Normally, I feel that reading more than one book at a time is crazy-making. However, it
is January in Missouri and I am three weeks post-op and feeling rather low energy. In February my book club plans to discuss Grapes of Wrath and watch the movie. So to attack a classic work so monumentally depressing, I checked out several books from the library to vary the palate.
I re-introduced myself to Steinbeck’s masterful prose, then read a few chapters of Double Shot by Diane Mott Davidson. I love to pretend to cook and Goldy Schultz, the caterer who solves mysteries, held my attention. Presently I am obsessed with food because of my diet of small quantities of soft food. I am reading the grocery advertisements that come with the newspaper, simply to fantasize. I got Tom Joad on the road to leave Oklahoma with his family and finished cooking by proxy.
Next I made a vicarious flight by small plane with Anna Pigeon to Isle Royale, a National Park island in Lake Superior, almost in Canada, on a research project on wolves, Winter Study. I interspersed the Dust Bowl with reading about the frigid group of workers with only a generator a few hours a day and no way to leave the island. One frigid night, while Richard was attending my grand-daughter’s basketball game and I was home alone by the wood
stove, a wolf-dog hybrid ate a member of Anna’s team and stalked them as they attempted a rescue. The coyotes began howling down by the creek and freaked me. No more fiction by Nevada Barr until daylight hours!
I could not handle the monstrous mysterious tracks in the snow or the burial of Grandpa
Joad beside the campsite that evening; scanning television, I only saw people being assaulted and tortured, so I turned to another book, Just Kids, a memoir by Patti Smith about her years in the sixties with Robert Maplethorpe. Tales of two hippie artists, living on the streets of New York City and eating out of dumpsters, were hardly cheery, but their creative adventures did not scare the wits out of me and obviously, they subsequently became highly successful in collages, prose and rock and roll.
On to California with the migrant workers; Grandma dies and Roseasharon’s husband takes leave. Patti and Robert find work for pay, rent a cheap room, read poetry and classics, dwell with drugs, sex, lice and gonorrhea and meet Alan Ginsberg, Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol.
Truth and fiction are equally unsettling. Time now for me to read a mindless mystery.But too much light stuff makes me feel as if I have had yogurt for lunch.
In Steinbeck’s words, “. . .man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only half a step, never the full step back.”
