Family matters

Real Life

It’s Saturday, but it’s pretty late and the Sunday Scribblers say it’s OK to go ahead and post my response. This week’s prompt is Real Life. I first tried to craft my response yesterday, but everything I wrote was pretty dreary. So I’m going to try it again with, we’ll hope, a little more sunshine.

Sunday Scribblings

“Real life” is not what I’d expected it to be. It’s bills and dishes and baked potatoes and vacuuming and scrubbing the bathtub and diapers diapers diapers. But it’s also so much more than I could have ever hoped. It’s Rockford bringing me breakfast in bed. It’s Poppy’s sweet smile and her giggles and her toes and her soft, shampoo-perfumed hair tickling my nose. It’s a warm cat, a cozy afghan and a good book on a chilly morning. It’s pie and ice cream on my birthday. It’s my friends and my family and knowing that I am loved. Knowing that I’m blessed.

And I am blessed. Every day. I know that, but it’s so easy to get bogged down in what “real life” was supposed to be, what “The Cosby Show” and the cotton commercials and the Lifetime movies said it would be. But I wouldn’t trade my real life for all the funky sweaters in Cliff Huxtable’s closet.

Reading

"The Language of Baklava"

This is a very well-crafted book. Unfortunately, I read the “praise for” section before I started reading this, and now I can’t think of anything to say other than to parrot what’s already been said. Such as, it’s a “beguiling and wistful Arab-American memoir [that] offers a poignant glimpse of the immigrant’s dueling nostalgias.” Yeah, that’s just what I would’ve said. But the St. Petersburg Times beat me to it.

“Chen shows me how to fit the chopsticks to my fumbling fingers. After a few trembling attempts, I manage to get a small piece of beef to my mouth. I close my eyes and my senses swim in my head. The flavors are so complex and capricious, I don’t know how to make sense of them. … Who would have thought to bring these ingredients, these ways of thinking about food, together in such startling ways?”

“I don’t know what my sisters and cousins and I ever talk about, I only know that we can’t stop laughing. We watch the adults eat, and we laugh some more. We’re not there for the food so much as for the pure electricity of one another’s presence: We could subsist on chewing gum and whistling and running in the fields.”

Uncategorized

Book report

In response to the “Reading List” post a bit ago, Jana B wanted to know what I’m reading now. I picked up “The Language of Baklava” at work last weekend, and I couldn’t put it down. And that was even before I knew there were recipes involved! I’m pretty close to the end, so I’ll write a bit more about it once I’ve finished.

Here’s a book meme I picked up at Caro’s Lines and she picked up elsewhere:

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (My mother-in-law would be outraged that I haven’t read this)
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I don’t remember anything about this. Maybe I should read it again)
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
(The Secret History – Donna Tartt)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I tried to read this, but I couldn’t find a copy. Someone — Felicity Huffman, maybe — recommended it in “O” magazine, which I was reading while my car was being worked on.)
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herbert

There’s a good chance that there are more of these than I noted on my bookshelf. I need a card catalogue.