Dragon-Sitting and Donating Books

 

These pictures are a few months old, meant to show a stack of books to be donated that I no longer wanted to take up valuable bookshelf space. 

And the dragon atop the books came to visit me after he appeared on my son's YouTube channel as an optical illusion. (I suppose he would be called a Mona Lisa effect illusion where the eyes continue to stare at you?) 

Here's a link to my son's channel showing the illusion.

I won't be able to see if the link works until it publishes but I hope it works for you. If it does, isn't that a weird optical illusion?

If you have a husband or son or grandson who is into odd technical devices like geiger counters, I know my son would welcome new subscribers. Of course I subscribe simply to see my son's hands show his latest acquisition and listen to the current music he's chosen. He has always loved classical music. 

Anyway, I couldn't understand what I was seeing and he brought the dragon to visit one day, forgot it when he left and I continued to dragon-sit until the next visit. 

And now to a quick, I promise, glimpse of the books that aren't getting a permanent space on my shelves.

Do you recognize any that you might have read?

Let's start with one I thought was superbly written, La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith.

While I love McCall Smith, it is only his Isabel Dalhousie mysteries set in Edinburgh that I collect and keep. This book was set in England in World War II and what impressed me about it was that the author wrote the book convincingly as someone from that era would have. Most of the time historical romance is so obviously written by someone of the future trying to be of that time period. It must be very hard to pull off, I've tried it, but McCall Smith does it so naturally. 

Are You Hungry, Dear? by the inimitable Doris Roberts was a fun and interesting and sometimes sad read of her life and favorite recipes. I guess I will always think of her as Marie on Everybody Loves Raymond who has an opinion on everything and isn't shy about letting the world know it. 

But did you know that she was married to author William Goven? I didn't until I read her book and strangely enough, on a visit to Goodwill after reading it, his name leaped out at me in the book section. I love reading published letters of celebrities lives and this book was Selected Letters from a Writer's Life. 

I admit I gave up halfway through and just skipped ahead to his marriage to Doris. Actually, I don't think I ever finished one of his novels. These both went to Goodwill for someone to discover. 

Not going to even mention the rest of the books in the donate stack. I'm sure that the fault of them not clicking with me is simply because I love old books better than most contemporary ones. 

I did donate this old book though, even though it was rare online. Perhaps a reseller will pounce on it.

Earl Derr Biggers was the author of the Charlie Chan mysteries that I remember seeing in black and white television in my youth. And then Charlie Chan seemed to disappear, evidently because he became thought of as portraying stereotypical roles that were rightly no longer tolerated. 

There, that's fairly short, isn't it? For me?

Smoked Salmon Spread and Mystery Italian Plates and both my blogs are fixed!

So many times something is mentioned in a book that ends up on my menu. Does that happen to you? I have always written down inspiring menus from books I'm reading.

 

Salmon has been a favorite for RH to put on his smoker for decades but we had never soaked it in rum first before I read that mentioned in Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club. 

He smokes it himself in one of those old smoking sheds. He soaks it in rum and then puts it over oak chips. It's the rum that gives it that wonderful flavor.

 

 I recently soaked some wild sockeye salmon in dark aged rum for two hours then dried it well, smeared on a little brown sugar, salt and pepper. RH had the smoker going with oak chips and the air in the garden smelled wonderful as the two sides of salmon smoked.

We had some of it on a big salad that night and I flaked the remainder, put half in the freezer, and used the other half the next day to make Smoked Salmon Spread from this Ina Garten recipe.

I halved Ina's recipe and added a little chopped celery, scallion, and jalapeño, plus a little cayenne and paprika. 

 I rarely make appetizers anymore for just the two of us so this called for a pretty old green glass container and a linen towel with fish embroidered on it and one of my mystery Italian plates.

I have a treasured stack of them and they never go in the dishwasher. I haven't been able to identify them online. I've searched for "sea creature plates marked Italy"  to no avail. Every time I've posted a picture of these plates on my blogs I've asked for help in identifying these so if anyone knows what kind of a sea creature this could be, please let me know.

I can't even remember where I got them but they're perfect for summer days. And ever since I read Frances Parkinson Keyes's New England-set novel Also the Hills many years ago, salmon has always been on the Fourth of July menu for me, along with the barbecued ribs for RH that we both grew up eating on Independence Day. Keyes's novels were full of good menus, whether in her New England-set novels or her Louisiana ones or her ones set in France or South America.

As were Laurie Colwin's novels. The best books have good food in them! Are there any fiction authors you find yourself jotting down recipe ideas while reading? 

And yes, both my blogs are working again! I have no idea how. For days they weren't despite everything I tried and then all of a sudden presto, there they were and I was no longer "anonymous"! 

Thank you so much, Google, if it was you that fixed it! 

My best to everyone reading here,

Dewena

Current Reading Pleasures--More Books

 Elizabeth Berg's The Year of Pleasures is one I regretted spending money on. I know, Berg is a wonderful author. I especially loved her The Pull of the Moon. 

The title and cover sold me the book and it started out so well. The dust jacket says that the book "is about acknowledging the solace found in ordinary things: a warm bath, good food, the beauty of nature, music, friends, and art." 

It's probably just me, at this stage of my life, but the book didn't live up to that statement and I put the book aside three pages before the ending and moved on to an old Isabel Dalhousie book, The Novel Habits of Happiness by Alexander McCall Smith. 

 While I've never been able to get into some other of McCall Smith's series, like The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, the philosopher from Edinburgh, Isabel Dalhousie, is always balm to my spirits. And I particularly like her love of W. H. Auden.

I thought that love would last for ever, I was wrong that line of Auden's that contained a truth about everything, not just love. And we had to act as if things were not going to end, because if we did not, then we would do so little in life. People still planted oak trees and created gardens, which they might not do with quite the same enthusiasm, or would not do at all, if they stopped to think of the brevity of life.

In a nutshell, at this point in my life, the philosophy of that paragraph is part of what excites me about each day of my senior years, even during a pandemic. 

When I saw that McCall Smith had written a small book on Auden, What W. H. Auden Can Do For You, I had to get it. I took down my big book of Auden poetry, turning back and forth between the two as I read the little book. 

 

After reading again Auden's "Funeral Blues", that always saddens the reader, I read what McCall Smith wrote about it and "September 1, 1939" that was brought to wide attention after 9/11.

Auden in general speaks to the more mature mind, but the raw sorrow and sense of loss that the poem conveys spoke to a young audience that had probably never heard of him. 

He's speaking here of the young people, and not so young, who first heard the lines of "Funeral Blues" in Four Weddings and A Funeral. 

And the same might be said of "September 1, 1939," another poem that touched the public imagination so vividly. That poem was photocopied and faxed around New York in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade towers.

I was so moved by something McCall Smith wrote near the end of this book that I have to include it here as a reassurance to myself that while we are increasingly reminded that we are citizens of the world that we still can and surely should cherish and pass on to our children and their children the unique culture of our own region.  

Preserving the human scale of our lives in the face of the onslaught of globalization and its bland culture cannot be achieved by legislative fiat. The declared cultural policy of states may be to protect or enhance local culture--France does that, as does Canada, to an extent--but such measures sometimes seem to be no more than putting of a finger in a dike of a near-universal popular culture. It is very difficult to protect ourselves from fast-food chains or standardized coffee bars; it is equally difficult to keep fragile or threatened cultures alive in the face of blandishments of powerful offerings from far away. Many people today lead cultural lives that are rendered shallow because the things that have been authentic to their particular place are overshadowed by things made or done for them elsewhere, a long way from where they are, and having no ties to their past. That may be largely inevitable, given technological change, but it involves the loss of possibilities of feeling and belonging and fosters a consequent impoverishment of spirit. We can restore the power of the local by resisting the claims of those forces that would take away from us our control of our local lives. It is not particularly easy, but victories can be achieved against impersonal agencies, against empires even, by people asserting the value of what is local to them and taking back the power to control it.  

That's a long quote from Alexander McCall Smith's What Auden Can Do For You, but struck me as so important when I see those of us in the United States being herded into a homogenized people, with even regional dialects fading away. I hope we won't all be molded into one smiling programed American prototype much as a Data from Star Trek. 

Thank you to any who have read this long and probably boring book post. I bet you're glad I have comments turned off on my blog! These posts are probably self-indulgent but reducing my screen time on my phone by 50% this last week, mainly from not looking at Facebook has given me time to actually do something with all the books stuffed with post-it notes in my office. Back on my shelves they go when I finish another book post!

My next book post will be about some of what I call my Nursery Food books that I've turned to when that is all I could handle in my bedtime reading. 

 

 

 

Remembering Phyllis McGinley and one author leads to another.

Phyllis McGinley, March 21, 1905 to February 22, 1978.

Every March I've meant to write on her birthday about this American Pulitzer Prize poet who meant so much to me as a young married woman. Not for her poetry, I had yet to discover that, but for her book of essays called Sixpence in Her Shoe, the old faded red book in the picture below.

 It was the first contemporary book I had read that made homemaking sound attractive in an age of Betty Friedan back in the early 1960s.

I think that McGinley is responsible for plunging me headlong into a lifetime of love for houses. All kinds of houses. Trying them on for size in my mind if not in my life. Constantly playing the game of "what kind of house do I want" even before RH and I ever bought one.

Admit it, you've done it too.

Avidly, I read McGinley's words:

And charm in a dwelling is like charm in a woman. It is a mysterious essence compounded of warmth, character, and a welcoming countenance.

The right house, no matter what its period, must pluck you by the sleeve and say, "Take me. We were meant for each other."

I loved the stories of how McGinley set about furnishing and decorating the houses she and her husband and daughters moved to, lapping up her advice on all of it.

But natural good taste is rare. A few lucky souls have it from the cradle like long eyelashes or perfect pitch. Most of us simply muddle along with our prejudices or our predilections instead.

I had no prejudices or predilections as a young married woman and natural good taste was not handed out to me in the cradle. I was a blank slate but knew I was. I did have that going for me.

We proceed by trial and error. We work and we plan and we read the instructions and we study other people's triumphs. Then if our surroundings really matter to us, if we are willing to use our eyes and our wits, we gradually acquire what is even better than taste: minds of our own.

It is only the mindless house which is dull...A house which charms and welcomes does not need to conform to any current fashion. But it must wear its owner's signature.

At least the houses I inevitably admire do wear that signature. They are not necessarily ones I want to copy or to live in. I enjoy them because they mirror the character of the friends who planned them.

Bingo!

 The rest of the book, on many other subjects, is equally as good, and still as relevant today as when I first read it in 1964.

Decades later I bought McGinley's Pulitzer Prize Poetry book, Times Three. I came late to loving poetry. It was not until I said to heck with poetry and started reading it as prose that I discovered I loved it. 

And it was an author of fiction who led me by a roundabout way to buy McGinley's poetry book. 

 
 I bought my first Alexander McCall Smith book that happened to be his first of the Isabel Dalhousie series.

The Sunday Philosophy Club's philosopher Isabel was like a bolt of lightning in my life. I had never thought much about philosophers but if Isabel was one, I liked them a lot.

A few Isabel books later I noticed that she was an ardent fan of a poet I hadn't read since high school, W. H. Auden. I won't use any Auden quotes from the Isabel books here because this is primarily a love letter to Phyllis McGinley but I took sharp notice of my favorite lady philosopher's love of the poet she called WH and ordered his big book of poetry. 

Fell in love. With 50% of the poems, not bad for a prose-reading woman. 

Then at a Goodwill, where I always look for older books, I spotted a book by Phyllis McGinley. However, it was a book of her poems and would I really read a book of what I thought would be like the humorous McGinley poems that had been in my mother's women's magazines? Even if I still loved her Sixpence in Her Shoe?

I opened it up and discovered that the long foreword was by an admirer of her work, no other than W. H. Auden himself.

For eight pages Auden quotes and praises McGinley's poems.

Holy cow! I nodded and empathized and laughed my way through McGinley's Times Three. Even when she poked fun and denigrated the South and our enthusiasm for ham.

Ham,
Ham,
Not lamb or bacon
But ham in Raleigh
And ham in Macon.
Ham for plutocrats,
Ham for pore folk,
Ham in Paducah and ham in Norfolk;
In Memphis, ham, and in Chapel Hill,
Chattanooga,
And Charlottesville.
Ham for the Missy,
Ham for the Colonel,
And for the traveler, Ham Eternal.

Oh, patriotically I implore,
Look away, Dixieland, from the smokehouse door.
--Phyllis McGinley, from "Notes for a Southern Road Map"

I laughed but I admit to another thought running through my mind, something to the effect of, well, honey chile, head back north if that's the way you feel. Just kidding. No, actually I'm not. But I do still love you, Phyllis.


That's probably more than enough poetry or prose from me now, but in my enthusiastic delve into poetry while pulling together a birthday salute to Phyllis McGinley, I pulled another favorite poetry book off the shelf,  Edna St. Vincent Millay's Collected Poems. 

I opened it up and discovered a little treasure inside, a pretty card from my mother from many years ago. When I saw the unicorn I knew I had to save it for our youngest granddaughter who is passionate about unicorns, or she was at Christmas.

I won't share the whole message with you as much of it was personal family news but I smiled to read that my father had brought home some purple grapes and she had made eight cups of grape jelly. 

To my three sisters, if you're reading this, wouldn't you love to have some of Mama's homemade jelly again? 

 Do any of you reading this, whether you ever comment or not, do you tuck cards and notes into books that you're reading, to be found years later? Don't you love it when you find them?

And don't you love it when the love of one author leads to another author? And on and on it goes, discovering one book after another. Isn't that a wonderful thing?

And have you ever been blessed to walk in a house for sale and have it "pluck you by the sleeve and say 'take me'?"

Christmas Tree Countdown, 8 & 9

Christmas trees 8 & 9 go up first and are taken down last, too cheerful at night or on dark mornings to do without easily while we sit on the sofa and snuggle with BreeBree and James Mason. 

This skinny champagne colored tree was in my dressing room at Valley View but now is our main indoor tree here at Home Hill. 

The ornaments on them are mostly old pale green, blue and pink ones with tarnished silver glitter fish scale design.

It fits tightly but perfectly in an old green garden plant stand and the rim holds vintage speckled Shiny Brite pink and pale green ornaments. Standing guard among the ornaments are four vintage celluloid deer. 

Right next to the champagne tree, on top of a bookcase holding books of three of my favorite mystery writers--Louise Penny's Armand Gamache series, Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series and Margaret Maron's North Carolinian Judge Deborah Knott--is a large old Dept. 56 Christmas tree dressed in fairy lights and old silver ornaments.

It sits on an Old Hall, English tea set, one I never have to polish because it's shiny stainless steel not silver. There's even a cute little mustard pot and minuscule spoon with it.

Maybe waiting for a little honey in his tea is a baby Steiff bear, a gift from my daughter years ago.

This is the end of my Christmas tree countdown, even though there are tiny ones scattered around the house. For some reason, my heart is feeling a little bit tender at the end of this post. 

I imagine because there are so many sweet memories behind the Christmas things I've kept after two downsizing moves. These are objects that bring back memories of decades of RH and I going to yard sales and junk shops and antique stores, with at least two of our four children in tow at a time.

We always promised (bribed) them with cash of their own to spend on their collections--advertising mechanical pencils for our firstborn son, Breyer horses for his little sister, and later with our second batch of kids, sports memorabilia for one son and Native American objects for our youngest, along with minerals and rocks, vintage Christmas items, vintage Star Trek items (and he was able to sell most of those for hefty prices on eBay later on in life!).

And then there was the Christmas decorating that back then began on the day after Thanksgiving Day where there was the fun of hauling barrels out of the attic and decorating the house together.

There was a different tree in those years, loaded down with decorations they made in school and ornaments that were their own with new ones added each year, and taken with them when they left home. 

I had lots of little helpers in those days, lots of little sugar cookie decorating helpers, lots of little ones who even when they were big still wanted Christmas books read to them at night. 

And there were three sons and one daughter to tuck in bed on Christmas Eve and say the final goodnight to:

"Jump in bed and cover your head

'cause Santa Claus comes tonight!"

Hey, little furry squirrel who came all the way from "West Germany" once upon a time and ended up here at Home Hill after traveling with me from Valley View to Florida and back to Tennessee again, you'll understand if you hear some crying in the room along with Christmas music playing, won't you?

Mommas do that sometime.

Late with June Reading

Where did you go, June? 

I will slip these in now and hope for a more timely book post at the end of July. These were my recreational reading choices for June.

A Summer Place by Sloan Wilson

Pine Island, Maine, thrust itself out of the sea like a medieval castle. There it stood, the only island in sight, with its Gothic cliffs defying the combers rolling in across the North Atlantic....

No one on the island penetrated the disguise of Sylvia's beauty, no one except Ken Jorgenson, who, for a little while at least, had an instinctive understanding of her. She was frightened. The Islanders seemed hostile and superior to her. Her parents did not dress correctly, she was sure; they did not speak properly.

I ordered this book simply because I love the 1959 sweet movie based loosely on it, A Summer Place, mainly featuring Troy Donohue and Sandra Dee. I was a sophomore in high school when I saw the movie and what 16 year old girl of the late 1950s could resist the beautiful couple. 

The book focuses more on their parents than them, which is just fine with me now. Troy's film mother, played by Dorothy McGuire is a favorite of mine but the Sylvia of the book was much more believable than McGuire's portrayal of her. Basically, the characters in the book were much more real than those of the movie. We find that happens a lot when a movie is made of a book. 

I liked this book so much that I'm set to read all of Sloan Wilson's books now, except for his war novels, will skip them. But another book of his is a hands-down favorite movie of mine, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit starring Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones. I expect I'll love that book more than the movie, too.

One piece of trivia: the movie song, "A Summer Place," still holds Billboard's record #1 running for an instrumental song.

Lunch in Paris, A Love Story, with Recipes by Elizabeth Bard

A French conversation starter is more subtle. Work is considered boring, money is out of the question, politics comes later and only in like-minded company. Vacation is a safe bet--it's no exaggeration to say that French people are always going on, returning from, or planning a holiday. But more often than not, social class in France is judged by your relationship to culture.

I enjoyed all of this book, the true romance story of the author and her French husband, details of an American adapting to life in France, how she fit in with her new French family, her struggle to find meaningful work there, and especially her food stories.

Four of her recipes I know will become regulars for me: her Better Than French Onion Soup, Pork Tenderloin with Apples, Wild Salmon with dill and cucumber salad, and her Coconut Macaroons.

I want to read her Dinner Chez Moi and Picnic in Provence sometime.

The next three books are the first three in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie Mysteries. And this is probably my fourth time to read the series. They have become my relaxing, going to sleep books to be read in bed before lights out. You can't say that about many mystery series. 

I've tried to choose a quote from each book that represents the true essence of Isabel, a philosopher from Edinburgh, Scotland.

It was so easy, thought Isabel. It was so easy dealing with people who were well-mannered. They knew how to exchange those courtesies which made life go smoothly, which was what manners were all about.

from The Sunday Philosophy Club

Scottish clothes are soft, a bit crumpled, lived-in, like Scottish people themselves really....

She looked at her wardrobe, and felt, for a brief moment, despair. There were word people--idea people--and then there were clothes people--fashion people. She knew which group she belonged to.

from The Right Attitude to Rain

A man who has had a recent heart transplant asks Isabel to lunch to discuss something that has been frightening him:

I've had a heart transplant, and I have fairly strict instructions from my doctor. Salads, sardines, and so on....I enjoy a conversation which goes beyond the superficial. Most of the time we exchange banalities with other people. And here you are launching into linguistics, or should I say philosophical speculation. All over a plate of salad and a sardine. I like that.

from Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

That's my Isabel, a woman whose life is thinking, who savors her life in the large village that Edinburgh is to someone who has grown up there, who makes omelets with chanterelle mushrooms and reads week old Italian newspapers at her man-crazy niece's delicatessen, art connoisseur and admirer of Brother Fox who lives in her garden. 

One last fact about Isabel. She's in her early 40s and falls in love with a symphony bassoonist who is handsome and fourteen years younger than her. Go Isabel!

And finally, there was Gardenista, a fabulous birthday gift from a sister by Michelle Slatalla. RH and I both are enjoying this beautiful book and adding ideas to our wish list of garden plans.

For example, will white iceberg roses thrive here? I hope so. Our only rose now is a large wild lovely pink one that grows in the wild roadside hedge. When I saw this picture and read these words...

...white iceberg roses...will bloom from April to October. [with deadheading]...clumps of chives and oak-leaf hydrangeas. 

I love it! I want it!

We want it, don't we, James Mason? Yes we do!

     

Taking Time To Follow the Star

It is the first Sunday of Advent. Although I no longer make the Advent wreaths that the kids and I made together when they were young, I will try to take time during each day to follow the Star. I will go to my bedroom and turn on the small tree that is the first Christmas thing I decorate each year and the last thing to pack away. It is a white flocked tree that son Defee and daughter-in-law Wallace gave me, and it will go to their little Nora someday when she's old enough not to break the vintage pink ornaments I've collected over the years.

I'll sit down in my old reading chair where books are stacked everywhere and baskets are close by holding my current writing project. This is my sanctuary and I want my things around me. This corner is for me-time. No bills get paid here and no blogging. The laptop rarely comes into this room.

Here is where I sit and read and pray and scribble. Here is where I'll have my own Advent devotions. This year I'll be using a new book recommended to me by a fellow blogger. Maureen, when I read this book of Wisdom from G. K. Chesterton, I'll be thinking of you there in Devon, England. I won't link to you here as you've been taking a bit of a blog break, but if you happen to read this, I miss you and hope you start again soon.

After I read and pray I'll read one of the old Christmas books from my collection. This is the first one I'll read, an old 1928 book by Temple Bailey called The Star in the Well. Here is a link to some I found, in case you're interested.

This is a beautiful book in almost mint condition, in it's own pink box. It has deckled edges, a tissue paper covering the title page with frontispiece etching of Paul Moschocowitz's Madonna and Child.

Mary-Alice's parents are typical of the jaded jazz age, especially her father Michael who brushes aside his wife's concern that they have "lost the Star." It takes a life-threatening illness for Michael to return to his southern home place and search for the values taught him by his parents when he was young, where he can teach them to his little girl.

Does this book seem too naive, too simple and old-fashioned? Most of my old Christmas books probably are just that. I admit to being from the Norman Rockwell school of thought when it comes to books, more so the older I get. I think like Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie in this respect:

"Isabel thought about this. It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and despair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicize the fact too widely, certainly not in sophisticated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the fun in that?"

I can't read books anymore that leave me upset and unsettled. I don't want to be disturbed in spirit when looking at a painting or picture.

Maybe I'm just an old fogey but I bet I'm in lots of good company, truth be told. Here's someone you might recognize who must have agreed with me:

"I dream of an art of balance, purity, tranquility,

devoid of disturbing or disquieting subject matter…

something akin to a good armchair."

Henri Matisse

Henri, I'll just sit in my armchair and read a good book and read the Good Book while I listen to Christmas carols, glancing up every once in a while to look about my sanctuary.

And this month of December I'll try to follow the advice of another man:

"Every day look at a beautiful picture,

read a beautiful poem,

listen to some beautiful music,

and if possible, say some reasonable thing."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Isn't that what we attempt to do on our blogs? I could type a list here of blogs I follow for those things, but I don't have to do that. Just scroll through my blogroll and you'll see a long line of them that are there for that very reason.

May this be a blessed December for each of you reading this!