full fathom five

Dog Park Morning

Today my husband and I and our dog Cody took our morning walk at a coastal park that's been appropriated by dog owners as a dog park in the off-season.  In the summer, it's closed to dogs.

But each winter morning at 8:30, dog owners come walking down the long road to the outermost spit of land surrounded by Casco Bay.  Many of them carry traveling mugs of coffee, and dogs fan out in front of them, leashless, chasing and sniffing each other, grinning with their tongues hanging out.  They all seem to know that the real playing will start further up the road at the water's edge.

When we got up there, twenty or so owners stood by the water watching the dogs play.  Some held balls, sticks, and frisbies, knowing the dogs were too enamoured of each other to be interested in retrieving.  Two dogs rolled around on the ground wrestling, and others ran in circles around them.  Our Cody, unused to the routine, sniffed all the dogs, and did his bow that showed he wanted to play, but after a few circles of chase, he'd run back to us, leaning against our legs to get patted.  Meanwhile, we talked to the owners, asking about their dogs.  They'd tell their dogs' names, then their breeds or mix, their ages and where they came from.  We were pleased to hear that, like our Cody, most were mixes from animal shelters. 

The regulars were curious about Cody, and told us how beautiful he is.  They urged us to bring him back.  Walking back to the car, Win and I decided to try to come back every Saturday, with a thermos of coffee.

At the parking area, we noticed several cars with dog blankets on backseats, held up by  loops that went over the headrests.  Win said he'd take our backseat blanket to his sailloft tomorrow and attach similar loops.  So we learned something, in addition to the great walk.   On the way home, I told him that if anything happens to either one of us, the other should go to the dogpark regularly, that it's an exuberant way to socialize.       

Christmas Contradiction

I'm reading Anna Karenina now for my bookgroup. I'm engaged by completely different parts of it than I was when I first read it in my twenties. Then, I was caught up by the adulterous lovers Anna and Vronsky. Now, I'm fascinated by the country gentleman Levin, who vascillates between his duties as a landowner and social life as a nobleman, and his empathy with the peasants, whom he sometimes labors with in the fields of his estate. In this pull between two opposites, Levin epitomizes the political forces that will transform Tsarist Russia into the Soviet Union forty years later. Tolstoy was ahead of his time in politics, religion, agriculture, and literature, and all of his prophetic genius is on display in this novel. In fact, the adulterous love affair that I fixated on in my twenties, seems a minor part of the book now. What I'm most amazed by, is how Tolstoy presages the change from the one-dimensional caricatures of fairy tales and myths of his day - the beautiful princess, wicked witch, charming prince, etc. - to the rounded characters of modern literature. He does this by creating characters shot through with contradiction. 

This made me more forgiving of our Christmas contradiction. I wanted to try a non-gift Christmas this year, shifting the emphasis from opening presents to being together with family and friends. So I told guests to bring a favorite reading or game, along with a dinner dish. And that if they insisted on bringing a gift, to make it a consumable, like wine or something else to eat or drink (that wouldn't add to the clutter we've got to cull through in the New Year). It went really well, with plenty to do in lieu of opening presents. During appetizers, I read an exerpt from David Sedaris's "Santaland Diaries," something I'd heard on NPR about his stint as a Christmas elf in Macy's "Santaland." Then a guest read an excerpt from Bill Bryson's memoir "The Thunderbolt Kid," about growing up in the fifties trying to put together the balsawood model airplanes boys often got for Christmas, getting tangled up in strands of glue and getting high on the fumes. And then my husband read the third stanza of Tennyson's Ulysses, the only sober reading, but very beautiful, about Ulysses asking his men to take one last sea voyage with him late in life.

Then we had a great dinner of braised lamb with root vegetables, which we walked off by taking the three dogs who were with us for an hour's walk down our dirt road and into a snowy meadow. We climbed a hill, then watched the lowering late-afternoon light over the woods below. The sky was intense blue with gold clouds so flat and still that they looked like rectangles of thick gilt paint. Then we retraced our boot prints back home to play a new word-game "Catch-phrase" - sort of like charades without the body-language, just words. We had coffee and cardamom pudding with blueberries, which our daughter made from the new Moosewood Cookbook.

But there was one big contradiction, in the form of a small giftwrapped package we gave our daughter and new son-in-law. He unwrapped it, revealing a new low-energy flourescent lightbulb box. "Ah," he said, "we were just saying that 2008 would be our year for saving energy. This is exactly what we wanted." Then he opened the box, and his eyes widened as he pulled out two sets of car keys. Our daughter bolted across the room to gape at them. Then we were all out of our seats and striding out to the garage. We opened the garage door to a new Honda civic hybrid, a cleaner version than my month-old one beside it. Our daughter jumped straight up and down like she was on a pogo stick. Our son-in-law told us they'd just been saying that morning that if they could somehow keep her crummy old Jetta, whose driver-side door no longer opens so our daughter has to climb over the gear-shift to get out the passenger door, running through 2008, they'd be able to get her into something else the following year (she commutes a long way to work). After we all examined the car and sucked in the beautiful new-car smell, our daughter turned to me. "It's the best present in the world, but the only thing is, how can we believe you from now on?" I said, "Oh, it's a consumable. It depreciated 20% just when we drove it off the lot yesterday."

Any Bitter Thing

I've had a killer-cold that's gone on for three weeks(!), so I've had a large block of time to sit by the fire and read.  I was fortunate to have Any Bitter Thing, Maine author Monica Wood's latest novel, on hand.  Although I buy all Monica's books and admire her writing and sensibility, I hadn't read this latest one even though it's been out long enough to be reissued in paperback.  A discerning reader in my book group had told me that the book turns religious at the end.  So, being agnostic, I was disappointed and never picked it up.

Boy, was I wrong!  Without giving too much away, the novel is about a Catholic priest wrongly accused of sexual abuse of his niece, whom he adopted in infancy.  In the end, the niece, now grown and having turned her back on God and the Catholic Church because of the false accusation, goes to church for the first time in twenty years.  This is the only possible reason I can see for my friend's judgment of the ending as being religious.  But the niece doesn't have any particular revelation or otherwise strong experience being back in church.  So I can't see how this could signal a religious message of any kind. 

It made me re-realize how different our interpretations of literature are, based on what we bring to the reading.  If we bring a beef with the Catholic Church in particular, I guess I could see siding with the main character's anger at her Catholic faith, and later feeling betrayed when that character goes to church in the end.  But I, who was fixated on writing techniques that were so seamlessly done that they were hard to pick out - such as the author's mixing of first-person and omniscient points of view and shifting from present to reminiscent narration - just let religious details go by without noticing, because I'm not really interested.  So each of us sees the same novel completely differently.  It failed for my friend, and succeeded for me. 

Another thing that impressed me about this novel is how the characters live on in one's mind after you put the book down.  I still picture them moving around, in exactly the way I think about people I know.  I picture them going to the ice-box, making a fire in the stove, spooning oatmeal cookie batter onto a baking sheet.   My guess on why they are so real, when other characters quickly fade from my mind, is that Monica makes them complex.  They are conflicted, usually poised between vying choices, beliefs, or characteristics, so they are interesting and charged with human energy, life.  Like all of us, so I see them as friends and miss them when the book is over.

This is a beautiful, deeply human book.  I hope you'll pick it up.