New Year's Eve

It's the end of the year, a very difficult one for many. The year to come is met with trepidation. What can we do but continue to hope and work toward the best? Fatalism is tempting, but offers no solution. This isn't the time to let each other down.

This year hasn't been so bad for me, personally. Judging by my posting habits, I've managed to post here more than any other year (and would have done more if my computer hadn't chucked it). It's been about 16 months since I began regularly using brainwave entrainment to treat my anxiety and depression, and am sure this is the reason. 

No, I'm not cured, nor "normal" by any means, but it's a major improvement, and for that I am grateful. 

As it is, I'm going to keep chugging on, keep up with my unconventional therapies, get a new computer, hold to my responsibilities and work up the bravery to be a help to my fellow man.

With luck, we will survive living in these interesting times.

Happy New Year.

When Dark Comes At Six

It was a frigid evening in December, with clouds so low that car lights reflected in the sky.  It was Thursday, too, which was my day off and also payday. I'd meant to get my check, but had fallen asleep and now it was getting late. It was after 4 by then, though the blank grey sky made it seem even later

I had to go, and quick. I was wearing a thin cotton dress, seafoam green with pink flowers. Perhaps it seems an odd choice for the season, but I was very young then and gauche, and couldn't afford many nice dresses anyway.  I put on my wool coat and  scarf before rushing out the door.

It was a mile to walk to work and back. The wind was icy,  I remember that, even with the coat and scarf. I remember turning my collar up against the cold. I remember crossing the high bridge over the river, the one that always made me worry that I would lose my mind and jump.

But memory is a tricky thing. Sometimes I have a mental image of seeing the plaza that evening, all lit with lamps in the gloom. Other times I'm not so sure. And while I must have made it to my workplace, through the ubiquitous Christmas music and peachy-apricot scents, this no longer exists as a firm reality. But I must have done all the same, because the check was certainly in my purse, uncashed, later that night.

The next thing  I remember for sure, I was standing on the edge of the street - it was grey, too, like everything else - dithering over whether I could make it to the bank before closing time. There were two men talking, not too far away. One of them had curly hair and was wearing a suit. They broke off their conversation to look at me.

I nodded at them rather distractedly. The light was fading. But I'd hardly got more than a block when a car drove up next to me.

The man in the suit said, it's so cold, do you need a ride anywhere? I said no, but thanks anyway.  I made to walk on. He said, I was just going to dinner, will you join me? Please?  He gestured at the restaurant across the street.

While I did like his fine suit and his rather elegant hands, I demurred.  I was still thinking of the bank. I had Christmas shopping to do.

He took my hesitation as something else, though. He said, You don't have to get in the car with me. I'll be at the restaurant and you can meet me there if you like.

After he drove away, I stood on the icy, wind-blown corner and pondered my fate. Wither this way or that? In the end, I met him. It came down to practicalities, you see. I was getting a bit hungry by then, and I really wasn't sure I could cash my check in time to buy anything to eat.

He bought us dinner and we talked. He said he lived in Austin but had come here on business. He was engaging and friendly. I found him appealing  despite our age difference, but was sceptical as he was the type who was usually married. He swore up and down he wasn't, and in fact this would turn out to be true. He was only what he claimed to be, really, a lonely businessman passing through town on this particular Wintery day.

When we finished our meal, he asked if he could take me out for a cappuccino. I didn't answer right away, since this was so long ago, I didn't even drink coffee yet, let alone fancy Italian drinks. The man said if I'd rather, we could have ice cream instead. I told him I wasn't sure, and this was the truth. But I was enjoying myself, and the man was nice, even if he kept staring at me funny.

"What is it you need?" he asked, with suprising sincerity. "a reference?" He offered to call an assortment of people who would vouch for him. He gave me his business card with his home address on the back. Finally, he gave me his driver's licence. He said, take this, amd if I get fresh with you, you can keep it.

By this time I was laughing, so it was easy to say yes. It wasn't that I didn't like him, or  even trust him somewhat at this point. It was that I knew we would end up in a relationship, and I wasn't sure at that moment if I wanted to take that path or carry on alone.

By the time we left the restaurant, the sky had faded into night. The man was staring at me again. Feeling a bit exasperated, I asked him why he kept looking at me. Why on earth did he want to go out with me so bad? He apologized and said  - with an earnest awkwardness that seemed ... maybe ... impossible to fake - "It's because you're the most beautiful person I've ever seen in real life."

Ah, such words! Perhaps only another Ugly Sister could appreciate the way I felt then, in the saddest, hidden corners of her heart.

At the coffee house, we had both cappuccino and ice cream among the Christmassy lights. I was no longer so cold in my seafoam dress.  We talked about how we wished we could fast forward to the future, 6 months or a year or 3. Ostensibly this is so we could say we were in love, but really we wanted to evade the challenges we knew would separate us. We were too flawed for it to be otherwise, even if we would pretend it was not so for years.

At that moment, though, in that reality, all was still potential. The man (his name was Michael, by the way, since we've already reached the point of planning our life together) asks me to come to a party at his father's house on Sunday. His whole family will be there. He says he'll pick me up at work at 6, when the store closes early that evening. By now, I've given up my token resistance. I'm happy enough to agree

And so it is three days later, I'm at work, nervously fussing around my domain. It's almost closing time. Through the wall-sized windows I can see the early darkness settling. And here now too I can see Michael, ready to take me to his father's house, with a dozen roses in arms.

Whatever happens after this is not important - well, it is, but not for the purposes of this post. It's that I promised myself then to remember this moment always, when dark comes at six and the weather is cold.

This post is my way of keeping that vow.

Merry Solstice

Merry Solstice and Happy Winter Holidays to all.

Speaking Of Hemlock...

Fire And Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, has been one of my favorite books since the second time I read it, back in 1988 .The second time, because the first, I'd scratched my head and wondered what the heck it all meant. I then re-read it and found it fascinating. This seems to be a fairly common pattern with fans of the book. It's a complex story, especially for a young adult novel, full of literary allusions and parallels that are not immediately clear. It's the kind of story a person really has to read more than once.

A lot has been written about the plot of this book, and I'm not really equal to writing more. Still, for the purposes of this post, I'll give a brief synopsis to give some idea of why I found the book so intriguing.

(some spoilers ahead, if you haven't read it.

The story begins with a young woman, Polly, about to head back to college. While packing her things, something triggers a memory, or several memories, that she knows must be false. As she tries to puzzle it out, she unlocks a flood of recollections from her childhood, beginning with the day she met a strange man at a funeral.

The book takes us through these lost memories, her odd and somewhat sketchy relationship with the man, and the overarching, ominous hold that his ex-wife and in-laws seem to have over him.

Considering the man's name is Thomas Lynn, and each chapter of the book begins with a quote from Tam Lin or Thomas The Rhymer, it's not hard to guess this aspect of the book. It's not even hidden, really, that the book is partly a modern reworking of Tam Lin. If I remember correctly, the copy I took out of the library even had this as a blurb on the cover. But if this is all it was, I don't think it would be so interesting.

Polly's adventures with Tom ("hero business", they call it) are mixed in with ordinary life, but Polly's parents are too self-absorbed and neglectful to even notice. "One of your Mr. Nobodies" her mother calls him, before letting Polly go off to Tom's London flat without even bothering to meet him first.

That there is something sinister, even supernatural, going on with Tom is accepted by Polly without much question, the way children do. Of course, Tom won't talk about it, clearly can't talk about it - Polly is sensitive to these things due to her difficult parents - so as she grows older, she resolves to find out exactly what's going on with Mr. Lynn.

When her hidden memories of Tom come to an abrupt halt, the grown-up Polly has to figure out what terrible thing she'd done that had erased him from her life so completely.

I'll leave it there, though I don't know if that in any way captures what is so appealing about the book.

Perhaps the most technically masterful thing Jones accomplished in this novel is the way she moves Polly from child to adult in a seamless, realistic way. Polly's hidden memories move from imaginative little girl to  tomboy, to fickle adolescent, to a somewhat overconfident teen, to finally a college-age woman who is unsure what she will do with her future. Yet Polly is always recognizably the same character. Looking back through these stages of her life has a haunting quality, and the once upon a time element that one expects to find in fairy tales is here present in Polly's own story.

School and home are also rendered with depth and realism, and the fantastical elements, while necessarily less realistic, are not so unbelievable in the context of the story.  The weaving together of the ordinary and extraordinary is one of Jones' hallmarks, and Fire And Hemlock is probably the book where she does it best.

Which isn't to say that the story isn't opaque at points, or at least translucent, in the sense of that thick block glass that only lets you see light and shadow. For instance, you are never explicitly told why Polly is able to intuitively grasp so much of Tom's situation, or why his in-laws perceive her as such a threat. And as far as the denouement goes, Jones was almost too clever for her own good. The answers are there in the story, but Jones clearly expected the reader to do the work and figure it out themselves. Hence the tendency for fans to go at the book like archeologists on a dig. You'd think we were interpreting one of Borges more convoluted works, not a YA novel.

For me, there is an essential whyness (I don't think that's a word, but never mind) that lies at the foundation of this story. As in, why did Jones write this particular book? I'd always had a strong sense that she hadn't done it just because it was a good story (after all, Tam Lin has been done dozens of times) or just to be clever, or because there is any particular moral in it.

I did know that she'd wanted to explore the concept of the female hero, because Jones said so herself. But that wasn't the answer I was looking for either. No, there was something else going on underneath the story, and it was mightily hard to get at.

Which brings me, at last, to the point of this post. I think I finally found it, the "why". Not in Fire And Hemlock or any of the other works referenced within, but in a short story of hers called The Master.

 I had heard that Jones wrote The Master about a recurring nightmare she'd had, and then written Fire And Hemlock out of the same set of ideas, but hadn't been able to get my hands on a copy since no nearby library or bookstore carried it. So this weekend, I was thrilled to discover this book preview of Jones's Unexpected Magic that actually included it. Double thrills!

 The Master is the third story when you scroll down:
https://www.harpercollins.com/web-sampler/978006555351
(Edit - or not. Some technichal difficulties with the link. But googling Unexpected Magic book sampler brings it up just fine.)

Even though The Master and Fire And Hemlock are very different stories, if you overlay one on top of the other the similarities are clear. The eerie, otherworldy house in the woods is the basis for Hunsdon House. The vet who is called into this situation is analogous, in many ways, to Polly. Egbert has elements of Tom, including the geas laid upon him not to tell. The unsettling rose garden links to the Tam Lin tale and T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, both. The wolves and their behavior - perhaps most tellingly of all - reflect Tom's in-laws. The list could go on and on.

As for the "why" of it, that is apparent, too. Both tales spring from a dream, the kind that haunt and nag at you and beg to be exorcized by finally understanding them. Which is exactly what Jones has inspired in the  most obsessive readers of Fire And Hemlock.

And if that is what Jones meant to do, then that was the most technically masterful thing she accomplished in the book.

It only took 27 years for me to work it out. It was worth it, though.