Episode 122 - In Praise of Detours

Episode 122 - In Praise of Detours

https://48bconsulting.com/ https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/in-praise-of-detours-rachel-landrum-crumble/ Rachel Landrum Crumble’s collection of poetry, In Praise of Detours, might be deemed a study of the individual’s plans versus the plans of the Divine. We have all heard the joke: Want to make God laugh?  Make a plan. The title poem certainly speaks to this conundrum of the human experience.  Crumble writes, “At the starting line of my white / suburban guilt, I first foresaw a tweedy / liberal blue-blood in my future, / a family friend.”  The reader soon learns, however, that the speaker’s “one,” so to speak – the true intended spouse – was nothing like what the speaker had imagined.  A detour occurred, and the speaker ends up falling for a man who was on his way to “winning / a black trophy wife to please your father, / who always disappointed you. / You were this quirky drummer / with a blowout ‘fro, a laugh and a stutter.”  Thirty-five years and three children later, the speaker pronounces him her true “home,” at least in the earthly sense, and the poem concludes with a bright, sentimental note.  And that would be fine but for the possibility that the raw material of this particular poem – race, time, expectations, and reality – seem to orbit something much greater: The very Source of a trajectory that leaves at least one mortal, the speaker, pleasantly surprised.  I certainly do not want to see what is not there, as it were; however, the tone of the very first line suggests naivete borne out of inexperience. Crumble had expectations in the beginning.  We all have expectations at some point.  But Providence always gets the best of us.  Providence, dear listeners, is also a character in this poem.  He is, if you will, the road worker who puts up the detour sign at all, making Crumble’s poem relatable to those who have experienced similar changes of plan.  Ultimately, it is a lesson in letting go – a lesson, I hasten to say, that is not easy in the least.  It almost seems counterintuitive, but the fact of the matter remains that it is essential for freedom to be experienced.  Take, for example, another poem in Crumble’s collection entitled, “Threads for a New Robe.”  The word “threads” itself implies something used, something old, yet it is out of the threads that something new emerges.  The poem is about a mother’s need to let her child grow up. What began with youth and love became a precious child that the speaker is somehow expected to “swallow my heart / and let my youngest son be delivered / into the rough hands of circumstance, forced / to walk on his own two feet / in a dangerous / world.”  The speaker’s motherly anguish is evident, and, in my estimation, no parent can come away from this poem without echoing back that anguish.  The lesson is painful, but it is necessary, for this is part of the rhythm of raising children since time immemorial.  They “grow under our heart” until it is time for them to take off on their own or, as Crumble tells it, “run in the rain.”  Crumble’s “Lessons of Loss in January” reinforces the relationship between parenthood and Providence by returning that relationship to where, in the Biblical sense, it all began: the Garden.  In a series of observations of trees in the dead of winter, Crumble elucidates that part of being human that has us experiencing loss and pain but finding a way to move on, not so much by our own volition but, to bring our study of Crumble’s work full circle, by the sheer insistence of life: through loss, through coming together, through letting go, through trusting what we cannot see, what we cannot hear life will come our way.  Life wins.  Providence is victorious.  "Leave me my heartwood,” Crumble writes.  “I am evergreen.”  This is the constant.  The unshakeable.  The true.  Far from ending on a nebulous note, Crumble seems to deliver her readers to the doorstep of something good, something accessible to all if only their own “heartwood” is right.

Episode 121 - Like Water on Leaves of Taro

https://48bconsulting.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Like-Water-Leaves-Taro-Himalayan/dp/1964271282Tulasi Acharya’s memoir Like Water on Leaves of Taro begins with a young family’s wish to celebrate the first birthday of their only child with their extended family in Nepal. There is much to be thankful for, and by all measures, the prospects are bright; however, soon after arriving in Nepal, Acharya’s mother-in-law – his sasuma – dies of a heart attack, leaving the family bereft.  The meditation on her loss is profound enough, but soon thereafter, his father-in-law becomes ill.  Most of Acharya’s memoir is about, not only how he struggles with what his sasuraba’s cancer diagnosis really means – imminent death – but also what death means, in general: his in-laws, his own, that common fate for everybody.  Between appointments at various doctor’s offices in Nepal, many staffed by abrasive, seemingly uncaring personnel, Acharya wrestles with the “Big” question, sometimes even bouncing ideas off of his wife, Kripa, who is still dealing with the loss of one parent while contemplating the loss of the second.  In a chapter entitled “Declaration of God’s Death,” Acharya quotes his wife as saying, “I always thought there was a God, that God existed, but for me God is dead today.  My God is dead.”  Here and there, Acharya seems to share this sentiment.  Instances of intentional and even spiteful carelessness crop up such as when he lights up a cigarette, knowing full well that smoking tobacco is a well-known carcinogen.  But what sets him apart is that, as the memoirist, he indulges in philosophical digressions where he quotes popular poets and writers as if trying to seek wisdom from long-dead mentors.  At some point, Acharya confesses that “life ... is both beautiful and fragile,” a conclusion that seems to begin to afford an emotional framework in which to work out his frustrations and fears.  It is a truth that grants him freedom, in other words, to recognize the paradoxes that make up a life – that make up all of our lives.  To be sure, Acharya’s fatherhood greatly informs his working comprehension of two overlapping seasons – birth and death, a beginning and an ending.  He quotes Robert Frost that though “the woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” which is to suggest a nebulous but peaceful end, he has “miles to go before I sleep,” Death is present but not for him.  He has work to do.  His mother-in-law and soon his father-in-law have clocked out.  Their race, to quote scripture, is done.  But not his. This revelation seems to be his way to make sense of the passage of time and what that means: gaining some while losing others, but in his case, as with many other men, being a father throughout.  This is his toehold.  This is the beginning of an answer that makes any sense.  It is his sasuraba or father-in-law's parting gift that eventually gives Acharya any peace.  The advice is rooted in family and the precious time we have with them, and for Acharya to end on that note underscores the real possibility that he knew the answer all along, even deep down: the memoir begins with family, and it ends with family, and time, like the intruder it is, makes its demands along the way.  Tulasi Acharya’s Like Water on Leaves of Taro, therefore, is a story for everyone of us.  Its themes are universal, and the struggles of the memoirist are relatable.  Grief is more than just what it is on the surface.  It is also fear and confusion, anger and desperation.  In this memoir, readers bear witness to a young man with a young family openly and honestly bearing his heart to the world with the implicit wish that the reader do the same or at least recognize the common experience of losing loved ones and having to get up the next day to go to work, earn a living, and, infinitely more importantly, love their families every hour, every minute, every blessed second.  So pick up a copy.  Your lives will be enriched if you do.

Episode 120 - Half-Truths

https://48bconsulting.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Half-Truths-Carol-Baldwin/dp/1957656859 Kate Dinsmore is like many characters in coming-of-age stories who early on discover the power of words to reveal and defend the truth.  The seed was planted early, perhaps with the death of her brother, Jake, but readers soon learn that even her small southern town cannot keep her cooped up.  She must spread her wings, which is why she goes to Charlotte, North Carolina to immerse herself in the formal study of words.  Kate Dinsmore wants to become a journalist, wants to use her words to champion justice and stand against men like her Papaw who assert between drags from their cigarettes or spitting tobacco juice that “we’ve got to keep them coloreds from taking over.”  Carol Baldwin’s debut novel, Half-Truths, is a powerhouse of a story.  Readers will quickly see why this book has already won many reputable awards.  A quick and lively pace combines expertly with insights on Jim Crow bigotry and the justice that must come out on top to create a narrative that is engrossing and a list of characters as complex as they are nuanced.  Baldwin does not work with caricatures; indeed, she understands that the culture of the Jim Crow South was multi-dimensional, even paradoxical.  There were no clear good guys or bad guys, just flawed ideas and modes of thinking that tragically tampered with everyone’s moral compass.  In Charlotte, Baldwin’s ingenue protagonist, Kate, find friendship in Lillian, an older, more sophisticated city girl.  To be sure, she is the country mouse to Lillian’s city mouse, and the contrast is unnerving – there is even some conflict -- but soon enough, she finds a way forward, discovering to her great surprise that she and Lillian, who is Black, happen to share a great-grandfather.  With Kate poised to become a society girl, having a Black relative anywhere on the family tree would be a disaster for both Kate and her well-to-do grandparents under whose charge she is as a new resident of Charlotte.  The Ku Klux Klan otherwise known as the invisible empire is very much visible to Kate and her kinfolk.  Stepping out of line could be dangerous.  Yet Kate still has her words.  And her truth.  The battle lines are drawn, and young Kate, like David, is about to take on her own Goliath.  Baldwin gifts her readers with a story that refuses to gloss over or otherwise forget the past.  For this reason, this book is invaluable to readers of all ages who are not timid about wrestling with old norms and old practices, asking themselves questions about their origin and how they were able to be sustained at all over the years.  Half-Truths lends itself to a discussion on history, yes, but beyond that, readers can also explore human psychology.  Readers might ask themselves: How did we let ourselves get so hateful?  What did these Jim Crow laws really say about us?  It is more than about racial segregation, more than about one race systematically scuttling another race.  Perhaps there was something spiritual going on: an unseen malice that kept everybody on edge and pointing fingers.  Ultimately, Baldwin’s Half-Truths ranks up there with other books including Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin, which was published in 1961.  Though nonfiction, Griffin’s book also tells the story of a journalist who immerses himself in the world of the Jim Crow South in order to uncover truths that could both undermine the status quo and bring people together across racial lines.  Baldwin accomplishes the same.  Brave Kate refuses to be cowed by what older, gruffer, and arguably more threatening men promote.  Though it takes time and a battery of tests that make her stronger, Kate comes out on top.  Truths are revealed, and healing begins. Baldwin’s Half-Truths is a small triumph, and those eager to secure a story that both entertains and edifies should not wait to get a copy.

Episode 119 - When Goodbyes Begin

It is likely that author Marissa McFarland was thinking of the stereotype Italians enjoy when it comes to parting ways.  Her novel, When Goodbyes Begin, tells the story of Anna, the daughter of Italian immigrants who spends the first thirty years of her life doing her best to please her oftentimes overbearing parents, Maria and Tony.  After taking more control over the reins of her life by quitting her nursing job at a hospital and following her dream of becoming a party planner, Anna’s life seems to look up.  She even finds a romantic interest – a man who happens to be half Italian, a huge plus for her parents.  The upward momentum is halted, however, when her father, Tony, begins to become forgetful.  He misplaces things.  He has trouble maintaining the books at the family construction business.  In short order, Tony is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which is when Anna – indeed, the entire close-knit family – experiences the unraveling of all that had once afforded order and certainty.  Anybody unfortunate enough to watch a loved one experience Alzheimer’s understands that the farewell process is cruelly prolonged.  Italian families are known for long goodbyes.  There is rarely a quick hug, a wave, and an escort to the door.  They are loud and loving, and anybody engaged in them knows that it is a process.  How fitting, then, that McFarland would couch the story of the family patriarch gradually losing his cognitive abilities in this affair.  Tony is saying goodbye.  The family is learning how to do the same.  And while it may not be loud – to be sure, quite the opposite – it is nevertheless loving.  McFarland pursues other threads in her book – other romantic tangles, the rearing up of things past – but it is Tony’s diagnosis that holds together the plot.  One might even argue, dear listeners, that When Goodbyes Begin is also about how many struggle with balancing the Old World with its culture and social expectations with the New World and the values it upholds.  In effect, this is an immigrant story where Anna, despite her efforts to secede from her strong-willed parents, actually embraces the very values that prompted her to try to break away to begin with.  Anna is her own person, but she is also very much the daughter of Tony and Maria.  They came to America to start a new life, presumably splitting with their parents and kin, and Anna is doing the very same thing.  We might call this ironic.  Or we might call this typical.  The apple really does not fall far from the tree.  How might we further interpret Tony’s Alzheimer’s disease?  Is his forgetting also the erasure of a family history of rebellion – striking it out on your own?  How does this reframe Anna’s own rebellion?  Does it even become predictable?  When Goodbyes Begin is a study in cultural baggage – yes – but it is also a study in human psychology.  What had seemed to be a break with tradition was actually a perpetuation of it.  Readers might even be inspired to reflect on they themselves lashed out, tried something different, attempted to go their own way only to learn that this had always been the masterplan.  As one gets older, this truth becomes clearer.  Perhaps had the disease not afflicted Tony, this same truth would have emerged from the depths of a lifetime of observation and been gifted to Anna as a token of peace.  This could very well be the biggest tragedy in the book.  With time comes great understanding, but when that time is truncated – when it is shortened – then the understanding we seek may not be found.  We simply pass the ball to our children and hope that they get farther along than we did.

Episode 118 - Keep Close

https://48bconsulting.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Close-Post-Apocalyptic-Survival-Adventure-ebook/dp/B0DSY5DD15 If you are familiar with Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, you are familiar with the genre Kristen Wade also explores in her 2024 novel, Keep Close.  In Wade’s work, a massive meteor shower described as “cat’s whiskers across the sky” ushers in an apocalyptic world where individuals unlucky enough to be standing more than six feet away from anybody else are preyed upon by banshees described later in the novel as “two-legged, headless, translucent wolves.”  They are also winged, which means that they can pounce upon their quarry in a matter of seconds.  The banshees cannot be readily seen, only being perceived as shimmers in the air, but when they strike, they do so with such sudden and swift brutality that witnesses are psychologically impacted in the worse way.  Fear is their greatest weapon; the quick death is merely a tag-on.  Ren, one of the protagonists, is motivated by this fear throughout the book as she labors to return to her mother after surviving the sinking of a sailboat in the Pacific Ocean.  Her mother is in Washington state, and the miles between them, not to mention the banshees and the human bandits who would not hesitate to take cruel advantage of a seventeen-year-old girl and her younger siblings, are many.  Keep Close can undoubtedly be read as yet another post-apocalyptic novel.  Like any other novel in that genre, readers bear witness to what happens when the tenuous agreements we have amongst each other – Rousseau would call it a social contract – are jettisoned, allowing for the less-flattering proclivities to emerge.  What interests me, dear listeners, is Wade’s particular approach to this genre.  A psychoanalysis of the book might reveal Wade’s motherly instincts at play.  Most of the characters are kids or very young adults.  Those much older are, in most cases, ancillary to the plot.  They matter, but they are not central to the narrative.  They orbit around the characters whose emotional development drives the story forward.  Ren must find her mother.  Lee must save his sister.  Hank must get to Australia.  What motivates them all is fear, which makes Keep Close a truly universal story.  Fear motivates us all.  Sadness, anger, jealousy – all of these emotions can be linked to fear.  We might even argue that every parent’s complete and utter dedication to the care of their children is a reaction to fear.  Fear of the unknown.  Fear of what cannot be stopped.  Fear of what the world and nature can do.  Keep Close begins, after all, with a meteor shower.  The novel begins, in other words, with a classic man versus nature set up.  The banshees are merely a manifestation of this.  And what is more, Wade reveals her motherly hand when she writes that individuals can only be spared from the wrath of these creatures by staying close to each other – by being tethered to one another with a six-foot rope.  A metaphorical umbilical cord.  The book is about keeping our children close in the face of what the world and universe throws at us.  That the banshees seem to prefer young children only underscores this reading.  Just as Ren, the older sister, insists that Lizzie, the younger sister, stays close, so, too is she trying throughout the book to get close to her mother.  When, in the end, she sets aside her fear and acts in a way that could easily lead to self-sacrifice we finally see Wade’s viewpoint on what it means for man to be pitted against nature – this classic theme.  We are to give all of ourselves.  That is the only way.  That is THE way.  Otherwise, our spirits will remain tamped down by what is out of our control, and that was never the intended story we were meant to live.  Ren discovers this.  Wade knew it all along.  We all have our banshees.  We also have the ability to live despite them.