’t know anything about this guy who’s yelling at me, and this guy clearly doesn’t know me—which is very odd since I am the only one in my neighborhood who wears a Bow Tie o’ the Day over to the Great Wall o’ the Housing Development Mailboxes 6 days per week. I tried to explain my mission to the man, but he wasn’t giving me an opening to say anything. His diatribe went on, and I finally turned around and walked back home, wondering when it started to be common for people to begin by assuming the worst of their neighbors. When did it become the fashion to begin every kind of human interaction by metaphorically balling up one’s fists and taking a fighting stance? Apparently, in this neck of the woods, it began sometime before yesterday afternoon.
But guess what. This morning, I noticed that the bantam doofus must have read my note, because he left his recycling at the curb overnight. I do not expect he will mosey over to my place to apologize to me or thank me for my Post-It Note efforts at following what I consider to be the bigliest of commandments. Nor do I need him to do so. 🥊 🤺 🤼♂️
I had a chatty day in Utah County yesterday. Skitter and I drove my jalopy truck down to visit my college pal, Jane. It was a roaring talkfest for hours, as per usual. When we get together, our opinions on the state of the world flow endlessly. For some reason, Skitter didn’t utter a word during our visit. She preferred napping at my side. The rigors of intense conversation sometimes overwhelm Skitter, so she retreats into whatever doggie dreamland her walnut brain takes her. She probably has more sense than any human I know.
Check out this past post from August 2018:
HAVING A THOUGHT, I AM NOT
Bow Tie o’ the Day and I can’t think of anything to write about this morning. We haven’t done anything yet, and we have no plans to do anything later. Our schedule is wide open. There are no errands needing to be done. The house is clean. Laundry’s done. (That laundry thing was a lie, but we don’t want to do it.) And for some reason, we aren’t even having opinions about anything. And there are no stories in our heads. What do we say here? How do we write this post, with nary a topic to write about?
I have no doubt you’re thinking we should just skip a post or two and give y’all a break. Nope. It ain’t our style. You know the “not post” thing is not gonna happen. Right now, in fact, as I’m typing away, I’m thinking maybe I should just see how long a “there’s-nothing-here” post I can write. I’m a writer, so I should be able to b.s. about nothing whatsoever for a while. I can treat it like a writing exercise—you know. Just treat it like a challenge for my abilities: jabber about nothing. And that would be all well and good, except that no matter how much “nothing” anyone writes about, the sentences are always about something. I mean—sentences have nouns and verbs and all types of other words, and you can’t have a noun without the rest of the sentence saying something about it. It’s the same with a sentence’s verbs and its other words. Every word is about something. So nobody can ever write about nothing, really. In fact, you’ve just read a string of words that are pretty much about nothing—except they are also about me trying to write b.s. There. You’ve now read over 300 words. About nothing and something at the same time. 🙃
For a while, one of the cups I kept in the cupboard at the Pub for my Diet Coke had these words emblazoned on it: “I LIKE BIG BOOKS AND I CANNOT LIE”—a reference to the 1992 Sir Mix-a-Lot song, “Baby Got Back.” The point of the cup was to proclaim my undying adoration for books galore. Technically, however, I don’t like big books, and the words on my cup which said I do, are evidence I lied about it. It doesn’t matter how interesting the book is, if it’s much over 300 pages, it feels like work to me to finish it. I especially despise a long book that requires me to devote more than a week to it. After a week of reading, if I still haven’t finished it, I feel trapped. I feel as if I’m weeping and wailing and gnashing my teeth all the way to the book’s bloody last page. I’m at war with the damn tome. You can’t just jump ship and abandon a book when you’ve already spent a week on it. You have to finish reading every last word of it. It’s a point of honor—even if the book itself turns out to be worthy of only a “meh” rating.
Just last week I decided to read a somewhat obscure book I’d always heard about but hadn’t yet read: The Recognitions, by William Gaddis, originally published in 1955. I ordered it online, and less than twelve hours later, Alexa informed me prime had delivered it to my doorstep. I was excited to begin reading—until I opened the front door and saw the thick package. I lifted up the package and my spirits sunk further because it wasn’t just a thick book, it was an unusually heavy, thick book. I tore open the package, hoping maybe other books I had ordered had been shipped with it—thus, accounting for the thickness and the weight of the package. But no, it was just the one book. The Recognitions has 933 pages. I was bereft.
It’s a psychological cootie I get: I look at a book with more than 300 or so pages and think, “I will be dead before I can finish reading that bigly book. I don’t have enough time to read a book that long.” But really, I’m going to read books anyway. Between all the books I’m reading simultaneously, I’m going to read that many pages and more in a week’s time. Logically, I know it should make no difference how many pages a book has, but it really does make a difference to me. Lots of pages means lots of distress for me. I would have no anxiety about reading every page of a 1000-page book if it was presented as 3 or 4 separate and less husky books. My Bigly Book Anxiety is simply one more peculiarity in a catalog of my many reading peculiarities.
I have a theory or two about why I am anti-bigly books. The first theory is simple: most lengthy books I’ve read seem to be trying to be long, at the expense of trying to be great. I have rarely read a bigly book that couldn’t have used a good editor to do a more thorough weeding of the manuscript before publication. Too many good writers have a tendency to want to put every jot and tittle into their story. They like to hear their own writing voice. They won’t cut out a fine piece of writing that might be lovely, but is totally unnecessary to the story. I think they are secretly afraid they’ll never get published again, so their book has got to be “the” book to end all books. Sometimes these writers think they have a lot to say so they write a 1,500 page book, when the story could be beautifully told in 200 pages—with much more impact and clarity, without all the blah, blah, blah to cloud it. So, yes, I am saying that most stories don’t need to be like the Primary song in which the pioneer children sang as they walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and walked, and walked. And walked. A story needs to end at some point, preferably while you’re still alive to read it.
My second theory—the one I think most explains my disliking bigly books—has to do with my assertion that reading is an activity. It is doing something, in the same way shooting hoops is doing something. Many of you probably heard something like this from a teacher or parent more than once when you were a kid, holed up in a chair reading a book: “It’s such a nice day outside, you need to get out of this house and ride your bike.” Like reading is the same as the Deadly Sin of sloth, or loitering. Reading is not wasting time. To read is to engage with other people in other places, dealing with other situations. Reading takes you far outside yourself, even as it simultaneously plunges you deeper inside yourself. Reading requires your attention. It requires skills. It changes you. When you finish reading a book, you are not the same person you were when you began it. I’m not overstating this point: When you give yourself up to it, the act of reading—with your full and open attention—enlarges and transforms you, one book at a time, in a multitude of ways, some of which you might not even discover until years later.
So how does this relate to my dislike of long books? For me, I like to experience these transformations regularly and often—every 300 pages or so. It’s a kind of high, and I’m proud to be addicted. To read a lengthy book is to defer the transformation for so long that some of it gets lost along the way. At the end of a bigly book, I often feel more exhausted than changed. I feel like I’ve been through an active experience, but my brain is too wrung out for me to fully care about understanding the implications. This aversion to bigly books is an eccentricity that is likely due to some sort of failing in my personal reading habits. I will own my failure. But, to be honest, I’m not all that interested in trying to alter my reading routines and proclivities at this point in the game. I am what I am, and I read how I read. I like regular-sized books, and I cannot lie.
