What I’m Reading…

After The Bombs - My Berlin by Heidemarie Sieg-Smith

Life After Life: A Novel by Kate Atkinson 

Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards by Jan Reid

Secret Sex Lives: A Year on the Fringes of American Sexuality by Suzy Spencer


The Shape of the Eye: A Memoir by George Estreich

Me Before You: A Novel by Jojo Moyes

Wool by Hugh Howey

Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World by Richard Rhodes 

Too Fat to Fish by Artie Lange, Anthony Bozza and Howard Stern

One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times - Chapter 100

#100 – “Don’t tell too much about yourself. It makes you vulnerable.”

Yesterday, as my husband and I were driving the “Wildflower Trail” west of Austin, we approached a stoplight in the suburbs, and an older, beautifully maintained Lincoln stopped in front of us. In the rear window deck there was a man’s hat. I realized in a flash that I might never stop remembering more things mom taught me a million times, like “Always keep a man’s hat in the back window of your car so you don’t look like you are alone.”

But that’s not #100. I always knew what #100 would be. I remember when Mom said it, and she only said it once. We were in the kitchen. Our eyes didn’t meet. She said, “Don’t tell too much about yourself. It makes you vulnerable.”

When I was young I tended to write mom’s words off as old-fashioned ramblings. I now write her words in honor of their timeless truths. But I didn’t dismiss #100. Something about it felt too real, too dangerous, causing my mind to tumble with speculation and imaginings. Why shouldn't I tell too much about myself? What will happen? How do you know? What do you mean by “vulnerable.”  Mom must have learned this lesson the hard way.

Do we harm ourselves when we bare our souls? The burdens of regret and the weight of secrets reside in us like inoperable tumors; anguish feeding the tumor. Some of us self-medicate to postpone the pain; and we heap one sorrow onto another. Some of us give it all to a “higher power,” the omnipotent cleansing. Some of us accept our imperfections, learn from our mistakes, and live each day as a blessing.

Have I increased my vulnerability by spreading my soul on the pages of this blog? Have I been completely truthful?

Mom was right.  Don’t tell too much about yourself. It makes you vulnerable.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

In Gulp, much as in all Mary Roach’s books, we meet the scientists who tackle the questions no one else thinks or has the courage to ask. We also find out much more than we want to know about the taboo tube through which we stuff and excrete food – the Alimentary Canal which includes the mouth, pharynx, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, large intestine, and anus.

Just as the subject of Gulp is a circuitous adventure, so too is the research that leads the author in unexpected and often icky directions, and we’re along for the ride, ready or not. There’s the issue of why stomach acids dissolve what we eat, but not us. Not something I’ve lain awake nights wondering about, but nevertheless a mystery worth exploring. Roach’s gift is that she keeps even the most clinical, comical.  Seriously! Gulp is hilarious and just full of interesting factoids.

For example, did you know that Elvis died of constipation? His autopsy revealed a colon 6 inches in diameter, nearly twice the size of the average person. It was also 9 feet long, compared with the normal 5 feet. They found five-month-old stool in there!  Sadly, Elvis suffered from a hereditary condition called bowel paralysis.

Even Roach's (pictured) description of the science of fecal transplants, which is probably what killed President James A. Garfield, after his assassin’s bullet failed, are interesting, albeit yucky.  Actually, fecal transplants, administered through enemas, have gained credence recently for “the restoration of the colonic microbiota to its natural state.” Unfortunately, Medicare won’t cover the procedure and fecal donors are hard to come by. No shit!

If you haven’t read any of Mary Roach’s books try Stiff first, as it is an all-time favorite. If you are a fan, I don’t have to tell you to read Gulp. Like me, you whooped with delight when you saw she’d spit it out!  

One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times - Chapter 100

#100 “Keep pot handles turned away from the front of the stove.”

I have a confession. This isn’t really #100 of the one hundred things my mother taught me a million times. About a year ago I realized that I had repeated one of the 100 things. Then this February I received the following email from one of my most favorite people in the world, Loralee Martin. She said,

This is probably the worst email I've ever written, and I'm already regretting it...but I'm gonna go out on a limb and take a chance. I was reading your blog, as I always do ... there's a duplicate, and I thought you'd want to know. #26 and #57 are the same. And I know it's bitchy to point that out, but I figured you might be happy that I was reading/enjoying so intently that I noticed it. No big deal, but you need to conjure up  another one, for those of us who are enjoying this project!  In fact...I have a suggestion! "Never point out a mistake. It's impolite and people might resent you for it".

To which I replied, that I knew there was a duplicate, and was impressed that she was reading close enough to catch it.  So, in truth, #100 is actually #99, and #98 is…well you get it, so on with #100 (really #99), which brings back two indelible memories.

When I was growing up the only heat we had in our house was the gas heater in the living room.  It was a brown metal thing, about 4 feet high and 18 inches wide on each side. It had a very distinct “art deco” look to it, and I though it was beautiful. Of course we all spent a good bit of time close to the thing because it was our only source of warmth, but it also didn’t take long for it to warm the entire living room to a comfortable temperature. During the winter months, the first place you went upon entering the house was to the living room heater to warm your hands or butt, careful to get just close enough to warm them, but not to touch the very hot metal surface.

Somehow I managed to back into the heater and burned a pretty large place on the back of one leg. I’d never felt pain like that, and it didn’t stop hurting for weeks as it healed. After that I gained an enhanced respect for “hot.” Click on read more below...

Sum It Up: A Thousand and Ninety-Eight Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective by Pat Head Summitt and Sally Jenkins

Almost nightly I troll Salon, NPR, Good Reads, Audible, New York Times and LA Times for interesting books. When I saw that Pat Summitt and Sally Jenkins had just published a new book, Sum It Up, I immediately went to Audible.com to snap it up. Here's why.

First, Pat Summitt, for those of you who don’t know of her, is the all-time winningest basketball coach in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) history of either a men's or women's team in any division. She coached The University of Tennessee’s women’s basketball team, “The Lady Vols,” for 38 years from 1974 to 2012, and now serves as the head coach emeritus. During her tenure, she won eight NCAA national championships, second only to the record 10 titles won by UCLA men's coach John Wooden. She is the only coach in NCAA history, and one of three college coaches overall, with at least 1,000 victories.  Every four-year college basketball player she coached graduated from college – also a record.

Second, I love basketball. I grew up playing basketball with Suzy Smithson and her brothers at their oil company “camp” house, located out in the tullies of west Texas. We didn’t have TV; we didn’t have Nintendo or Wii. Town, such as it was, population 1,500, was 20-miles away. We had a basketball hoop attached to the garage. When Suzy and I were in the 9th grade (Junior High), we approached the Junior High boy’s basketball coach, who was actually the science teacher, asking him to help us organize a girl’s team.  He agreed and our first game was in Barnhart, a town so small that we didn’t even know they were big enough to have a team. They stomped us. The next year, when our class entered high school the boy’s basketball coach took us under his wing and we won district.

Pat Summitt too grew up playing basketball with her brothers in rural Tennessee. But probably the strongest influence on her life and coaching style was her father, an iron-fisted dairy farmer of few words who was so hard on his kids, and so withholding of love and affection that it skirted on abuse. Summit was 43-years-old before her father hugged her and told her he loved her, then added, “I don’t want to hear anymore about that.” And indeed, Summitt took up his persona. She is renowned for how hard she could be on her players.

In Sum It Up, Pat talks a lot about her coaching style and it was painful to hear, but the results are undeniable. Her team members are also quoted extensively, and although they are gracious, you can hear the undertones of resentment and respect. She would beat her players down and punish them relentlessly until one of two things happened. They’d either leave, which was not an easy choice given the prestige of playing for the Lady Vol’s, or they would get better. Click on read more...

Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

Anyone who goes into a Barbara Kingsolver book without anticipating a meandering sermon in the context of sumptuous writing hasn’t read much Kingsolver. Since Flight Behavior has been detailed to death by reviewers, I don’t think it is a spoiler to say that this is the story of a young Appalachian mother who feels trapped in her back-woods community, her unexciting marriage, at the mercy of her in-laws, and floundering in the trials of motherhood. Then in a trek up the hill to a tryst, her feeble “flight” from reality, main character, Dellarobia (love the name), discovers a massive kaleidoscope of monarch butterflies completely covering a nearby canyon. 

Kingsolver certainly sets the stage for a good story, but in spite of her delicious writing, it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere. We don’t quite like Dellarobia; we don’t quite dislike her husband or mother-in-law.  Her prospective lovers never quite materialize, the conflict between the butterfly defenders and the loggers never quite comes to climax, Dellarobia never finds a smart solution to her situation. I just found myself peaking hill after hill to find nothing breathtaking on the other side.

Kingsolver grew up in Kentucky and has a graduate degree in Evolutionary Biology, so it is not surprising that she has written a number of books about rural life, rural people, and the perils of human impact on the environment, my favorites being Animal, Vegetable Miracle and Prodigal Summer. However, in spite of her stunning prose, she sometimes, especially in Flight Behavior, tends to portray country people as ignorant and backward, which is stereotyping, and she tends to use them as mouthpieces to talk down to readers, which is pretentious and condescending.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always read Barbara Kingsolver’s books because her writing is beautiful, her story lines are interesting, i. e. monarch butterflies migrating to Tennessee instead of central Mexico because of global warming, and she does a fab job of reading her own books (for those of us who frequent audio books), but I could love her more if not for the clichés and condescension.

In spite of this rather negative review, I’m going to recommend that you read Flight Behavior because Barbara Kingsolver simply doesn’t write a bad book. It is worth the read, it just won’t make your list of “best.”

By the way, the monarch butterfly issue isn’t fictional,there’s a pretty interesting article about that in Huffington Post.