It occurred to me just now that...three posts ago...I wrote this long blog entry about my mother being in the hospital and asked for prayers from everyone, but I never followed up with how my mother was doing. So here it is...
...My mother is doing much better. In fact, she came home this morning for the first time since going into the hospital. This now marks the SECOND time that my mother has been close to dying (so close to dying that even the medical professionals around her admitted later in both cases that they didn't think she'd make it) and pulled through. She's like a cockroach--you CAN'T kill her!
Oh great, with that "cockroach" comment, I've now given my mother TWO reasons to hit me over the head with a newspaper. I guess I can take comfort in the fact that--thanks to the fact that both the State-Journal and the Lexington Herald Leader are online--my mother hasn't subscribed to a newspaper in more than a year.
And on the off hand chance that you do find a newspaper around somewhere, Mom, I'm going to post this photo on here so that you'll remember how much I love you AND HOW MUCH YOU LOVE ME!
Here's a story from way back in August. I've been meaning to tell it since it first happened, but something else came up and I forgot about it. But I had an almost perfect repeat of it this afternoon, so I was reminded to write it now...
I typically leave work at 4 PM. I come home and make dinner (I'm the primary chef in our home), and I try to get the food on the table by 5 o'clock. On the first day of school this year, though, I was running a little bit late (lots of technology "fires" to put out on the first day), and I was in quite a hurry when I tore around the corner of Royal Drive on the way home to my house. Just past the Drawbridge Inn Hotel is a set of eight apartment buildings, all mostly identical and all just a few feet away from each other. I had to put on my brakes as I approached the apartment buildings because there, at the sidewalk of the fourth apartment building, was a school bus. It was the first day of school, and the children--mostly kindergarten and first grade children it looked like--were getting off the bus and running into the arms of their parents, who were excited to see them after their first day of school. Both the parents and the children--who were carrying back packs, lunchboxes, and fistfuls of paper to their parents--were beaming with these gigantic smiles. It was a stunning sight to see. Their joy infected me, and I smiled broadly, enjoying the spectacle.
Then my eyes focused on the car in front me, between me and the bus. The driver was angrily shaking his fists and his head was jerking up and down and I could tell that he was shouting something. I didn't know what he was shouting, but I could tell that he was directing his anger at the bus in front of him. I couldn't believe the nerve of the guy. Stop and smell the roses, I thought. How big of a hurry could he be in that he couldn't wait for these excited kids and parents to have their moment? And it was just a moment. A few more seconds and the final child got off the bus, the big, red "STOP" sign on the side of the bus folded back into place, and the bus rumbled forward.
It went all of about twenty feet before it stopped at the end of the sidewalk of the fifth apartment building, and the scene repeated itself. I watched the whole scene again, this time with a little less joy in my heart as I watched. When the bus rumbled forward slowly and then stopped AGAIN at the sidewalk of the SIXTH apartment building, I craned my neck as far to the right as I could in order to see around the bus. I saw a whole line of parents also standing at the end of the seventh and eighth apartment buildings.
By the time the bus pulled away from the eighth apartment building, I think I was shaking my fist harder than the driver in front of me!...
As a child and as a teenager, I used to love to read. I did it all the time. In middle school and high school I was always carrying a book around with me from class to class. I especially liked science fiction and fantasy stories (Yes, my geek nature is showing here), especially the DUNE novels and the SWORD OF SHANNARRA and the THOMAS COVENANT THE UNBELIEVER novels. I absolutely consumed those stories. Later, in high school, I fell in love with Shakespeare, and I began reading Shakespeare, even outside of class. Reading was a joy.
And then something happened: I became an English education major. I did it BECAUSE I loved reading. What could be better, I thought to myself, than to spend a lifetime reading great literature and sharing it with students? And in becoming an English major, my ability to APPRECIATE great literature expanded tremendously, but my ability to ENJOY it decreased. Yes, I did get to read everything Shakespeare ever wrote (thanks to a total of six different Shakespeare courses taken in high school, undergraduate school, and graduate school), and I also found some other literature along the way that I really liked (including a lot of poetry). But mostly, I plodded through a bunch of stuff that I NEEDED to read but didn't necessarily WANT to read. And once I started teaching school, I ended up teaching the same literature over and over again, and any newness and joy in the literature wore off pretty quickly.
I left the classroom eight years ago to take an administrative position, and in that eight years, I haven't read a single piece of fiction. Until the last six weeks.
As I mentioned over several posts back in November, I purchased a Kindle Fire for myself as an early Christmas present. And I decided that, after eight years, it was time for me to start reading again. So I decided to begin with Gregory Maguire's novel Wicked, which is a prequel to The Wizard of Oz. My entire family had seen the musical a few weeks before, and I was sufficiently intrigued by the musical to wonder what the book might be like. I assumed that, like almost always, the book would be better than the musical. And so I started reading. I found the novel difficult to get through, though, and I couldn't figure out why. Despite having some familiarity with the story thanks to the musical, I still struggled to focus and maintain my interest. At first I assumed that maybe reading on the Kindle Fire wasn't going to work for me, because after reading a page or two I'd find myself leaving the book to browse the web on the Fire, or to play Doodle Jump or Angry Birds or some other game. Maybe, I thought to myself, I was just too easily distracted.
But then about a week ago, on a whim, I downloaded a different book to my Kindle, and I read the entire book in less than a day. And once I had finished that book, I realized what it was that was making Wicked so difficult for me to read: I hated it.
I HATED it!
Once the thought occurred to me, I knew that was the problem. I absolutely hated the novel Wicked. The storyline was intriguing, but the characters were awful in their development. And the author did a lot of "telling" and not "showing." Instead of showing a scene in which Elphaba and Galinda--these two complete opposites--became friends, the novel just said something like, "And over time, Elphaba and Galinda became friends." That's the laziest writing I've ever heard of! The novel just bored me to death, and I didn't even know it.
Apparently, all of those years of forcing myself to read literature that didn't particularly interest me but that I "needed" to read had broken in me the ability to distinguish what I truly liked from what I disliked. It reminds me a bit of the video below, from the film STAR TREK: GENERATIONS (again, showing my geek nature here). In the scene, Data, a robot, has developed emotions and the sense of taste for the first time. This is pretty much how I felt that day, even to the point that--after I realized I hated the novel Wicked--I read another 20 or so pages of it to see WHY I hated it.
