Week in Seven Words #462

answered
On the train, a toddler keeps asking why the doors aren't closing yet. His mom rephrases her answer several times, providing explanations that he doesn't seem to understand or accept. Or maybe he just enjoys the series of answers, each one tweaked to be slightly different while remaining reassuringly repetitive at the same time.

cozily
For part of the year, they live in a motor home. It's a little over 24 feet long, with a bed tucked in back, a seating area like a small diner booth, and a shelf full of books above the opening to the cab area.

cravings
She doesn't know what to do with herself without her phone. She craves the infinite scroll, the fresh supply of images.

moderators
Two wolf-like dogs oversee the debate from the sofa. They look mildly interested, and a bit intimidating. Maybe they could be moderators, growling at anyone who goes off-topic.

quest
There needs to be a game in the style of Oregon Trail, only the characters are trying to navigate the phone system of a major corporation with the ultimate goal of speaking to a human being who can provide accurate and complete answers. Along the way, your characters suffer from: disconnected lines, misinformation, long stretches of obnoxious music, rising blood pressure, automated voices that request and fail to process your input, a dozen paths or more and only one leading to competence.

treated
The Ghirardelli squares left on each seat are a lovely touch. Chocolates on chairs, a fantastic way to welcome people to the event.

uncoordinated
The toddler has a helmet with spikes on it. In between bursts of smooth gliding, he trips and topples over his scooter. Picks himself up, looks over his shoulder, and glides and trips and topples again. He's like a baby dinosaur learning to walk.

Five Short Stories for the Winter Holidays

With one exception, none of these is specific to the holiday season, but they explore themes associated with this time of year.

Title: A Christmas Memory
Author: Truman Capote
Where I Read It: It appeared at the end of an edition of Breakfast at Tiffany's
This story aches with love and separation. A young boy and an elderly female relative who's a bit childlike and eccentric are pals in a house where they're both overlooked. Their friendship won't last for long before they go separate ways in life, but Capote infuses the story with rich details that makes their relationship timeless in memory. Mostly, it's the two of them preparing for Christmas. Here's a walk through the woods:

A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molten feathers... Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels.

And making fruitcakes:

Eggbeaters whirl, spoons spin round in bowls of butter and sugar, vanilla sweetens the air, ginger spices it; melting, nose-tingling odors saturate the kitchen, suffuse the house, drift out to the world on puffs of chimney smoke.

What does a representation of home mean?

For Deal Me In 2017, I read "Home," a part of Maya Angelou's Letter to My Daughter.

She considers how people carry a representation of their childhood homes in them - the landscapes, the struggles, what the imagination constructs, the impressions that are strongest.

At one point she writes:

I am convinced that most people do not grow up... I think what we do is mostly grow old. We carry accumulation of years in our bodies and on our faces, but generally our real selves, the children inside, are still innocent and shy as magnolias.

What would it mean to grow up as opposed to grow old? Is my 'inner child' my real self, or only part of my real self (I'd say part of, an important part, but not the only one).

Do most people only grow up superficially? I've seen adults of otherwise sound mind throw tantrums like young children, because of something that struck them the wrong way. Maybe they're acting on an old wound or giving voice to a part of them that never grew up. They may have gotten stuck somewhere in their middle school years emotionally or psychologically. People often don't realize how much they're influenced by their childhood experiences, the patterns of thoughts and behavior they established then.

... I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.

What if someone doesn't have that sense of a place in them? How does one find it? (Or construct it?) Is there a danger of getting trapped in it?

Step into the home of the Femm family, The Old Dark House (1932)

Title: The Old Dark House
Director: James Whale
Language: English
Rating: G

In this freaky and ridiculous horror movie, five people get stranded in the Femm family home, located in a remote corner of Wales. The Femms live in a stew of ruination and resentment. There's the sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), a bitter and creepy old woman who broods on the sins of the world, especially anything to do with sex and youth. Her scarecrow of a brother, Horace (Ernest Thesiger), sometimes attempts to defy her but is reduced to fits of trembling. Their 102-year-old father is somewhere upstairs. And is there anyone else? Oh yes, the butler, Morgan (Boris Karloff of Frankenstein fame), who's difficult to manage once he starts drinking.

From Wikipedia, Fair use

The unfortunate guests are a married couple, Philip (Raymond Massey) and Margaret Waverton (Gloria Stuart), and a bachelor, Penderel (Melvyn Douglas), who was traveling with them in their car. Later, a businessman, Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his high-spirited chorus girl companion, Gladys (Lilian Bond), show up seeking refuge from the violent weather that's driven everyone into the Femm home.

It's a good ensemble pic, the kind of movie I really enjoy when it's done well. The standout performance for me was Charles Laughton, as a cheery but profoundly sad and lonely loudmouth, though the actors playing the Femm family are also great, and Gloria Stuart is luminous, bringing brightness to the Femm home (Stuart, by the way, played the elderly Rose in Titanic).

There's no gore, and no need of supernatural entities, because people's personalities are gruesome enough. The movie is a mix of creepiness and absurdity. There are some surprisingly funny moments - not obvious jokes, but just the way a character says or does something at a given moment. The whole scenario is over-the-top, and I think the director (also of Frankenstein fame) and everyone else involved with the film made it with playfulness.

Worth Watching: The Trip to Bountiful (1985)

Title: The Trip to Bountiful
Director: Peter Masterson
Language: English
Rating: PG

The Trip to Bountiful has one of the most beautiful opening scenes I've ever watched: a mother and her young son running through a field of bluebonnets. They're full of life. They look as if they could run forever.

Flash forward a few decades, to the 1940s. The mother, Carrie Watts (Geraldine Page), is now an old woman. She lives with her son, Ludie (John Heard), and his wife, Jessie Mae (Carlin Glynn), in a small Houston apartment. Ludie isn't the carefree boy he once was; he's recovering from an illness and trying to get a promotion at work. He and his wife haven't been able to have children. Jessie Mae is a self-centered, petty woman, who needles her mother-in-law at any opportunity she gets. I also sensed resentment in her, that she has to live with her mother-in-law in close quarters, and that Carrie makes her feel inadequate as a homemaker and wife. The two just get on each other's nerves, and Ludie is, for the most part, tired and withdrawn.

Living in that little apartment is driving Carrie insane; she's reduced to being a child, squabbling with her daughter-in-law. She's cut off from the only kind of life that ever gave her meaning. Realizing that she's in poor health, she's overtaken with the desire to see her old home again in Bountiful, Texas, out in the country. She won't let her son and daughter-in-law stop her.

Good Short Fiction: 5 Tales from 44 Irish Short Stories

Collection: 44 Irish Short Stories
Editor: Devin A. Garrity

It was difficult to get into 44 Irish Short Stories, and I put it aside for a while, but eventually I came across the following five stories, which I thought were all good. I love their wry humor - it doesn't matter how dark the subject matter is, you can see the authors writing about it with a hint of a smile. Reminds me of Jewish humor - can't escape life's misfortunes so you might as well laugh.

Extracts: A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

Don't you see there isn't any real progress... there is only one large circle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us - our own little mirage that we think is the future.

A Raisin in the Sun is a wonderful play, one of the best I've read in a while. Lorraine Hansberry shows how people define themselves and strive for their dreams; in progressing towards what they hope will be a better life, they discover new sources of strength in themselves but also risk self-destruction and undermining others. The play ends on a mix of good spirits and foreboding; the Younger family haven't had it easy up until that point, and they have frightening circumstances to deal with in the future, but they're still alive, fighting with one other and against the world.

Meet the Youngers
The Youngers are a black family living in Chicago's South Side in the years after World War II. The patriarch of the family, Big Walter, has passed away, and his material legacy is an insurance check worth 10,000 dollars - a boon to his family, who have long wanted to get out of their airless, lightless hole of an apartment.

There are six of them: Lena (Mama), Big Walter's widow and the matriarch of the family; their adult children, Walter Lee and Beneatha; and Walter Lee's wife, Ruth, and son, Travis.

Walter Lee is a chauffeur, and both Lena and Ruth work as domestic servants, cooking and cleaning in white people's homes. Unlike Walter Lee, it's apparent that Lena and Ruth don't stop working when they get home; with some help from Beneatha, they take care of all the chores in their apartment, while Walter Lee spends time with his friends, shooting the breeze and cooking up grand business schemes. Beneatha (who at a low point in the play speaks the words excerpted at the start of the post) is a college student, a first for her family. In the course of the play she's also wooed by two very different men - George Murchison and Joseph Asagai - each representing a certain kind of future for her, should she choose one of them.

Dreams deferred, denied, or achieved
Everyone in the Younger family has a dream they want to realize. For Beneatha it's becoming a doctor, and for Walter Lee it's running his own business as a bigshot executive. Lena's primary goal is to move to a real house, something Ruth longs for as well. The only affordable neighborhood within an easy distance of their workplaces in the city is a suburb where only white families live.

Personal flaws and family tension could keep their dreams from materializing. Hansberry might have gone the route of having the family be on the same page, united by the same beliefs and outlook as they fight for a better life, but instead she wrote them as messy and real. Walter Lee fights a good deal with his sister about the man she should marry, and with Lena about what to do with the 10,000 dollars; he wants a chance to be his own boss, and if Beneath got to go to college, why can't he have his opportunity to develop himself?

Walter Lee and Ruth's marriage also goes through a lot of strain. Ruth doesn't have Beneatha's booksmarts or Lena's central position in the family, but it's a testament to Hansberry's writing skills that instead of being a sidelined two-dimensional figure she's distinct, given good lines, a dry wit and a complex character, and made to confront her own difficult choices. As for Lena, she looks at her kids with love and pride and, at times, incomprehension. Of those in the younger generation, Ruth (the aptly named daughter-in-law), is the only one who consistently connects with her.

On top of all the intrafamilial conflict, there are people in their community who would resent their move to a better home, taking it as a sign that the Younger family doesn't know "their place." The one neighbor we do see, Mrs. Johnson, is a riot - a funny portrait of a woman who tries to pass off her nosiness and envy as sincere concern. There are also other people in their community who would more actively undermine their attempts to realize their dream.

And finally there's the all-white neighborhood they want to move to. The neighborhood association sends a representative to try to dissuade them from coming to live there; in a morbidly funny moment, Beneatha refers to him as the "Welcoming Committee," a joke taken up by Ruth and Walter Lee:

Mama: What he want?
Ruth: (In the same mood as Beneath and Walter) To welcome you, honey.
Walter: He said they can't hardly wait. He said the one thing they don't have, that they just dying to have out there, is a fine family of fine colored people!

Lorraine Hansberry's own parents fought racial residential segregation in the northern U.S. (read about the Supreme Court Case, Hansberry vs. Lee) and she knew first hand how violent the situation could get, with black families getting fire-bombed out of their homes, attacked by mobs, and worse.

What is progress?
Returning to the excerpt at the top of the post - is progress an illusion? It's fitting that Beneatha makes this pessimistic pronouncement, as someone who's still figuring out her identity.

On the one hand she's the first college-educated person in her family and wants to be a doctor. But if she marries could she still pursue a career in medicine? (Her brother is leaning on her to marry George Murchison, who would be least likely to support her career.) So what is her identity, her role in the family and society at large, meant to be? And what options are available to her as a black woman who wants to go into medicine? She isn't expected to take charge of her family; for better or worse, Lena comes to expect that of Walter Lee, not necessarily because he has good judgment but because he's the man of the house. With her education and career aspirations Beneatha finds herself in an unprecedented position in her family.

Across the generations, the Younger family has progressed out of slavery, then out of the South, to live in their own apartment and to send one family member to college. Even when the "Welcoming Committee" representative from the white neighborhood comes to speak with them, he doesn't threaten them outright, as Beneatha puts it:

Oh - Mama - they don't do it like that any more. He talked Brotherhood. He said everybody ought to learn how to sit down and hate each other with good Christian fellowship.

Progress seems to work uphill, with backsliding and resistance for every bit of ground gained. The newer generations - Walter Lee and Beneatha - are building off of the sacrifices of their parents and forebears in different ways, while also fighting certain battles all over again: not what previous generations fought against - not slavery and not the southern Ku Klux Klan specifically - but against similar forces, in new shapes and forms. They also fight to understand who they are and where they belong in society, and to understand how the legacy of their parents and ancestors affects them; they absorb it, honor it, chafe against it, turn to it sometimes for guidance and mock or ignore it otherwise. The sum total of Big Walter's legacy - along with what Lena has imparted to her kids - is more than 10,000 dollars.

Any push for progress requires risk. Sometimes the desire for a better life is so consuming that it blinds people to potential dangers as they work impatiently towards it. Then again, focusing too much on the dangers keeps people where they are, relatively safe but also miserable and diminished.

Why haven't we seen more of Hansberry?
In addition to being very active in the Civil Rights movement, Lorraine Hansberry made history in theater with A Raisin in the Sun, becoming the youngest American playwright to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Play. Tragically her life was cut short, at age 34, by pancreatic cancer.

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I read The Modern Library edition of A Raisin in the Sun; it's also the first work I'm writing up for the Classics Club Challenge (you can find the link to the challenge post in the Reading Lists tab at the top of the page as well).

Week in Seven Words #126

armed
I find a black and white photo of her tucked inside a book. It was taken decades ago, during her army training. She stands by a tree and holds a gun, the butt of it resting against the ground; she looks at the photographer with a smile that gives away nothing.

captured
She sits alone in her roller-skating gear and with a smile and a little wave snaps a photo of herself out in the bright world.

missed
On a walk in the park I come across a few actors who are yelling things at each other that sound vaguely Shakespearean but don't carry well in the open air. I ask a couple of people who are leaving, "What play is this?" Silently they point to my feet, where I stand on the giant HAMLET written on the pavement in pink chalk. (To thine own clueless self be true.) Speaking of which, Polonius comes out soon after, and you can tell he's an experienced actor. His voice projects, and he speaks his lines well. Too bad he has to die sooner than everyone else.

packing
I'm starting to associate my old apartment with boxes and hamburgers and papers that multiply every time I look the other way.

sapless
I watch eleven and a half minutes (yes I counted) of yet another T.V. show for kids where the characters don't have distinct personalities - they all do the same things and sound alike when they speak. Their misunderstandings are minor and are resolved almost immediately. The message for kids is that if you and your friends are as similar as possible there's less of a chance that you'll be inconvenienced by disagreements, compromises, and independent thoughts.

siesta
In the shade of the beech tree the mallards are napping.

sitting duck
When the car is stuck in traffic, and the frustrated driver is just spoiling for a fight, there you are, captive in the passenger's seat.

Good Short Fiction: Two tales from 50 Great American Short Stories

Collection: 50 Great American Short Stories
Editor: Milton Crane

Title: The Girls in their Summer Dresses
Author: Irwin Shaw
This story is like a hard piece of candy. It seems bright and sweet at first but when you crack into it you find out it's brittle and hollow. The sweetness fades fast.

A husband and wife take a stroll down 5th Avenue. They've decided to spend the day together instead of meeting up with friends. It's meant to be an intimate time for them, but the husband keeps looking at other women with a gleam in his eye that his wife recognizes from when he first laid eyes on her over five years ago.

What follows is a conversation that exposes and widens the distance between them, the thinness of their intimacy. The husband (who at some points reminds me of a kid in a candy store) tries to be easygoing throughout, and says quietly devastating things in a reassuring voice, as if that will soften the blow.

And I can imagine what the wife is thinking. Not only the question that's voiced - whether looking and coveting will ever lead to adultery - but also the question of why he married her to begin with. If he looks at other women the same way, what makes her special? It's never clear why he married her specifically; she has a number of good qualities, but are they sufficient for him? And if he sees some of the same qualities in other women, or if those women are just as intriguing in their own way, where does that leave her? When he says, "I love you," on what level does he mean it? At one point she says, desperate, "I've made a good wife, a good housekeeper, a good friend. I'd do any damn thing for you." He tells her that he knows; he clasps her hand in his. But he can't tell her what she hopes to hear, not without lying.

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Title: A New England Nun
Author: Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Louisa Ellis and Joe Dagget are engaged but haven't seen each other for years. Joe has been working abroad; Louisa has lived alone. When he returns it's clear that they've grown apart; they behave like kindly acquaintances. What's more, Louisa has carved out a life for herself. Her house may be small, but it's hers. She has her own little garden, and a large dog that has a fearsome reputation in the village. Inside her home everything has its place, and she lives in peace.

Freeman writes about rooms, interiors, and personal space like no author I've come across yet. This is where her characters really come alive: in privacy, living quietly beyond the notice of other people. Her descriptions of 19th century New England village life and the countryside are also lovely.

Louisa could sew linen seams, and distil roses, and dust and polish and fold away in lavender, as long as she listed. That afternoon she sat with her needlework at the window, and felt fairly steeped in peace.

When Joe visits Louisa's house he feels out of place, a bull in a china shop. And by marrying him she knows she'll have to give up her home and move in with him and his mother. The fact that she has independent means of her own, however modest, gives her more of a choice of how to live her life. Both she and Joe are honorable enough to keep their promises to each other, even if their hearts aren't in it; they would still get along tolerably well. She also senses that this will be her last chance to get married, and that if she asked almost anyone they would say that she should. But who can understand, as she does, the pleasures and blessings of her calm solitary domain?

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Other stories from this collection include The Blue-Winged Teal (by Wallace Stegner) and The National Pastime (by John Cheever), along with Silent Snow, Secret Snow (by Conrad Aiken) and The Damned Thing (by Ambrose Bierce).

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A New England Nun also appears in Great American Short Stories: From Hawthorne to Hemingway

Week in Seven Words #85

confines
Résumés remind me of straitjackets.

fruitage
Apple sauce and apples smeared in almond butter. Autumn foods.

homey
Padding around the apartment, wearing socks to stay warm. Different books wait for me on tables and armrests.

pother
When she's fearful she likes to recruit people to her fears. She gets them excited and ready to act, agitates them, like a girl splashing around on the beach getting water in people's eyes and convincing them a shark's fin is just a dozen feet away.

sparklers
The large padded envelope she brings me is splashed with bright colors and streamers, and it yields cards and smaller envelopes like starbursts.

summertide
One lingering summer night. It's balmy out on the porch, where the trees creep close and leaves rattle on the paved path.

swing
Sing, Sing, Sing played by The Benny Goodman Orchestra beats and blares and explodes out of my laptop. It's the kind of music that can make people feel like born dancers.

Week in Seven Words #49

clinch
A quick fierce hug when words sting and words can't wholly mend.

den
I've made my home a little winter den, where I've holed up most of the week, picking away at work, reading by lamplight, storing up some energy for the coming months.

giddy
Tipsy on daiquiris and the wildest thing they do is play Scrabble. I love them.

imploring
Outside the library, as I tuck books into my backpack, a squirrel hops up on the bench beside me. It cocks its head at me and crimps its hands close to its chest. I wish I had something to give it.

kleenex
The snow looks like tissue paper torn up and puffed on by the wind.

petrology
Watching the sunrise on a heavily clouded day. The sky starts off charcoal, lightens to lead, shifts to cobalt and settles at last on the tranquil blue-gray of an agate stone.

tabletop
A pool of light, a game board, a plate of rolled figs covered in coconut shavings.

Week in Seven Words #45

chapped
My knuckles crack open in the cold.

culmination
All eight candles are lit along with the presiding shamash; the light they give is defiant and cheerful.

fragment
A slender journal in Hebrew, and the story of a girl who lived decades ago and died young. She left a deep impression on her teacher, who wrote about her elevated spirit and discerning mind; this teacher wanted to preserve her writing and keep her memory alive. In her black and white photo she looks serious and severely lovely.

listing
The project drifts off course and onto some rocks. It groans, tilts, and waits in weary silence for intervention.

peepers
Their eyes appear on the screen as two blank white circles on a black square. The circles squeeze to nothing and spring to full circumference; they waver and blur and shift from side to side. They seem to belong to a cartoon character blinking out of a dark room.

tight-lipped
My front door won't admit me, and at first I'm not sure why.

twinkle
Snow drifts down in the late afternoon. It's the best time of day for it, knowing that there are warm places waiting for me at the end of the day's work.

Week in Seven Words #13

bluebells
Flecked with silver rain.

dendrology
One approach to studying trees is to go out after a heavy rain and look down. The manhole cover has become a mirror; the unruffled puddle shows me sprays of green, a knit of branches, and gray-white skies beyond.

gnome
The oboe scampers from one note to another. It slips between the piano's crushing chords.

ignorance
To be dealt with despairingly or, I hope, determinedly.

roost
She settles here for a day, finding some rest for herself, and when she leaves I realize once again that she's helped make my home feel more like home.

smorgasbord
At lunch there's Pygmalion, post-modern art, and Prussia.

vise
A band of pressure throughout the week, beneath the heart.