Chestnut Street

I discovered Maeve Binchy as an adult. I was terribly saddened by her death in 2012. I consoled myself by knowing that I while I'd read all of Binchy's more recent novels, I hadn't read a few of her earlier ones. (To this day, I still have not read Light A Penny Candle, her first published book.

Most of Binchy's stories are set in Ireland and revolve around relationship and family issues. My favorite novel is most probably Evening Class, followed by the rest of the novels that are connected to that one. The characters and locales overlap, but the connected novels are not in any way a series.

A little over a year ago, when I was between books, searching through the online e-book catalog, I discovered Chestnut Street. Chestnut Street is a collection of short stories, all set on the same street in Dublin. Binchy would write a short story as the mood struck her and then she'd shove them in a drawer "for the future." After her death, her husband, Gordon Snell, gathered together all the stories... and voila, another Maeve Binchy book was published.

Maeve Binchy short stories are lovely. They aren't terribly satisfying, though, as one of her strengths as a writer was to develop characters and relationships. How much can you do in 10 pages or less? But a taste of Binchy is better than no Binchy at all.

This was the book that I'd pick up between books, when I could get it out of the library. Knowing it was my last "new" Binchy, I wasn't in a rush to finish it which is why it took me about 14 months to get through this not quite 400-page book.

Now to go back and read old Binchy books...

Uncommon Type

I loved this book. If you follow me on goodreads.com, you might have seen that I only gave it 4 stars. Why? If I loved this book so much? I loved it because it made me think so much of my dad. Whenever I hear the clack of a typewriter, which you rarely hear these days, I think of my dad. That was the lullaby that put me to sleep most nights of my childhood. My dad, in his study above my bedroom, typing ... something... well into the night. After my dad died, my brother and I knew that one of us was going to have to keep at least one of his typewriters. I think my brother took the IBM Selectric. Ah, the IBM Selectric. Jill, do you remember all the fun we had on that thing?

Back to Uncommon Type. I didn't even realize until I was nearly finished with this collection of stories by actor Tom Hanks where the title Uncommon Type came from. Not every story involved a typewriter. In fact, many did not. But ah... those typewriters.

Uncommon Type has 17 short stories. There are a few that involve 4 friends. The narrator, Steve Wong, MDash and Anna. There are a few that are "newspaper articles" written by Hank Fiset. The rest are kind of random and deal with things like civil war and being a refugee (I think I need to read up a little on the conflict between Greece and Bulgaria - when was that?), father/son surfing, divorce, Time Travel. Pretty random stuff. What's especially strange is that while each story wouldn't end happily ever after, once into the swing of the book, you realize that nothing bad is ever really going to happen.

Because it's a collection of short stories and because of the community book club's experience discussing Neither Snow nor Rain, I wrote at least a one sentence summarizing each and ever story. Here's hoping this will help in the discussion.

Reading this immediately after Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, which was more a collection of short stories than an actual novel, I was hoping for something that I could really sink my teeth into. A novel. A saga. I picked up Uncommon Type rather reluctantly, especially since a fellow book club member said she really didn't like it. And while now I'm really craving something with a little meat that I can dig my brain into, I loved Uncommon Type and hope others do as well.

The Martian Chronicles

The only Ray Bradbury that I'd read prior to Books & Beer Club reading Fahrenheit 451 was (probably an abridged version of) "All Summer in a Day," about life on Venus, which I read as a fifth grade teacher with my class. I'd forgotten what planet "All Summer in a Day" was about and was excited, momentarily, thinking that it was going to be part of The Martian Chronicles.

Oh well.

I won't lie. I had a difficult time getting through The Martian Chronicles. As much as I enjoyed it piecemeal, I really wished it was more of a narrative rather than a loosely connected collection of stories about "Earth man's" experience on Mars. But in the end, I am really glad that I stuck with this and finished it.

The Martian Chronicles is set in the not so distance future (from 2030 until 2057), when people from Earth were settling the Mars frontier. It's important to remember that The Martian Chronicles was first published in 1950. I wish I had more knowledge of how certain things were back in 1950 to get a better handle on how Bradbury imagined things to be in the mid-21st Century.

In this novel, Mars is a planet full of lots of dead cities without a whole lot of Martians in 2030 and moving forward. Expeditions from Earth (from America) are trying to colonize the planet. The interactions between "humans" and Martians are quite violent. It's hard to know who is really a person from Earth versus who is a Martian in Bradbury's telling. And life on Mars doesn't appear to that different from life on Earth. Go figure!

Once the expeditions to Mars were more or less successful, transports carried building materials from Earth to Mars. But where did trucks come from? And how exactly where they fueled?

And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work.

Who knew in 1950 that there wouldn't be typewriters in 2034? Surely not Ray Bradbury!

The references to telephones were interesting. No mobile devices. You'd think if he could imagine rockets transporting people and things, including food, back and forth between the planets that voice communication wouldn't be tied to a wired telephone. And were there answering machines in 1950? Will you leave a message on the answering machine so she may call you when she returns?

What year did Fahrenheit 451 take place? There's mention that books were all burned in the Great Fire of 2006.

There was a chapter called "Usher II." Would that have made more sense to me if I'd read The House of Usher?

My favorite chapter was one called "August 2057 - There Will Come Soft Rains." It's about an automated house in 2057 that probably stood empty for over 20 years. Yet everything continued as it probably had for the past 20 years. I wondered how the  house was powered to go on that long. And where did the food and the cigars and whatever come from after 20 years of being abandoned?

Which brings me to the whole abandonment thing. Let's assume that people started settling on Mars in the late 2020s (which right now seems like it might as well be tomorrow). A destructive war on Earth starts in 2036 and all the Earth folks rush back to Earth? Why rush back? What did I miss in this regard? If you traveled from Earth to Mars for a new life, why would you rush back to Earth when it's on the verge of destruction?

And why did one family rush to Mars to get away from all that?

"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.

I'm left to wonder whether there will be the start of settlements on Mars in my lifetime, even though I very much doubt the reality would be anything like Bradbury's vision. Looking forward to discussing this at Books & Beer Club to see how others saw the book.

A Higher Loyalty

My first instinct when I heard that James Comey, former FBI director, had written a book was that it was something I'd want to read. I requested it from the library, pre-publication.

Then I watched Comey on the interview circuit and thought, hmm, what was the purpose of his writing this book? And what was the purpose of his writing this book now? What was the point? I also wondered if Comey really thought he was better than everyone else. That's the impression he was giving. I decided that I really didn't want to read this book after all.

A few weeks ago, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership should up on my iPad from the library. I didn't download it, but I didn't return it early. Then sometime last week, one of my Facebook friends posted a quote from the book on Facebook. I asked her if she thought it was a worthwhile read and she said she thought it was. I finished up what I was reading (Every Other Weekend). A Higher Loyalty was next up.

I think I'm glad that I read the book. I still do wonder why he wrote the book at this point since there was much information that he isn't at liberty to share right now. When I've mentioned that to other people, they said that he most likely felt that he had to vindicate himself. I get that.

In the book, Comey comes off as being a good guy with decent values. He doesn't come across as being superior, the way I viewed him on television. That was a relief. The bits of his background and family life that he shared were marginally interesting. His career path made total sense to me.

He addressed this:

The stuff that gets me the most is the claim that I am in love with my own righteousness, my own virtue. I have long worried about my ego. I am proud of the fact that I try to do the right thing. I am proud of the fact that I try to be truthful and transparent.

What I most realized, though, is that in his stint as FBI director, he was more often than not put between a rock and a hard place. The position is not a political position. Comey had no desire to be a politician - or even someone on the outskirts. Yet due the Clinton e-mail "matter" and Russian interference in the 2016 election, much of what he dealt became political. Information that needed to be shared with the country was, in fact, political. For some of these decisions, Comey weighs out what would happen if he introduced information one way over another. Should the Department of Justice be a party to disclosures? Or should the FBI go it alone? Should information be divulged to the public at all? I'm not even sure if tortured is too strong a way for how he felt as he made his decisions. He became a much more sympathetic soul in my eyes. I would not want to be him. His reputation is so damaged now, and I wonder if it will be restored in my lifetime.

I was interested in Comey's stories about the "Cosa Nostra." My Sicilian husband has told me stories. Comey's anecdotes confirmed and embellished what I'd already known. And I have my own "two degrees of separation" from John Gotti, Jr.

The ways in which he attempted to change the culture at the FBI were interesting as well. He described meetings of FBI senior executives the way I would have described morning meetings in my fifth grade classroom.

I asked entire conference room of FBI senior executives to tell the group something about themselves that would surprise the room, quickly adding, to much laughter, that it should ideally not be something that would jeopardize their security clearance. Weeks later, I went around the room and asked them to tell me their favorite Halloween candy as a child. In November, I requested their favorite food at Thanksgiving, and, in December, their favorite gift of the holiday season. Of course, these could be seen as childish techniques, the kind a teacher might urger on an elementary school classroom, but children open up and trust one another in amazing ways. We were in need of a little more childlike behavior in our lives, because children tend to tell each other the truth more often than adults do.

How interesting! And exactly right!

In the end, I'm glad that I read the book. I'm sure as time goes by, my thoughts and impressions of Comey and his present situation might change.

Divorce is not for the faint-hearted

Rather than writing my random thoughts as part of my review of Every Other Weekend, I decided to put them in an entry of their own. I've pulled some passages of the book and then will share what the particular passage reminded me of from my own divorce. This is bound to be a very long blog entry, not really book-related. However, through my own writing, you'll have the opportunity to get to know me better.

In the driveway, note the brand-new Chevy van. On family trips, scuttle like a bug to get a swivel sweat. Yell "Shotgun," punch someone in the arm, cry to Mom if you have to - whatever it takes. If you're not swivelin', you're snivelin', 'cause the back seat reeks of sweat and swarms with ants when summer rolls around. They sneak up the tailpipe and find their way in, a little button of black squirm where someone spilt Hi-C from a can.

I don't think my memory here has anything to do with divorce. It has more to do with being a mother of three children, driving a minivan. We didn't have swivel seats in our middle row, but we did have captain's seats rather than a bench in our middle row. When I purchased my Toyota Previa in 1991, captain's seats were a big deal. Most minivans still had middle row benches. 

Once the kids were all out of their car safety seats (which happened a lot earlier in the 90s than it does today), it became a fight to sit "shotgun," in the front seat next to Mom. There'd be running for the car. The punching was also a thing. And I thought my family was unique. Ha!

The summer after my divorce, the kids and I were driving from our house in New Jersey to my parents' beach club in New York. On a good day, the drive took a little over an hour. If I'm recalling correctly, on this particular day, the traffic gods were on our side and we hadn't sat in any traffic at all. My youngest was sitting in the captain's seat on the passenger side of the middle row. I can't remember who was sitting next to her and who was sitting in the third row. About 5 minutes away from the beach club, I hear her say, "I have a stomach ache. I have to go to the bathroom." My response was, "Hold it in. We'll be there in a few minutes." She had a can of Yoo Hoo with her when we left our house. I had no idea how much she had or had not consumed. I then hear what sounds like her pouring the Yoo Hoo out of the can onto the floor of the car. That's what the other two kids heard as well. I'm not sure which one of us realized that she'd vomited all over herself, all over the seat.

Maybe this is a divorce story. My ex-husband wasn't helpful in nearly all ways, but until that point, he'd cleaned up a much larger share of the vomit that had come out of the mouths of our children. Someone else's vomit made me want to vomit. It made me feel like vomiting. Who was going to clean this up? Me, of course!

We get to the beach club, I get the kids up to my parents' cabana, and I did my share of whining about having to quickly get back down to the parking lot to clean up the vomit in the car before the temperature got too warm and the stench got too intense. Several of my mom's friends gathered together to get me supplied with rags, buckets, water, cleaning products. I left the kids with my mom and returned to the car.  I scrubbed, I rinsed, I disinfected. And that day, I left my car unlocked in the parking lot of the beach club with the door near what came to be known as "the vomit seat" wide open. 

Yes, "the vomit seat." Didn't the kids we carpooled around town ever wonder why none of my kids would seat in the middle passenger-side captain's seat? A year or so the Toyota was replaced with another minivan, this time a Plymouth, and "the vomit seat" was relegated to the memory books for me and all three kids.

And then Dad would show up, every other weekend and one night a week, looking like someone had blown him up and had left a weird, featureless man in his place. On Wednesdays, he'd take them to McDonald's and they'd eat in silence, and every other Friday he'd pick them up for the weekends at his house. They were long weekends, dull and quiet in a sad, sort of lonely way.

I can't really speak for my kids. I have lots of details about the time they spent with their father when they were kids. But the memory that this passage sparked has to do with how quickly the kids got thru their dinners out with their father on their Wednesday nights. Neither my former husband nor myself were fans of fast food. So he took the kids to actual sit-down restaurants. When I'd take the kids out to dinner, we'd enjoy our time together without me having to fret over cooking a meal that invariably someone wouldn't eat and when dinner was over, we'd get up from the table and go home. I didn't have to clean up and I didn't have to nag them for help. The four of us liked eating out together and it wasn't a rushed affair. Wednesday evenings, their father, who'd driven however long from somewhere in New York City to our house in suburban New Jersey, would be sitting in his car on the street, reading a newspaper until the kids were all home and ready to go out to dinner. They'd pull out of the driveway and seriously, maybe 25 minutes later, the kids would be ringing the bell. Dinner done. Really? He spent at least 4 times as long driving in the car as he did with the kids. Why?

Turns out, Dad does know his way here. Except that when he shows up now, he doesn't even come to the door. He just sits in the car, staring straight ahead, honking.

Again, our stories aren't even close. But they are certainly parallel. And this passage sparks two different and distinct memories. My kids and I remained in our family home after the divorce. So their dad knew his way to the house. (In the book, Nenny, her mother and her brothers move to an apartment with their mother's friend and then quickly moved into a house with their mother's new husband and his two kids.)

First memory. He's sitting in a car. I can't remember if this was in the early days when he still had his own car or later on, after his car had been stolen, and he'd show up in a different rental car each time. He'd be sitting in the car, head facing forward, with a newspaper pulled up right in front of his eyes, but positioned so that it blocked his view of the house or of me. Did he honk the horn? I can't remember for certain. But as soon as the first kid approached the car, he'd put down his newspaper, get out of the car and start screaming at the other two kids, "Let's get out of this dump." Remember, this was the house he and I bought together with the intention of raising our children there together. This happened for years. Whether it was picking up the kids for a weekend or picking them up for a "quick bite." "Quick bite," an expression he used all the time, being taken far too literally. "Let's get out to this dump." This happened all the time. I was the Girl Scout cookie mom. I had moms in the driveway picking up their cookie orders. And the father of my children is standing in the street yelling, "Let's get out of this dump." Another standing joke with the kids going forward.

Second memory. He might know the way to the house. But a while after his car got stolen, he claimed that he wasn't able to secure a rental car for Sunday evenings in order to drive the kids home. He'd send them home with a "car and driver." Eventually, a "car and driver" often showed up on Fridays for the pick-ups. Anyway, the current memory is about the time that the driver was unable to read the handwritten directions that my ex-husband had given him to be able to get them home. This was in the mid-90s, years before GPS was a thing for ordinary drivers. Of course the driver didn't realize he couldn't read the handwritten directions until he and the kids were crossing the George Washington Bridge. As soon as my middle child realized that they were "lost," she started to cry. Eventually, two or three of them were able to somehow, miraculously, direct the driver back to our house. After that, whenever we'd drive from New York City to our house, I'd throw out the question, "Okay, which way to I head now?" making sure that they'd recognize landmarks and would be comfortable finding their way home.

Little Nenny has always been a nervous nelly. She was born with a natural predilection for alarm. Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. This simple irrationality governs her whole life - top to bottom, inside and out.

This describes my youngest. She had broken her leg as a toddler and as such, required much more personal space than most kids need. She was afraid of people getting physically too close. She was afraid of being alone at night. She'd "sleepwalk" down the stairs and lie down on the kitchen floor outside my office, without me even knowing she'd come downstairs. That led to me having all three kids sleep in the same bedroom for probably close to a year. It took many more years for her to be able to sleep in her own bedroom, alone. She was afraid of storms. She was afraid of getting lost. She was afraid of animals. (In the midst of writing up this post, she reminded me that she was afraid of our cat as a child. Our cat. That lived in our house with us.) Once when we had a chipmunk loose in our house, she locked herself in her bedroom for about 15 hours with a towel blocking the bottom of the door. Didn't she have to go to the bathroom? She was afraid of terrorists. But more on that later.

Having divorced parents is like living in one of those claw machines at the pizza parlor: you're just hanging around, minding your own business, and then every other weekend you get plucked up and flung somewhere else. Except it's less fun than the pizza place. It's not like Nenny ever thinks Yippee, a weekend at Dad's.

"Just everyone sit down," Dad finally says, and they sit at the picnic table. He irritably hands out the food and they start to eat. Denny's burger is smeared with ketchup and she practically gags, but she knows better than to complain.

Oh boy! My oldest hated ketchup. I wish he'd known better, most of the time, than to complain. The tears.

Even though Mom's pissed, she lets Nenny come along and softens halfway through the drive. She's like that: prone to rage and then settle guilt for exposing the kids to her wrath.

Isn't this a normal mom thing? Or is it exclusive to divorced moms? Didn't we have a certain level of guilt to overcome, just because we were divorced?

"You ever been to a laundromat before?" she asks. 
"I don't think so," Nenny says.
...
Mom smiles. "Boy, are you spoiled!" She looks at Nenny playfully, but Nenny just looks back. She sure doesn't feel spoiled. Spoiled is a new Barbie every week and trips to the skating rink.

At the end of October a new quiet descends upon the house like nothing Nenny's heard before. Though she doesn't know it yet, it's the silent assault of approaching death. Gramma B's been declining for months. That's what they say, "a steady decline," as though she's slowly crawling down a hill.

The memory associated with this is not good. This was in 2004. Both my ex-husband and I were in relationships. He was engaged to be married. For what seemed like a really long period of time, whenever my ex-husband needed an excuse for not showing up for something or not being able to spend time with the kids, he'd bring his future wife's sick mother into play. One Friday he called to say that he couldn't pick up the kids until Saturday because his girlfriend's mother was really, really sick, on death's doorstep, and he promised his girlfriend that he'd spend the evening with the two of them. I had plans for the weekend that involved leaving town. I stuck around longer and made overnight plans for the kids. Death's doorstep? The father of my significant other had recently passed away. I understood death's doorstep. 

On Sunday, once the kids were home, I learned that my ex-husband's future wife's elderly but not too sick mother wanted to go out to dinner. She wasn't on death's doorstep at all. She was old. She wanted a restaurant meal. I was hurt by the insensitivity of him using a death's doorstep excuse. And hey, could he have not lied? Oh wait. I guess not.

"Get under your desks!" Sister Timothy shouts and peers through the blinds. "Oh no, it's the Russians! Dear God, dear God, dear God!" She crosses herself like crossing's the only thing left.
...
Mikhail Gorbachev comes into the room. The Mikhail Gorbachev.

What's my recollection here?  My youngest was a fifth grader on September 11, 2001. Like Nenny, she was a fearful child. I wish I could remember if she was afraid of Saddam Hussein in the days before 9/11 or the days after. Not only was she afraid of Saddam Hussein, she was sure that he was a regular at our Starbucks! She insisted she'd see him there. I later learned that the guy she identified as Saddam Hussein was an artist who spent an awful lot of time at our Starbucks. He looked nothing like Saddam Hussein. And she could never really explain to me why she thought that's who this fellow really was. We (everyone but my youngest) joked around about it. But she was totally serious. 

Denny's on the Baby-Sitters Club #5 again, Dawn and the Impossible Three, because she forgot the newest one at Dad's. That's another thing about divorce: you pack things and forget things and lose things all the time. There's a trail of your stuff like crumbs wherever you go.

I don't remember too much of that going on with my kids and their dad's house. Mostly because they brought everything back and forth each time they went for the weekend. I found out after they'd spent many weekends there that he didn't have tooth paste or shampoo for them. He expected them to bring those things along with them. As if it was a hotel. Yet, he insisted that his apartment in New York was their "real home."

But she doesn't get up right away. She clutches her book and hugs her knees and sits for a minute on the midway stairs. She knows what it's like to anticipate something, then to have your hope shrivel like a deflating balloon. Every time she goes to Dad's she expects something will have changed, that maybe this time he'll ask how she is, if she's happy, if anything's wrong, but he never does. He's so whacked and floating in his own world of grades and naps and dumb historical facts. The house could be on fire and he'd just sit there, with his cup of coffee and his stack of papers and his pile of red pens.

Then again, he'd always show up. He's never not shown up. That's a different kind of disappointment entirely.

I believe this describes my children's situation. He always showed up when he said he'd show up. That doesn't mean he didn't back out of weekends or dinners with advanced warning. He did that all the time. But we always knew in advance.

As kids, I know all three of them wished that something would change. That somehow the dad that picked them up would be a warmer, "daddier" like dad than the one they really had.  And that was the source of their biggest disappointment. They're adults, and I'm not 100% sure that the disappointment each time they see him isn't totally gone.

Every year the fourth graders at school research a California mission and build a model out of sticks or sugar cubes, and every year it's always the same - tiny Indians in the mission gardens, raking soil or planting seeds or forming bricks, or else praying with some priest in a courtyard somewhere, the feeling one of peaceful camaraderie, of a fair and equitable exchange, and every year, walking through the cafeteria where the models are on display, Nenny thinks, Yeah, right. Everyone knows the Indians were slaves.

Next year, she thinks, when I'm in fourth grade, my model's gonna tell the truth, and pictures sugar cubes specked with painted blood and little figure faces twisted with rage.

Mexican houses! That was the project that my kids had to do in first grade. The dreaded Mexican house project. I was still married when my oldest was in first grade. His father and I had just returned from a quick getaway to Cancun where I'd seen actual Mexican houses. I guided him in his construction of his house. I had him do all the work. I don't think they got actual grades on their Mexican houses, but had they, he would have gotten a D-. His teacher told me that his house didn't look at all like how she'd described the houses to the children. So was THAT the project? That was never made clear. Not to the first graders and not to their parents. His house looked just like what I'd just seen in Mexico! Not to mention that he was "sloppily" done. Well, yes! He was 6 years old and I wasn't doing the project for him. His Mexican house fell apart on the day that he carried it home from school. I don't think I realized how many parents did the projects for the kids so those kids showed up with very well-constructed Mexican houses!

Take two. My middle child is assigned the Mexican house project. I knew better this time. "What did Mrs. Hayes say that your Mexican house needs to look like?" I didn't talk about any real Mexican houses I'd seen before or how her older brother's Mexican house was not well-received. She described the house that her teacher had described to her. And that's how her house was constructed. By her. That's when I learned that many of those over-achieving parents built the houses that their children brought in. You should have seen the house the child of the architect brought in! Well, you can imagine!

Take three. My youngest makes it to first grade. She has the same first grade teacher as her older siblings. The entire summer between kindergarten and first grade, I'm dreading the stupid Mexican house project. The school year rolls along and my dread grows. But no mention of the Mexican house. Ever. June comes. First grade is over. No Mexican house. Hooray! It wasn't until about 3 years later when I'd begun my full-time teaching career that I learned why their was no Mexican house project. Apparently the year that my youngest was in first grade, there was a new, young first grade teacher at their school. She thought the Mexican house project was ridiculous. And she made it go away. I owe great thanks to that wonderful teacher who impacted the lives of both my child and me, for the better, without us really ever having any direct contact with her.

That's the extent of my text-to-self connections from Every Other Weekend by Zulema Renee Summerfield. I have tons more anecdotes. Maybe someday I'll write a book.

Every Other Weekend

I wish I could find where I first read about Zulema Renee Summerfield's debut novel, Every Other Weekend. Summerfield was a child of divorce in the 1980s. I was a mother of three young children during my divorce in the 1990s. The review I read had me really curious about whether I'd find any of my family's own experiences in the page of this adult novel.

I'm about 1/3 of the way thru the book at this point. I guess some aspects of divorce are pretty universal. But even the ones that aren't universal, the stories about Nenny, the protagonist in this novel, spark memories of some of my own stories. In the back of my mind, I've always thought that some of the anecdotes from my divorce are book-worthy.

Every Other Weekend is really a series of sequential anecdotes. I wonder how many of them are real. But like I said, it's really brought my memories to the forefront of my mind.

Nenny is an 8-year old with a wild imagination. The story seems to alternate between anecdotes of real occurrences in Nenny's family and stories that exist only in Nenny's imagination. Jenny is a fearful child and her imagination only fuels her fears further.

The Stolen Marriage

The Stolen Marriage by Diane Chamberlain, in my opinion, is a combination of historical fiction and sappy romance. The plot revolves around missed opportunities for communicating, poor choices, secrets, acceptance, and coming to term with oneself. The setting is early 1940s, Little Italy in Baltimore and Hickory, North Carolina. The US is fighting in WWII, infantile paralysis (or polio) is raging in pockets throughout the country, and racial and gender inequalities are the law of the land. There's religious intolerance as well, but I'm fairly certain that type of intolerance still exists.

The first half of the book felt more like sappy romance. That's not really my thing. Tess abandons her fiancé, Vincent, to run off and marry Henry. Even though she really loves Vincent and doesn't really know Henry. Henry's family hates Tess. They don't want her to be able to sit for a state licensing exam that will allow former nursing student, Tess, to become an R.N. She's a Kraft. It would sully the family name if she was to work. At times, I was ready to put down the book. I couldn't understand the rave reviews. When was I going to get to the "good" stuff?

It wasn't until I got to second half of the book that I felt completely engaged. I love a book that makes me run to the internet to check if part of the plot is made up or based on history. I found myself investigating several times during the second half of the story.

I learned about "the miracle of Hickory." In 1944, Hickory and the surrounding area experienced a horrible outbreak of polio. At the start, most cases were being sent to hospitals in Charlotte for treatment. When that was no longer an option, the folks of Hickory commit to opening a hospital to treat their own polio patients, complete with an iron lung. From a small wooden building that was part of a Fresh Air camp to an operational hospital took a mere 54 hours. Truly a miracle. In The Stolen Marriage, the fictional characters of Tess Kraft, R.N. and her husband, Hank Kraft, owner of a large furniture factory, are hugely involved in getting the hospital up and running so quickly.

In the first half of the book, Chamberlain has us wondering why Henry married Tess. To the author's credit, my prediction was off the mark. Not completely. I wonder if other readers made the same prediction that I made. In the second half of the book, Henry's reason for marrying Tess is made clear. Other secrets are revealed. I don't want to include any spoilers here but the other secrets are much more substantiative than those that might be revealed in a romance novel.

It took me five days to plod thru the first half of the book and just one day to finish my reading. This is the explanation for my 4-star rating on goodreads.com.

• How I miss you and Little Italy and St. Leo's and everything! Have some pizza for me, Gina. They've never even heard of it down here, and I am ever so tired of grits!                                 As a transplanted pizzaholic, this made me chuckle.

• Well, guess what I did this afternoon? I went to the library and researched divorce in North Carolina. The results were depressing. Gina, it's impossible!                                             Divorce is horrible. But I'm so glad that the option was available for me. I could only imagine how Tess must have felt upon this discovery. That harming the family name would be more important than people living happy, satisfying, productive lives.

• "Get up, get up!" she commanded, breathless from the climb up the stairs. "The Allies attacked the French coast!" she shouted. "Teddy Wright just came over to tell us to turn on the radio." She was smiling broadly and I could see the pretty young girl she had once been in her face. "There are thousands of troops!" she said, clasping her hands together. "Thousands upon thousands! Hurry downstairs."   ...  In minutes, all four of us plus Hattie, already dressed in her uniform, sat as close as we could get to the radio in the living room, awestruck by what we were hearing.  ...  "Teddy says the church is open." Ruth got to her feet. "Everyone's going. I'm getting dressed and calling a cab to take me there myself. Lucy and Tess, you come with me. And Hattie, you can go to your church too, if you want."                                                              I know that 24-hour news is a relatively recent concept and that in the "old days" households had one radio that the family listened to together. I know this. But I often imagine what how a story would be changed if set in today's time with our current access to news. I also wonder about what went on in my parents' individual homes (they were both still teenagers, 17 and 15) as World War II was ending. That makes me sorry that I never thought to ask that type of question of my parents before they died. Big news stories, now, as then, demand coming together as a community. I remember in my younger days crowds of people standing outside appliance storefront windows watching big news story with others. I guess that's a way that we can make better sense of our world.

• "That's a pretty doll," I said, and Jilly held it in front of her to show me. The doll had eyes that opened and closed, pursed pink lips, and molded blond hair. I wondered what it was like for a colored child to have to play with a white doll. I wonder if that is still a big issue. I know that it was becoming less of an issue when my kids were little. It reminds me of the time that my younger daughter really wanted "Baby Tumble Surprise" and the only one I could find was the black version. I wanted my kids to be accepting of all types of people so I didn't give much thought at all to the fact that the doll didn't resemble my blond-haired, blue-eyed daughter. And she loved that doll. Until she stopped tumbling!

• "...We can help our children. And speaking of the children" - he paused momentarily - "we won't have the space to separate colored from white right away, so until we do, the facility will be integrated." He held up his hands as if to stop any complaints before they began. "That can't be helped," he said. "We need to remember that polio knows no socioeconomic or racial lines. It affects all of our community and it will take all of us to fight it." Ruth, mother of Henry, (falsely) believes that polio is caused by poor hygiene. I'm sure many affluent people thought that as well, until polio struck someone close to them.

• From the author's notes: To complicate matters, the town is impossible to navigate by map, having street names like "44th Avenue Court NE." To make matters worse, as I tried to learn what the town was like in 1944, I discovered that the street names were different back then. the joke is that the town government changed the names during the war in case of invasion - the enemies would never be able to find their way around. I wonder why the street names in Ocala, Florida, near where I live, are so ridiculous. NW 34th Avenue Road?

• Also from the author's notes: Joyce Moyer, the author of the award-winning children's novel, Blue, shared some of her research with me early on. She whetted my appetite to learn more, and I'm grateful for her generosity. I'm a fan of children's literature, checked out Blue on goodreads.com, and it sounds like another book I'd enjoy reading.

The Stolen Marriage is a book that I'm glad I stuck with. And if any of what I've just written sounds remotely interesting to you, you might want to give this novel a try.