Anxiety Dreams

In Cynthia Rylant's wonderful picture book Motor Mouse--illustrated by Arthur Howard, whose work on Rylant's Mister Putter and Tabby series I love--Motor Mouse has a pocket watch that tells, not only the time and if it's sunny or rainy, but also whether you are dreaming or you are experiencing something that is really happening.

I need such a watch.

Last night I had an anxiety dream, one of those ultra-realistic ones that you think is reality, about my old job in the corporate world. In this dream I had a Big and Important project due very soon, but not only had I not started the project, I felt totally unqualified to do it at all--and powerless (in that dream-like way of being literally unable to do something) to tell my bosses--who were busy telling me how important the project was, and how they just knew that I would do a great job--that I couldn't do it and hadn't even started. It would have been a great comfort to me to have been able to whip out my pocket watch and see the little hand pointing to "dreaming," instead of thinking it was really happening and waking up at 5:15 a.m. in a panic.

(And if you're thinking, "But in the dream, the watch would have said 'really happening'"--No, if the watch really worked, it would have to say "dreaming" if I was dreaming. The watch is greater than any anxiety dream.) (Except that, yes, the watch is not real and anxiety dreams are. Dangit!)

Animal Stories: Another Book Post

I love animal stories—the children's literature kind—so I'm going to write a little bit about them.

Children's picture books are filled with animal stories; I suspect that talking, clothes-wearing furry creatures outnumber talking, clothes-wearing human beings in the picture books at most libraries and bookstores. Many of these books are great, but what I'm thinking about here are longer, more prose-heavy books—chapter books and novels. Among those, there are at least three kinds of animal stories (and probably a lot more than that):

1. Completely realistic (and sometimes even true) stories about people and animals, where the people behave like people and the animals behave like animals: The Black Stallion, My Friend Flicka, Old Yeller, Sounder, Gentle Ben, and that one about the racoon, the name of which I can't remember now, and many more. The animals are essential to these stories, but it is really the people who are center stage.

2. Somewhat realistic but mostly fantastical stories about people and animals, where the people behave like people and the animals behave like animals, except for when people aren't around, at which time the animals behave like animals who are fully sentient and can speak English: Charlotte's Web is the best example of this, and also one of the most wonderful books ever written, and also the only example of this kind of book I can think of right now. In Charlotte's Web, the animals don't wear clothes or drive cars or hold down jobs, but they do, when the people aren't around, talk to each other and plot to save Wilbur's life. The sheep and the geese and the pigs and the rat and even the spider—especially the spider—all speak the same language, and remember too that Fern (the human little girl) can understand them, though her mother doesn't pay any attention when Fern tries to tell her about it. The people are essential to these stories (or at least to Charlotte's Web), but it is really the animals who are center stage.

(Charlotte's Web is a great book. If you haven't read it, go read it right now.)

3. Entirely fantastical stories in which people—human beings, that is—don't play an especially large part, and animals are mostly or completely anthropomorphized and talk to each other (even among very different species) and wear cloths and have jobs and houses and use dishes and teacups and cutlery and are all, apparently, for some reason about the same size. This is my favorite category, and the one into which perhaps my favorite novel, The Wind in the Willows, fits. I would also include A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh stories (published in Winnie-The-Pooh and The House At Pooh Corner) in this category; yes, I know, it's made clear in the first book that the stories of Pooh, Piglet, Owl, et al., are stories the Father is telling his Son about the Son's stuffed animals, but that frame isn't consistently applied, and in fact is pretty much abandoned in the second book. So mostly Pooh and his friends are anthropomorphic animals rather than stuffed ones, and Christopher Robin, while occasionally being called upon to Save the Day, is not the central character. The animals are very much center stage. The Wind in the Willows includes only a couple of human characters, who are minor characters; they are barely on the stage at all.

Last year, my favorite of the new books I read (admittedly a fairly short list) was a new category 3 animal story: Skunk and Badger by Amy Timberlake. I really loved this book. One reviewer described it as a sort of cross between "Frog and Toad" and "The Odd Couple," and that seems pretty fair, though I think there's just as much The Wind in the Willows as Frog and Toad Are Friends in Skunk and Badger.

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Vol. I: Another Book Post

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One

This picture shows three different editions of the same book; they are all mine and I took them down from the shelf to take this picture, but none of them is the actual copy I owned and read and loved as a teenager, back around 1985 or so (however, the copy I had was the same as the smallest one shown here, the Avon paperback). And man, did I love this book! It has some fantastic stories in it, including all of the early stars of SF: Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke, of course, but also Simak, Sturgeon, Leiber, Bester, Boucher, and many others. There are twenty-six stories in all, one of which was adapted into a famous episode of "The Twilight Zone" (Jerome Bixby’s "It’s a GOOD Life"), and two of which were made into "Star Trek" episodes ("Arena" by Frederic Brown and "The Little Black Bag" by C.M. Kornbluth). (However, as I’ve said before, the mark of a great story or book is not whether somebody made it into a TV show or movie, which most of the time just results in a mediocre or bad TV show or movie anyway, but whether it’s enjoyable to read as a story or book. But that "Twilight Zone" episode is pretty great.)

The blurb on the front and spine of the 2005 ORB edition says, "The greatest science fiction stories of all time, chosen by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America," though "of all time" is actually limited to the thirty-five-year span of 1929 – 1964, and technically the contents only cover 1934 - 1963: 1929 was the first year the SFWA considered a published story to be eligible for inclusion and 1964 was the last (because the SFWA was founded in 1965, and immediately started handing out awards for contemporaneous stories), but nothing earlier than 1934 was voted into this collection, and nothing from 1964 made it in either.

The final story in the collection, Roger Zelazny’s "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," is pretty great. I’ve never read any of Zelazny’s novels (almost a crime on my part, I know), but I’ve read quite a few of his short stories, and this might be the best.

Reading Log: A Book Post

I've been thinking about books and reading a lot lately. I mean, even more than usual.

The writer whose work I've read the most of—I admit this with a little bit of embarrassment—is Piers Anthony. It's been nearly thirty years since I read anything by him, but between 1981 and 1993 I read twenty-seven of his novels. Twenty-seven! There's no other writer I've read that much of, even if it has been decades since I read him. I loved his books when I was a teenager, and I had actually more than twenty-seven of them on my shelf (obviously there were a few I never actually read); for a while, I called him my favorite writer.

As I said, there are no other authors whose work I've read that much of, but there are a few writers from whom I've read around a dozen books, and none of those are embarrassing to me: Robert A. Heinlein, Clifford D. Simak (who I also considered my favorite writer for a while when I was teenager), Madeleine L'Engle (also my favorite writer for a while; I really loved her work), Lloyd Alexander, James P. Blaylock.

And I've read more than two hundred of Ray Bradbury's short stories, but that's about the equivalent of ten Piers Anthony novels, and I haven't ready any of Bradbury's true novels (he didn't actually write that many—The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine, for example, are both related groups of short stories published under one title—and no, I haven't read Fahrenheit 451). I've read 70 or 80 of Gene Wolfe's short stories but none of his novels, and 60 or 70 of Isaac Bashevis Singer's short stories (I might even say that for the last couple of years he's been my favorite writer), but also none of his novels.

When I was nineteen my favorite writer was Bobbie Ann Mason, but that was solely on the strength of one short story collection (Shiloh and Other Stories, still, I think, a great book) and her first novel (In Country, which had just come out when I started reading her). I also really loved Lorrie Moore, but that too was based only on a couple of books. I haven't read anything by either of them since the early 1990s, though both are still writing.

These days I spend a lot more time thinking about reading than actually reading. I don't read that many novels these days (and when I do, there's a good chance I'm just reading The Wind in the Willows again), but I read lots of short stories—it's my favorite literary form, and last year I read over 200 of them, including all of Flannery O'Connor's stories, most of John Cheever's, and a number by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (many of which I wasn't crazy about, but "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" is a remarkable story), Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and other "literary" writers. I also read a number fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mystery stories from various magazines and "Year's Best" collections (i.e., The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2019, Best New Horror 23, etc.). And I re-read Joe Hill's collection 20th Century Ghosts, which I think is a wonderful book. "Pop Art" is a great story; if you haven't read it, you should.

Remembering Ben Bova

Ben Bova died today.

When I was in fifth grade, my gifted class went to the Bethesda Elementary library and the librarian gave us a presentation about some books she was encouraging us to read, books that were nominated for some award that year--it was a long time ago, and I was probably only half-way paying attention anyway, so I don't remember any details, but I think it was probably the Georgia Children's Book Award for the 1977-1978 school year. What I do remember her telling us as we all sat around a table at the back of the library, half a dozen books spread out before us, was that this book--she held up one of the volumes and showed us the cover--was science fiction and it was pretty advanced stuff, but if we thought we were up to the challenge we could give it a try.

That got my interest.

So I checked it out and read it, and absolutely loved it.

It was End of Exile by Ben Bova, perhaps the first "real" science fiction novel I ever read. I mean, a couple of years earlier I had loved The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron, but this was a whole different thing.

The next year, when I got to sixth grade and learned my way around the Sweetwater Middle School library, I was amazed and delighted to discover that End of Exile was actually the third book in a trilogy! (I don't think the librarian at Bethesda mentioned this--she may not have even known it--and apparently I didn't pay enough attention to the book jacket to come away with this information on my own. And really, I was only ten years old--what did I know from trilogies?) I immediately checked out the first two books, Exiled from Earth and Flight of Exiles, and then that third book (which I hadn't even known was the third book in a series when I read it) made SO MUCH MORE SENSE!

I read the Exiles trilogy every year that I was in middle school, and have read it a few more times since, though not in about twenty years--the list I keep of all the books I read tells me that in the year 2000 I read the first book (finishing it on my birthday, in fact) but that I didn't go on to read the second and third books, and have read nothing else by him in the 23 years I've been keeping that list. I have a paperback copy of the early 80's Berkley edition that puts all three books under one cover--"His famous star flight saga now in one magnificent volume!" the cover screams. I don't think I've ever actually read the copy I have now, but I intend to keep it forever.

In my mid twenties I tried reading a couple of Bova's other novels--he published dozens of them in a career that spanned six decades, and also many short stories, and a lot of non-fiction as well--but I couldn't get through them. It's not that they were bad, but nothing could live up to that experience of being ten years old and having my mind blown by End of Exile.

So, even though I haven't read that much of Ben Bova's work, and may never read anything else by him ever again, he is one of the Very Important Authors from my childhood, and for that I will always remember him with a great fondness.

(The winner of the Georgia Children's Book Award that year, by the way, was Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers. I've never read the book, but I've seen the Disney movie--the version with Jodie Foster, not that version that was released years later--many times; I think I actually saw it in a theater when it first came out. John Astin, who was Gomez Addams on TV more than ten years earlier, plays the father. It's a decent little movie, not great, but not bad either. I recommend it if you haven't seen it. In fact, I recommend it even if you have!)

Nostalgic and Pensive

One unexpected way in which getting well into middle age has affected me is that when I learn that some artifact of my youth--a person, a building, a store; nearly anything--is no longer here with us, even when it's someone or something that wasn't that important to me when I was growing up, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic and pensive.

I grew wistful a few years ago when I found out that Doug Henning had been dead for more than a decade, though I hadn't been especially attached to Henning in my youth (other than, I will admit, a certain amount of hair envy, but that's a whole other story). Though this fact shouldn't really have moved me at all, I felt sadness and disappointment when I learned that, many years ago, Shields and Yarnell had gotten divorced. It's more understandable that one day eight or ten years ago, when I drove by the site of the Ingleside Presbyterian Church building I went to every Sunday when I was growing up and saw that it had been razed, I was very saddened indeed. Should it make me melancholy when I realize that I'll never again shop at Treasure Island or Richway, or never again eat at the Wendy's Superbar? Probably not...but sometimes it does. These are all people and places that I don't think about every day, but when I do remember any one of them, I get sentimental and stop whatever I'm doing to stare off into space for a while.

It's silly, I know. The world we live in today is filled with wonderful people and buildings and stores that contribute to the richness of our lives, even if they weren't around when I was eight or ten or twelve. There's nothing magical about someone, or something, having been on TV, or on Lawrenceville Highway, in the 1970s when I was a kid.

But yesterday both Helen Reddy and Mac Davis died. I haven't thought much about either of them in years, but I'm sorry they're gone.

On Grits and Grannies

Every morning I wake Elyse up at 6:55 and say, "It's time to get up, Honey." She mumbles and turns over to face the wall, and I ask, "Do you want me to make you some grits?" She says "Uh-huh" into her pillow, and I ask, "Do you want to stay in bed until they're ready?" Of course she says yes.

So I shuffle off to the kitchen to make her some grits.

I'm quite happy using instant grits, Quaker Instant Grits with Butter Flavor, to be exact. I do wonder how a grits purist would feel—and I'm pretty confident there are grits purists; I'm sure a quick Google search would return many very opinionated grits Web sites—when I recall that scene in My Cousin Vinny when the witness on the stand asserts that "no self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits." Well, maybe I'm not a self-respecting Southerner. In many ways I'm only southern at all by an accident of geography: I love but can't personally relate to the works of true Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. In fact, if I were able to go back in time and have a conversation with any of them, it's possible I wouldn't even be able to understand them through their thick Southern accents.

But about those grits....

When I was little, starting (I believe) when I was five years old and my family was freshly returned from our brief life in Maryland, and lasting at least until I was eight—this I can say for sure, and I'll tell you why in a minute—I would often be left for a morning or a day with my grandmother at her little brick house in Tucker. I suppose my mother needed the time to go to work at a part-time job, or run errands, or maybe do some shopping; I don't know that it ever occurred to me to wonder where Mom was going when she dropped me off at Granny's. In any case, I remember those times with Granny with a great fondness, as something I very much looked forward to. Whether that is exactly what I felt at the time I really can't be sure, but I can tell you that now I miss them terribly; I would give nearly anything to be a kid again on my way to Granny's, where we would read stories, color in coloring books, and, when I got a bit older, sit and watch "Wheel of Fortune" with its original host, Chuck Woolery, on that small rabbit-ear-antennaed color TV that sat on the rolling cart in her living room. (And that is how I know that these times with Granny went on at least until I was eight: in 1974, when I was seven, we couldn't have watched "Wheel of Fortune," for it didn't begin its lengthy run until a year later.)

One of the details I've been remembering the most lately, the thing that makes me wistful as I prepare my breakfast these days, is seeing Granny make grits for me on those mornings more than four decades ago. I was much more interested in eating than in cooking, so I didn't pay close attention to what she did, but I know it involved bowls and pots and measuring cups and water from the tap and grits from a bag she kept under the counter—she probably used quick grits, for I don't think instant grits existed yet, and even if they did, I want to believe that my grandmother wouldn't give in to them, as I have. Finally, when the fixings were all prepared, she would ask me, "Soupy or not?" Some days I would want them soupy: plenty of water for very thin, easily slurped grits. Some days, not: only the proscribed amount of water, or perhaps even a bit less, for thicker, more substantial grits.

So when I fix a bowl of grits for Elyse every morning, I am temporarily taken back to the early seventies, to that small kitchen in that little brick house in the suburbs of Atlanta. It's one way to keep my grandmother alive and with me, and to keep alive within me the memories of people and places who were once so important to me. And in a very real way, it keeps me alive within me; the me that once was, many years ago, and in most important ways is still here. Someday when this story will mean something to Jessica and Elyse, I hope a little of my grandmother—their great-grandmother—may live within them too, and perhaps a bit more of their father than is already there. Someday I hope it will resonate with Elyse if I ask her if she wants her grits soupy or not. (If I asked her that question now, I'm pretty sure she would just wrinkle her nose and say, "Make them like you always make them." Which, by the way, is a little bit soupy; I use five ounces of water for one bowl rather than the four ounces the directions on the box call for.)

The thing about getting older, if you're me, anyway, is that you can look back and see how wonderful, how nearly perfect, many of the pieces of your past have been. But you also realize that you slogged through these near-perfect times largely blind to how truly wonderful they were. Back then, I took it all for granted, as children—as we all—are wont to do. I was clueless. I still am.

I'm not the first person to say this—it is, in fact, something of a cliché—but it helps you understand the importance of appreciating every moment, of realizing how lucky you really are, of trying your hardest to take nothing for granted. The importance of really taking the time to enjoy a good bowl of grits. It's such a simple thing, and yet, as you can see, it's really not.

I'm glad I get to prepare grits for my daughter for breakfast. I'm sorry I didn't realize what a precious thing it was, all those years ago, to have a granny who would make them for me, just the way I wanted them—soupy, or not.

(NB: I started this several months ago—actually, in a different form, several years ago—but am just now getting around the finishing and publishing it. Everything I've written here is still true, except that lately Elyse hasn't been eating grits as often; now she's more given to requesting Pop Tarts or Honeynut Cheerios. Maybe I'll write an essay about my lengthy history with Pop Tarts and breakfast cereals some day.)