Episode 121 - Like Water on Leaves of Taro

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.

Episode 117 - Midnight Murmurs

https://48bconsulting.com/ https://midnightmurmurs.blog/ Kevin Enners is like any writer doing his best to promote his work while continuing to generate thoughtful and engaging content.  He is a member of the Atlanta Writers Club and writes for The Kyle Pease Foundation whose stated mission is to “improve the lives of people with disabilities through sports and beyond.”  Enners is prolific.  He has even written a novella, The Crave, and hosts a blog entitled Midnight Murmurs that houses a substantial collection of scary short stories.  One of the stories, “Three Knocks at the Cabin Door,” is reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.”  In it, a man, alone in a cabin but for his dog, is tormented by the incessant sound of three sharp knocks.  Mostly, he does not know where they are coming from.  But sometimes, the knocks seem to come from specific places.  The heavy bedroom door.  The closet.  The floor beneath him.  The knocks do not let up.  Duke, the dog, grows uneasy.  The man believes he is losing his mind.  Until he peers down at his hands.  The mud.  The soil packed beneath his fingernails.  The disturbed earth near the porch.  I invite you, dear listeners, to find the February 2026 short story yourself to learn the ending.  You will see how the gothic is, if you will indulge me, alive and well today.  The short story is impressive enough.  The fact that Enners penned it by using eye-gazing technology should arouse the interest of anybody used to the battle that is writing.  Kevin Enners, you see, has cerebral palsy.  What is particularly noteworthy about Enners is how he champions writers with disabilities, observing that platforms dedicated to supporting the creative endeavors of folks with disabilities are either rare or obscure.  Spotlights shine on the creative works of many so-called marginalized groups, but for individuals like Enners, no such spotlight exists.  At least in the way Enners prefers it to exist.  Allow me to explain.  There are many preconceptions about those with disabilities.  They do not need to be articulated here, but suffice it to know that there seems to be one centered on the ability produce creative work.  For whatever reason, there is a disconnection between the immediate impression many get when encountering someone with a disability and that person’s actual ability to do the thing we are all hardwired to do: create.  In Enner’s own words, “The general public doesn't realize that people with disabilities don't have a platform where they can express themselves creatively. I am lucky to have support for my writing. I have had a lot of support from my family and friends to maintain a voice in the creative realm and write stories that I don't think any other author can or is willing to write. There is a misunderstanding between what the public thinks we can do and what we actually can do.”  His writing efforts, thus, are meant to disrupt those assumptions – to correct a way of thinking that has shoved aside the voices of those who happen to have a disability.  To read Enners is not to read an author with cerebral palsy.  It is simply to read an author – and a good one at that.  Elsewhere on The Professor’s Bayonet, I have written about how being made in the image of God, the Supreme Creator, means that we were made to create.  It is more an action, a vocation than an image.  In fact, it is far from the latter.  We only need to look at the superficial differences between us to acknowledge what is truly important about us all.  Some of us have darker skin.  Some of us are female.  Some were born with conditions like cerebral palsy.  All of us, though, were gifted in some form or another to create.  We draw.  We paint.  We nurture relationships.  We build families.  We create businesses.  And we write.  Kevin Enners writes.  And more of us should check out his blog.  It’s called Midnight Murmurs.  Just be sure to keep a light on.  You never know who might come knocking.