This Time Tomorrow

As soon as I read about Emma Straub's latest, This Time Tomorrow, I immediately requested it from the library. I'd heard it was a non-fantastical time travel book, if that makes any sense. I was anxious to read it. Happily, it did not disappoint at all and was a most enjoyable read.

Alice is a content almost 40-year old who was raised on Pomander Walk in Manhattan, now living in Brooklyn. After college, she started working at the private high school she attended and all these years later is still working there. Her father is in a hospital towards the end of his life. After having dinner with her lifelong best friend, Alice has a few drinks alone to celebrate her 40th birthday. She then returns to her childhood home to reflect on life. Did she to easily just go with the flow? Is something missing in her life? She wakes up the following morning in the storage shed on Pomander Walk and it's 1996. She's 16. Her father is a young, vibrant 40-something year old man. Pretty close to Alice's current age.

Once Alice realizes the "secret" of her time travel, she repeatedly returns to the past to see if her actions can change her father's outcome without changing anything else. Can that be done? What would you do if you could have a do-over? Alice's story repeats itself in many different ways each time she returns to the past. But what has really changed?

I learned that Straub wrote this novel in 2020 when her father was gravely ill and she was closely reexamining their past lives. She used her writing to process what she was going through in her own life. It shows as this book is clearly written from the heart.

This is my favorite quote from the book as well as being a good reminder for us all.

Maybe that was the trick to life: to notice all the tiny moments in the day when everything else fell away and, for a split second, or maybe even a few seconds, you had no worries, only pleasure, only appreciation of what was right in front of you. Transcendental meditation, maybe, but with hot dogs and the knowledge that everything would change, the good and the bad, and so you might as well appreciate the good.

This Time Tomorrow is also a celebration of New York City. I'd never heard of Pomander Walk but now I'd love to go back to New York and check it out. Part of Alice's teenage birthday routine was going to Papaya King, a hot dog spot that somehow, even though I was eating hot dogs in the 1970s, I never went to. Even though Alice is years younger than I am, a lot of her New York City descriptors made me feeling quite nostalgic.

I'd highly recommend this novel, even to those who don't think they're into time travel. Time travel is what allows Alice to think about life. Her reflecting is the larger part of this compelling story.

I'll Be Seeing You

 

I'm the type of reader who is always on the lookout for my next book. Even when I have plenty of books out from the library or know exactly what I want to read next. What else can I read?

During my evening doomscrolling a few nights ago, I came across a blog post of books a young woman (younger than me, at least) has read during the pandemic. She mentioned a memoir by Elizabeth Berg, an author I know and like. It covers the time when Berg became caregiver for her parents during their final days.

I'm approaching the 7th anniversary of the day when I transitioned from being loving daughter to loving daughter caregiver. This is always a sad time for me. I mean, one day I was just my parents' daughter, talking to them every night to make sure they were doing okay. And the next day I was advocating for my mom at the hospital, reviewing her living will and other documents. At the same time making sure that my dad who had never lived alone would be okay. It was a lot. I think of my life as "before" and "after".

Was this the perfect time to read Berg's memoir, I'll Be Seeing You? Perhaps not. But perhaps yes. It gave me a legitimate reason to climb into bed each night and shed a few tears while reading.

Berg's experience with her parents - and her story - is quite different from my own. Her father was suffering from memory loss and faded very slowly. And her mother had to stoically deal with all that. Berg lived a 7-hour drive from her parents but her sister was local to where the parents lived. They have a brother who lives in Hawaii.

In my case, my parents' ends came very rapidly. My mom had a stroke on March 6 and died on March 25. On April 13, my dad was diagnosed with cancer and he died exactly 4 months later. So not quite 5 months after my mom. Both my brother and I lived flying distance from our parents. I was there for 6 months, flying home once when my (fairly new) husband had surgery and to spend a weekend with a dear friend in California. My brother flew in and out as he could.

So much, however, of what Berg wrote really spoke to me. Her parents had lived in their home for nearly 40 years. She wrote about the attachment to the house, even though she had never lived there. My parents lived in their house for all of the 57 years they'd been married. My mom grew up in that house. I grew up in that house. My kids grew up visiting that house as was the case with Berg's children. She wrote about being the sandwich generation. About what it's like  to be aging herself and closer to the point where her kids might need to care  for her. 

She wrote about visiting her uncle Frank at his nursing home. Shortly before either one of my parents "got sick," I drove them to visit my father's brother in his nursing home. Oh  yes, could I relate!

One thing that Berg wrote about the book was that she hoped her memoir might help others going through the same thing. It is good to know that we're not alone. It reminded me, too, that caring for aging parents as an older adult isn't ideal, but it does mean that we were blessed to have our parents for a good part of our lives.

Then I woke up this morning and saw the following post on Facebook by John Pavlovitz.

That's the thing you learn as you grieve deeply: when you lose someone you love, you lose a bit of you.

You don't simply lose yourself metaphorically or symbolically, but you have stolen away the part of your story that only they knew.

You lose the shared memories you curated.

You lose the you who you were when you were with them.

A part of you dies too, and so you want the person you love returned to you because you want that piece of your identity back—and you know you can't have it.

He linked a blog post. He takes this a whole lot further.

Many times over the past six years I’ve had to contend with a sobering realization: life will never be as good as it was when my father was here.
It will never be that complete.
I’ll never feel that rightness again.
That wholeness can simply not return.
My world now is a less-than substitute of the one where my father was alive.

And being a mere mortal who has no say in the when and where and how of reality, all I can do is be here in this world as it is, be who I am in this altered story that I wish I could rewrite but know I cannot.

We who are mourning in this timeline can only work with the reality handed to us and do the best we can to find gratitude in having once had someone worth missing. 

Mom and Dad, I miss you. Thank you for making me the reader I am. Reading often gives me comfort.

On Division

After I read about On Division, Goldie Goodbloom's novel about a 57-year old woman in the Chasidic community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I suggested it to my synagogue book club as a title for our next meeting. The response from the group was mixed, but once one woman purchased the book while we were still discussing it, we decided that we might as well go with this one for our January discussion.

We typically try to select books that would be of broad interest to Jews and non-Jews. While this book fits the bill, some of the language and customs might only be recognizable to someone familiar on any level with Chasidic Judaism. However, the big ideas of the novel were a late-in-life pregnancy, dealing with the loss of a child, and aging in general. We're hoping to grow our book club. I'm not sure if this was the title to help us achieve this, but I'm quite anxious to talk about this with the group.

Surie, at 57, is getting ready to enjoy a more quiet life after her husband, Yidel, retires at 62. They've raised 10 children, have multiple grandchildren and are expecting their first great grandchild. A late-in-life pregnancy wasn't in the plan. And how did this miraculous pregnancy even take place (besides the obvious)? Surie needs to come to terms with her condition before she shares the news with others in her family.

Besides her children and grandchildren, Surie has loving in-laws who live in the same apartment building. One of her daughters lives in the building with her family as well. The lives of those in the building are very closely interconnected. Will she be able to keep her secret until she is ready to share with the others?

If you enjoy reading "Jewish" fiction, I would definitely recommend this one!

A break in my reading slump

I'm not sure if I'm in a reading slump because I just can't seem to get into Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes (which I'm reading for Books and Beer Club) or if I just haven't felt like reading. But the longer I went without making a dent in any book, the more anxious I began to feel. So I picked up The Red Address Book which I'd read about in a "reading lovers" Facebook group I'd joined. Everyone in the group loved it. It sounded like it could be a quick, easy read.

It was quick. I finished it in a single day. It was relatively easy. And it was just okay. What really made it relatable, though, was the day before, while visiting an elderly cousin, she spent time thumbing through her address book, reminiciscing about the people listed in the pages. That had brought back memories of my dad and I going through his contacts on his smart phone, "updating" the contacts. While we updated, we talked about nearly every person he had listed. I learned more about his life and relationships in addition to learning who was still alive and who was dead.

In an attempt to tell her great niece, Jenny, about her life, 96-year old Doris thumbs through the old address book her father had given her when she was just a girl. As each entry died, she marked them dead. This novel focuses on just a few of the entries. I think I wish there had been some other people she told stories about, even if they weren't so central to her story. We learn about the impact each individual had on Doris' life. And she had quite a life!

I did love how relatable and authentic Jenny was portrayed. Her interactions with her great aunt were spot on!

Would I recommend it? If you're in the mood for a book about a full life and what it's like to reach the end of it, you might enjoy this.

Best Sedaris yet!

My entire "immediate' family gathered together - on vacation - in North Carolina right after Labor Day this year. We hadn't been all together for anything but sad and tragic events in over 9 years. It was great.

We were all posting photos on Facebook - of the scenery and of each other. One of my brother's friends recommended Calypso by David Sedaris in response to one of my brother's posts. This latest Sedaris collection of essays is about his North Carolina beach house - and his family. See the connection? We weren't at the beach, but we were in North Carolina - and we were with family.

As soon as I read this guy's comment, I looked up the book, added it to my TBR list... and ended up starting it a few days later. I think this is my favorite of all the Sedaris books I've read.

As much as this book is about family vacations in North Carolina, it's more about aging within the context of being part of a family. It's about loss. It's about watching parents age. I connected with this book on so many levels.

It started with this: ...thinking all the while about my ever-shrinking family. A person expects his parents to die. But a sibling? I felt I'd lost the identity I'd enjoyed since 1968, when my brother was born.

I caught my older daughter getting weepy several times on our North Carolina vacation. She was missing the four members of our family who were no longer with us. Within the past few years, we've lost my parents, my aunt, and a cousin who was more like a sister. My cousin helped me get through the first three losses, and my identity was so tied to hers. I was the little cousin and she was my idol. How many times after my cousin died did I say the exact words that Sedaris used, changing the word sibling to cousin? I expected to grow old with my darling cousin. Now, years later, I miss my parents, but they lived a good life. I expected to live to old age with my cousin. When her life ended, our life together was cut short.

He wrote this about diaries: "After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading," I often say to Hugh. "I promise that on the next page you'll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that."

Just the day before, I'd had a discussion about just this with fellow bullet journalers. The question came up about whether or not to keep your bullet journal after you complete a notebook. My thought was, of course keep it! I treasured little things that I found from my parents after they died. I like to think that my kids or grandkids will find my bullet journals a treasure. One of the journalers in my group writes something at the front of each of her journals similar to what David spoke to Hugh. Perhaps I should do the same.

There were some political bits in the book that I thoroughly enjoyed. Then again, we think along the same lines. Enough said. Sad to think that our society is so politically divided right now that some people might not be able to make it through this entire book without throwing it against the wall in disgust. But based on that, I can not recommend this book unconditionally even though I gave it five stars on goodreads.

Our Souls at Night

I'm not sure what I thought Our Souls at Night by Ken Haruf was about, but I was anticipating a really dark story. It wasn't that at all.

The premise of the story is interesting. Two neighbors (I hesitate calling them elderly because they aren't that much older than me) lost their spouses many years ago. The neighbors knew each other but weren't friends. The woman shows up at the man's house one day and asks him if he'd like to have sleepovers at her house, not for the sex. Just for the company. It doesn't seem to take much thinking about it on his part. And that's pretty much where the story begins.

"But that's the main point of this being a good time. Getting to know somebody well at this age. And finding out you like her and discovering you're not just all dried up after all."

Interesting, right? Think about it. If you're of a certain age, how often do you get to develop a relationship with someone new? Think about the getting to know you phase. What a great feeling. Once you reach that certain age, the prospect of opening up to someone new can be terrifying, a feeling expressed by some of the other women in the neighborhood.

We learn about the marriages that Addie and Louis had. The reader is able to draw conclusions about how Addie and Louis ended up where they were at the start of the novel from bits and pieces they share with each other about their pasts.

I think this is a perfect book for my community book club to discuss. I'm one of the younger members of the book club, and fortunately, I still have my husband. But would I do what Addie does if I were in her position at her age? Frankly, I don't think so. In all my single years, I was okay climbing into bed to go to sleep by myself. My loneliness would come at dinner time more often than any other time of day. Then again, you really open yourself up when you're in bed, not quite asleep yet. You'd probably develop a truer relationship than you would just chatting over dinner. And that's what I think the title of the novel means. Our Souls at Night are our true souls. I'm really curious to hear what some of the other women in the book club have to say.

The language used by Kent Haruf is very sparse, but the story is very deep. There's not a whole lot of action. But by "eavesdropping" on Addie and Louis' conversations, we really get to know them very well.

There are three other significant characters in the novel. Ruth, an elderly woman, who is Addie's friend and another neighbor. Addie's son, Gene. And Gene's son, Addie's grandson, Jamie.

I don't want to give away the ending, but I was disappointed. No, that's not true. I was saddened. Saddened that lots of folks stories end up the way this one did.

I'd highly recommend Our Souls at Night. And I hope to add a little bit to this post after my book club discusses this next month.