Old

We’d been exploring one of my favorite parts of North Carolina, the Pamlico coast: Washington, Bath (the state's oldest town, with its oldest church), and, up the Pungo River, Belhaven, where we ate flounder for lunch and toured the museum. Now we were heading home, with me driving, Anthony riding up front, Kelly and Mike in back. At first we were all talking. Gradually, as lunch settled, Anthony and Mike fell asleep and the car went quiet. That was okay. It was a nice drive, a golden day, sun stretching out long across the cotton fields. I've always loved late November. I've always loved this landscape. Miles and miles of nothing.

When I checked the rearview, Kelly was wide awake, fidgeting like she does when she's just figured something out. "This is what old people do," she said. "They all get in the car and go riding around in the country and don’t talk."

Even an animal couldn't save it.

This week I tried to read a novel that’s coming up for discussion at the library, a bestseller. I don't often read bestsellers, but I like discussing books at the library, and this one had an unusual premise involving an animal, and I like animals. I couldn’t get to page fifty. The sentences were soggy, and every chapter ended with something or someone "glowing palely in the growing dark," "silhouetted by the falling dusk," etc. There was a time when I would have finished the book anyway, if only to complain during the library discussion, but that was last year.

photo: Anthony Ulinski

Blue parrot, or the perils of nonfiction

Lately I've been writing personal essays, a new form for me, and twice last week I let worries over the feelings of others creep into my editing decisions. It's hard enough to edit when your motives are purely literary. In an odd sort of punctuation to these episodes, I happened on an essay by David Sedaris, "Repeat After Me," in which he repeats a story his sister has told him in confidence. The particulars of the story aren't important; the point is that Sedaris is telling it. The essay is about betrayal, and the guilt that often goes along with writing personal stories. In the last scene, Sedaris imagines himself in his sister’s kitchen, chanting while his sister's parrot listens, teaching the parrot to say, "Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me."

blue parrot photo: JT Reby / jtdc.files.wordpress.com.

Stories!

Two of my favorite books this year are story collections. Going Away Shoes is Jill McCorkle's heart-rendingest, funniest, most satisfying work yet. If you've ever taken care of an aging parent, been divorced, remarried, tried to blend families, if you've ever been at the mercy of a plumber on Christmas Eve or dated an imaginary boyfriend, and even if you haven't, these stories are for you.

Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing is the first book by Lydia Peelle, one of the "Five Under 35" writers honored this year by the National Book Foundation. Set in the hill country of Tennessee, these stories are bleakly beautiful and haunting as high lonesome music. I loved them AND the red boots Lydia wore to her reading in Raleigh.

In memory of my father

Today would have been my father's 77th birthday. Here he is in Germany in 1956, the year I was born: Max M. Church, 24-year-old U.S. Army cryptographer. From him I inherited a wide forehead, blue eyes, and a tendency toward fiction.

Please, not the blog.

I love words. I love to hear them spoken, read aloud, sung, whispered. I love to hear them being tapped out on computer keys, or typewriters, when there used to be typewriters. I love pens and pencils on paper, and erasers. I love the hushed, holy sound of a book being opened, a page being turned. I love words that sound like what they mean. A word I do not love is "blog," which sounds like a sickness -- lethargy, stuffy nose, churning stomach. "Oh, no, she's got the blog."