Week in Seven Words #565

This covers the week of 11/15/20 - 11/21/20.

capturing

Leaves sink into mirror-like water.

dammed

When he serves us drinks in his home, he talks about his life in a torrent. The words have been pent up by too much time spent alone. Now, his mask muffles them as they pour out.

desperate

She's been overlooked for so long. That's the main reason she's looking for an effortless win.

low-spirited

She's been in a low mood all day. The only things that keep our conversation going are the conventional greetings and the well-wishes we've said many times. Hopefully, these good wishes have some power.

readerly

As I wait in line at the library to return a book, the lady behind me gasps and tells me she has that same book on reserve. It will be going from me to her. I don't tell her that I lost interest in it after 20 pages, because she's happy to see it, and maybe she'll like it more than I did.

repeatedly

Some find comfort in their routines. Others start to question the point of their routines.

squeaky

"What's the special ingredient?" he asks, lingering over the dish, and she's tempted to hint at the raging pest problem in the city, the rats creeping into homes in higher numbers. Might as well put them to good use, right? But she figures he won't appreciate the joke.

Week in Seven Words #564

This covers the week of 11/8/20 - 11/14/20.

boredom

He's under the impression that his boredom makes him unique. He believes it's a sign of superior intelligence.

eventful

Quarantined at home, she wears an evening gown to her microwaved dinner.

inevitability

Was it always going to happen this way? Could there have been another way? Another reminder to shift from what-ifs to what I have to do now.

innocence

There's enchantment in his voice when he points out the leaves whirling, settling on the sidewalk in a cascade of gold.

pasty-faced

We Skype again, our voices subdued. I don't even think it's something we enjoy doing anymore, seeing each other's faces through a screen. There's something tiring and unreal about it.

upcycled

As the sun sets, we stroll among dog sculptures made of plastic bags. They're cleverly done, colorful, a contrast to the loose bags and other bits of garbage along the street. Afterwards, we sit on a bench and talk for a while, until it gets too cold and dark.

walking

The day is made better by changing leaves and weather that's cool, not cold.

Week in Seven Words #521

This covers the week of 1/12/20 - 1/18/20.

cheerless
Gray streets dusted with litter. A chain store here and there, lots of chain link fencing, and some windowless concrete walls.

convolution

I almost flub one part of the coding test by overthinking things, making the questions more complicated than they are. Instead of looking at the simplest explanation for what they mean, I interpret them as a set of trick questions. 

drowsy
A sleepy walk, early when it's still dark. It seems like the only other people outside are the ones walking their dogs before work.

interconnected

Reading a memoir, I notice that the author speaks of going it alone but at the same time keeps mentioning people – family, friends, mentors, colleagues – who helped out along the way. There was no "going it alone." Sure, there was hard work, individual effort. But the support, encouragement, and connections were ever present.

provisions
The basement food pantry has shelves of beans, canned meat, packets of tuna and pink salmon, canned vegetables and fruits, and plastic bags bulging with bread. Some of the bags are collecting moisture. Some of the bread is stale. A delivery of food arrives through a chute propped up under an opening high in the wall. Boxes of food tumble down the chute and skid across a long table.

tidewater
Waves of sadness come over me, pouring over and through me.

upchuck
A pleasant dinner followed by the unpleasantness of a stomach bug.

Eight Unromantic Short Stories

Yesterday, I posted a playlist for Valentine's Day on another site. Today, I've decided to shatter dreams of romance with the following stories. Enjoy!

Title: After You've Gone
Author: Alice Adams
Where I Read It: Legal Fictions
An attorney attempts to bring some order to her feelings and thoughts after her boyfriend leaves her. She analyzes different areas of her life and assumes a dispassionate attitude about a deeply personal and emotional topic. In her letter to him, she even advocates for his new girlfriend, asking him to be kind to her. The story is worth reading for the performance the main character delivers.

Title: The Connor Girls
Author: Edna O'Brien
Where I Read It: The Love Object
The title refers to a pair of adult sisters who live with their father. In the area of Irish countryside they call home, they're the elites. However, a scandal breaks the family apart when one of the sisters falls in love with a man her father considers unsuitable; she's Protestant, and her lover is Catholic. She leaves home and returns only when her father passes away. The marriage she once hoped for never takes place. For a while she's in the grip of an intense grief and has a drinking problem. But eventually, she settles back into life with her sister. Her heart was broken, her hopes thwarted, but by the story's end she's healing and is also more open to the community around her. You wonder, as much pain as she went through, maybe marriage to the man of her choice would have put her in worse straits? Or maybe she would have been deeply happy. There's no way to know for sure.

The story's narrator is a neighbor of the Connor girls. Her family comes from a lower class, and she has always looked at the Connors from the outside. When she grows up, she chooses to marry outside her parents' wishes. After a period of estrangement, she visits home with her husband and young son. The visit highlights her husband's contempt for her parents, their rural way of life, and yes, for her too. The narrator is deeply alone, wrenched away from her parents' world but in a relationship that isn't loving. She also no longer has a community to call her own. Ultimately, the story doesn't portray marrying against parental wishes as an unquestioned good in all cases. Sometimes it might be the best choice, but the risks are serious, and one might lose a great deal. Should you take the risk then?

Title: The Country Husband
Author: John Cheever
Where I Read It: American Short Stories Since 1945
Cheever is good at writing about middle-aged, upper middle class suburbanites who possess the accepted trappings of an adult life - marriage, children, a job, a lovely home – but if you look more closely, you discover that they are profoundly immature. Something in them remains undeveloped. In this story, a man experiences a shock – he survives an airplane accident – and appears to spiral into a mid-life crisis that he doesn't have the wisdom or maturity to handle. For example, he feels lust for his kids' young babysitter (he thinks of it as love, but it doesn't come across as genuine love), and acts on his feelings in a selfish, nasty way that hurts other people.

Title: The Furnished Room
Author: O. Henry (William Sydney Porter)
Where I Read It: Manhattan Noir 2
A man searches through NYC for a woman he loves. He goes from one derelict boarding house to another in the hopes that someone knows where she is. She works in theater, and her fate is at first unknown. By the end we find out.

The visceral descriptions of miserable places are the most memorable parts of this story.

They trod noiselessly upon a stair carpet that its own loom would have forsworn. It seemed to have become vegetable; to have degenerated in that rank, sunless air to lush lichen or spreading moss that grew in patches to the staircase and was viscid under the foot like organic matter.

Human misery is imprinted on furniture and on the floors and walls. You can feel the presence of former occupants in depressing ways.

One by one, as the characters of a cryptograph become explicit, the little signs left by the furnished room's procession of guests developed a significance. The threadbare space in the rug in front of the dresser told that lovely women had marched in the throng. The tiny finger prints on the wall spoke of little prisoners trying to feel their way to sun and air. A splattered stain, raying like the shadow of a bursting bomb, witnessed where a hurled glass or bottle had splintered with its contents against the wall.

Week in Seven Words #443

damply
She spreads her coat on the floor and invites two kids to squash up on it for a story. Raindrops squeeze from the coat into the carpet, as the pages of the picture book flip.

duodenum
I head deep into the belly of the store, which is full of glitter, stickers, crafts, and lines as long as intestines.

how
He says that after a tragedy people shouldn't ask 'why,' they should ask 'how.'

misdirect
They use arguing as a strategy of escapism. If they're full of outrage over one thing or another, they can avoid dealing with other emotions and underlying problems.

reticence
"What do you do?" they ask him. "I think of myself as a philosopher," he says, and seems to mean it. As he is silent for most of the evening, and gives brief, vague replies at other times, it's difficult to determine what he thinks about.

torn
He wants to grieve on his own. But he's also terrified of being alone at a time like this.

unmentioned
We're going to pretend that there's no reason (and maybe there is no conscious reason) that we haven't seen each other in a while.

Week in Seven Words #378

confect
He brings out a glass bowl with six strawberries bathed in whipped cream.

denial
The kid is determined to pretend that she's happy. She speaks in greeting card platitudes and draws smiley faces on her work. It's her way of getting through a childhood that's starved of love.

gliding
The day is flush with sunlight, and the air smells clean. I walk for an hour and feel calm.

narrowly
He spins the fidget toy on the surface of the desk (spin spin spin), his attention focused entirely on it and not on his book.

pressed
The silver din of utensils and the voices sparkling and roaring pin me to the doorway for a moment, before I step into the restaurant bar during happy hour.

tenant
The cat doesn't belong to anyone in the building. He moved in, and some of the residents took responsibility for veterinary fees. Now he wanders the corridors and curls up for hours in the courtyard among potted plants and folding chairs.

tongue-tied
Her gratitude catches me by surprise, and I don't know if it's deserved. I smile awkwardly, and the thoughts seem to empty from my head to make room for confusion.

Agnes Grey - Revenge of the Governess!

I didn't know anything about Anne Bronte before reading Agnes Grey, except that she's the overlooked Bronte sister. But by the end of the book I figured she'd worked as a governess and that it had not gone well. This book might have given her a little power. On paper, she could enjoy some mastery - trotting them out, all the wealthy vulgar fools who spoil their children and mistreat their governess (a governess who, in the book at least, earns a happy ending to make up for all the unappreciated labor and neglect).

Agnes is a clergyman's younger daughter, and when her family falls into financial straits, she offers to work as a governess. Her older sister and parents doubt her and try to discourage her. She's the baby of the family and has led a sheltered life. She romanticizes the job, imagining that it involves a lot of gentle teaching and chiding and comforting.

In the first family she works for, she gets a bunch of unmanageable brats dumped on her. The parents offer her no support and blame her for the children's faults, so she's helpless in dealing with them. The second family that hires her gives her teenaged daughters to work with. There's little she can do to teach them. Outside the schoolroom, they sometimes spend time with her when they're out of other options. Otherwise, they ignore her. Neglect, loneliness, invisibility - Bronte writes these feelings confidently. The only upside to Agnes being ignored is that she enjoys a few opportunities to spend time with a local curate. She falls in love with him, and he's actually a decent man. (No Heathcliff here.)

Three Short Stories About War from Around the World

Story Collection: World Literature: An Anthology of Great Short Stories, Drama, and Poetry
Editor: Donna Rosenberg

Title: One Soldier
Author: Katai Tayama
Translator: Jai Ratan
This story is more or less a one-man death march, and the soldier it focuses on could be anyone. He's Japanese, fighting against Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, but the details of the war don't matter. All we see is him, leaving a military hospital prematurely because he can't stand to be there anymore, and trying to catch up with the other soldiers in his company. He realizes, while marching through the countryside, that he's still sick with beriberi, a horrible condition brought about by thiamine deficiency. He thinks about the glorious ideas that made him eager to participate in the war, and the possibility of dying from cardiac arrest after straining to walk for miles with beriberi. Or, even if he survives, the thought that he'll be trapped anyway, gunned down somewhere. War is a giant trap, and every moment he's alive he's in pain. The heart of the story is his terrible cry: "This pain, this pain, this pain!"

Title: The Soldier
Author: Krishan Chandar
Translator: (Info not provided)
Shortly after the end of World War II, a Pakistani soldier returns to his village. He wishes with everything in him that life will continue as before, only with the added benefit of people regarding him as a hero. But he knows, from the start, that everything will be different. He's lost his leg, and people notice the loss of the leg more than the medals he's received for his heroics; the glory of his sacrifice is tarnished by pity. Others have moved on with their lives, and there he is, an object of pity among them, beloved to them but also strange and upsetting. What does he live for at the end?

Title: War
Author: Luigi Pirandello
Translator: (Info not provided)
Although it's set against a backdrop of war, the story is not so much about war, but more about the difference between people's thoughts and the misleading impressions they give with what they say. There are a group of parents in a train car whose sons have enlisted in the military. They squabble about who has cause to worry most, and one passenger delivers a monologue on patriotism, and how "our children do not belong to us, they belong to the Country..." He nearly convinces one woman that she hasn't risen to the occasion and that she should resign herself to the possibility of her son dying in war. But all it takes is one innocent question to expose his own love and grief, which can't be quieted by any amount of tribute paid to abstract principles.

Worth Watching: About Schmidt (2002)

Title: About Schmidt
Director: Alexander Payne
Language: English
Rating: R

Who is Warren Schmidt and why does he have reason to despair?

Early on, we watch Warren Schmidt (Jack Nicholson) at his retirement party. His best friend makes a toast and tells Warren that a man can be proud if he looks back on his life and sees a loving family, good friends, and meaningful work. And while, on the surface, Warren seems to lay claim to that legacy, it isn't long before he realizes that his life is empty. His years of work in insurance are irrelevant to the young man succeeding him on the job. He's disconnected from the community and from friends. Now that he's at home with his wife all day, he realizes that she's virtually a stranger. And though he thinks with fondness of their one daughter, Jeannie (Hope Davis), all of his fond thoughts center on her as a young girl. The adult Jeannie is a stranger to him as well.

Week in Seven Words #163

dotted
Getting speckled with snow as I take a long walk.

embitter
As everyone is celebrating, I taste the undercurrents in the room. Along with genuine warmth, there's a strong flavor of condescension and cynicism. People are smirking instead of smiling.

gloomy
People in shambles in a green-carpeted parlor.

openness
The conversation goes much better than I expected it would. More listening, calmness, and humor than I would have imagined possible. Acceptance is still a long way off, and maybe it will never come. Regardless, I have to do as I see fit.

potentate
My opinion of him (which isn't definitive, not least because I'm acting as an armchair psychologist), is that he's deeply self-absorbed. Occasionally he turns away from his work or personal interests and notices someone else. He might even be moved to do a kindness for them. Then he'll forget about them and become irritated and puzzled when they contact him.

stimulant
Jolted out of a quiet Friday afternoon by some really good news.

threshold
We stand outside talking in the damp. Occasionally the front door opens, disclosing golden light and a roar of voices.

Worth Watching: The Station Agent (2003)

Title: The Station Agent
Director: Thomas McCarthy
Language: English
Rating: R (not sure why - probably because of some of the language)

At the heart of it, this movie is about people's hunger for companionship and their adjustment to loss and the passage of time.

Three people form an unlikely friendship in The Station Agent. Finn McBride (Peter Dinklage) is a man with dwarfism who immerses himself in the world of trains: their make, their speed and movement, their history and the routes they've taken. Joe Oramas (Bobby Cannavale) is an outgoing, talkative food vendor, filling in at his family's food truck because his father is ill. And Olivia Harris (Patricia Clarkson) is an artist who could be genuinely calm and joyful if she weren't struggling with a horrible tragedy in her life.


One weakness in this movie is the way the characters keep getting thrown together in coincidental meetings that can feel forced; the filmmakers really want them to be friends. But I didn't mind so much, because I want them to be friends too. The kind of friendship that grows between them, three people who live in different worlds and ordinarily wouldn't connect in life, is beautiful.


And then, even with the movie repeatedly throwing them together, their friendship remains in some ways fragile. It doesn't take much to shut people out of our lives. Sometimes when we need people the most, we push them away. If we're lucky they won't go away forever.

*All images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

Week in Seven Words #145

gauze
Fat snowflakes swimming past my eyes. The world is wrapped up in snow.

macabre
Despair is always waiting with open arms but I don't look his way, not this time.

masonry
In the subway car I'm just one brick in a wall of solid flesh.

morphed
The dog got a haircut. Now when she stretches up on her hind legs to poke her nose over the edge of the table she looks part-canine, part-rodent, and part-pixie, with liquid alien eyes.

pointless
Conversations with people who have a gleam in their eye that tells me they're not really hearing me out, just waiting to pounce on what they expect to hear. Why should I talk, when they already know what I'm going to say?

simulation
Before reading comes pretend reading, where she turns the pages, recites the words she knows by heart, points out the pictures, and to all appearances looks as if she's reading.

wobbly
I'm heading into new territory on unsteady legs, as if there's ice under my feet.

Week in Seven Words #117

compressed
Am I really in Israel? More than once I ask myself that. I leave the U.S. on Sunday afternoon, land in Ben-Gurion airport early Monday morning. The funeral is that afternoon, and I spend many hours in my maternal grandma's apartment at the nursing home, where shiva is being held. And then Wednesday night it's time to go back. I see a lot of my family in those few days (grandmothers, uncles, an aunt, cousins, the spouses and children and in-laws of cousins), and it's the first time in years that the members of my immediate family have been in Israel together. As for the country itself, I get glimpses of it. A walk around the lake in the local park among moorhens, geese and hooded crows. Sitting wedged in the back seat of a taxi cab as it loses its way in Tel Aviv traffic. Running through a crowded souk like a video game character who loses points every time she bumps into someone. Eating delicious breakfasts and going out to lunch at a place that serves shish-kebabs and salad platters with hummous, falafels and Moroccan cigars. On Wednesday night fireworks go off; it's the eve of Independence Day. I catch some of the fireworks from the backseat of the cab that drives us to the airport.

filaments
The plane flies over the northern coast of Spain, all dark at night except for strings and clumps of golden light, shaped like cobwebs, snowflakes and amoebas.

funeral
At the funeral for my maternal grandpa, Saba Yossef (Grandpa Joseph) of blessed memory, whom I wrote about in the previous post, there's an atmosphere of sorrow and reunion as people arrive - many of them I don't know, others remember me when I was three feet tall (I don't remember them), and some I know well but haven't seen for years. Here they all are, mingling outdoors, waiting for my grandpa's body to arrive. The Israeli cemetery looks like a desert, full of stone, bright dirt, cacti and flowering shrubs, strange birds crying out from a handful of trees. The main part of the service is held indoors, my grandpa's body wrapped in a shroud and laid out in the center of a cool dim room. I know it's his body, but at the same time it's difficult to accept that it's really him. It doesn't seem like him; it's only his fragile shell. Where he lies in the middle of the room as a shrouded figure there's emptiness. His presence is felt not in this emptiness but in the surrounding people - in the thoughts they have of him, their prayers, their love, their words of remembrance, their grief, the fact that they're all there. The Hebrew word for funeral is "halvayah"(הלוויה), which at the root of it means "accompaniment." Some of his relatives and family friends carry his body out of the room on a pallet and take him outdoors into the cemetery, and everyone else goes with them, accompanying him on a long walk to where his grave is waiting. There's some recitation of lines from psalms and some more quiet reminiscences. When everyone arrives at his grave his body is lowered in, still in its shroud; there's some sort of receptacle at the bottom (I can't see it clearly), which is then covered by stone slabs. After that the grave is filled in, mostly by one of the men from the burial society, but also by family and friends who take turns shoveling in some dirt. Then everyone walks by, placing small stones on the grave. We stare and stare at this mound of earth dotted with many stones.

granddads
A visit to the grave of my paternal grandpa, Saba David (Grandpa David) of blessed memory, who passed away in 2005. Like my maternal grandpa, he died of an infection - in the very same hospital - after living the last few years of his life in a poor state of mental and physical health. Like my maternal grandpa, he was a fighter. He was a war veteran. He also survived the Holocaust (his tombstone bears the names of close family members who didn't). As a very young child he survived smallpox, after the doctors told his mother that he was a lost cause. Luckily for us, she kept taking care of him.

shiva (שבעה)
While sitting shiva, mourners are not meant to be left alone to brood, to sink too deep into grief. Visitors come bringing comfort, conversation, inappropriate funny jokes, and food. Some of them also bring small children who distract and delight with their antics. It's all a mix: tears, laughter, religious musings, mundane conversation, reminiscences, an airing of personal troubles, and silence.

standstill
On Yom Hazikaron - The Day of Remembrance, Israel's Memorial Day - a nationwide siren sounds twice: a minute-long siren in the evening, and a two-minute siren in the late morning. It's a haunting mournful sound, fitting for a day honoring fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism attacks. When it starts up, playing all over the country, everyone stops what they're doing and stands in silence. Cars and motorbikes stop in the middle of the road; the drivers get up and out and stand beside their vehicles. For those three minutes day-to-day life comes to a halt.

whispered
A heart-to-heart with my maternal grandma, who is used to taking care of everyone else and needs time to sit and talk and consider herself too.

Week in Seven Words #108

banality
Online dating has been mostly a bore so far. When you meet people in person you experience them as the complex 3D creatures they are, and not as small photos supplemented with the same descriptions over and over - "intelligent, fun-loving, one-of-a-kind" - like personal ads in a Lake Wobegon newspaper.

fulcrum
Time has to be balanced in your mind so that you don't tip too much into the future or sink too frequently into the past.

indurated
In the night my thoughts are cold black diamonds.

reaching
I talk into the phone, knowing that he's there at the other end even though I can't hear him.

second-rate
Sometimes you look back on your week to find that one of your prominent memories involves a pitched battle with a backed-up toilet. Oh well.

slipping
When I'm feeling low about my writing I think of the words as weak magnets sliding down the front of a fridge.

sussing
At the library I spot a DVD Whisperer. He caresses their spines and speaks to each one - "Should I watch you tonight? Or you?" - then cocks his head and listens for the answer.

Red Blues

Week in Seven Words #57

galvanic
Jerked out of sleep early morning by the thought of how much I need to get done in less than two months.

mirrored
Reflecting on someone else's behavior I suddenly get insights into my own.

tweaking
Her teasing has enough truth, humor and kindness that I dissolve in laughter.

twinkling
The rain twinkles in deep black puddles; the raindrops hit the water in starbursts.

utter
Each word is a pearl or a drop of poison.

wail
A man cries out in grief, in a corridor that's usually full of greetings and loud conversation.

willing
When people tell me their plans their eyes are intense, their words intent; they think that if their description is sufficiently detailed, they'll find themselves in their desired reality, their dreams concrete. For a moment their words allow them to inhabit that reality and step into the shoes of their ideal future self.

Undone - a short film

A wrenching, disturbing, and beautiful film.

From the film-maker:

A stop-motion animation using textured and tactile materials, as well as personal imagery, that represents the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Inspired by my grandfather.

Undone from Hayley Morris on Vimeo.