Reading and Movie Commentary

Today I read a short story in The New Yorker by Alice Munro, about poor Scottish immigrants to Canada around 1918 and the long shipboard voyage. I didn't want the story to end--it was almost like a fairy tale, a world so completely gone now and yet so lovingly imagined. I liked the way the narrator limned the thoughts of each character in the family, not without criticism but forgivingly: the unfavored, unloved sister who was besotted to obsession with her little nephew James; Old James, the grandfather who went around telling everyone on shipboard superstitious country stories about old Scottish royalty and ghosts and elves, stories that he made fun of back home but now seemed to need to present; Agnes, the mother of little James, pregnant with her second child and harsh and impatient with her first; and the two brothers, Andrew, Agnes's husband, and Walter, only 17, who keeps a journal of the trip and befriends an upper-class young girl who is traveling with her father only and has an onimous cough. Then there is Doctor Suter, who delivers Agnes's baby in a cabin made available by the two "ladies from Edinburgh" who have one of only four cabins on board. Through it all there are matter-of-fact and unsentimental allusions to the sufferings of women who might bear 8 or 9 children before they are well out of their 20s. And there are mothers who are missing and missed by their daughters.

The story did end, alas.

In the mood for more storytelling, I rented a movie later in the evening. In Good Company, an implausible but pleasing comedy with Dennis Quaid as the family man in his early 50s who suffers the indignity of being demoted at his corporate job and having to report to a young outsider half his age. Well, that part wasn't so implausible, but some of the twists and turns the story takes after that are. I won't give anything away, except that, predictably enough, the character played by Quaid becomes a mentor to the younger man. At one point the young guy, wistful about the older man's happy marriage (to beautiful Marge Helgenberger), asks what his secret is. The older man answers, "It's easy. You just pick the right person to be in the foxhole with and keep your dick in your pants when you're out of the foxhole."

I kind of liked that.

Insomnia Rules

And I don't mean that in a good way. Anyway, here I am. Sarah is not my actual name but what I might have been named, after my mother's best friend who had died some time before I was born. My father didn't want my mother to be sad (or at least that's the story) so I was named something different. It's all part of that mysterious past, a younger mother that I didn't know and her attachment to the mysterious Sarah, who she roomed with, along with their two babies, during the war when their husbands were overseas.

Actually there was even another name before Sarah, a name that was officially on my birth certificate and then changed. I'll save that one for later, perhaps--but that one was changed because of my grandmother's objections. I feel compassion for my mother, now, long after her death, that she had to endure everyone's well-meaning or not so well-meaning interventions.

I'm not sure what this blog is going to be about: my life as a part-time academic and full-time editor? my ruminations on the infuriating and joyous city that I live in? (and why is it that I now hear in my head Robert De Niro portentously commenting on "my joy, my heartache, my East, my West Side" in that very objectionable ad that he did for American Express? How, how could he?) Anyway, I will try to stick to my own thoughts if that is possible and report most truthfully on all noteworthy New York happenings.

I am not sure how people get connected to other people doing this blog thing or how people will find me. But I am feeling that I need to find my voice and maybe this will help. At any rate, it might give me something to do during these insomniac hours.

Here's a little New York story to get the ball rolling: Yesterday, I was stuck in a Blockbuster store in the furthest reaches of Brooklyn, trying to take out some DVDs for my most beloved older brother (the baby in the World War II story above) who is unable to walk or talk after his stroke more than a year ago and lives in a nursing home now. It had been a hot, long day already, and nothing seemed doable; the staff were not just rude but aggressively hostile (or so it seemed to me). I needed to fill out the application to open an account and then wait all over again for someone to pay attention to me. The vibe in the place was just chaotic. But then there was this little blond-haired boy, not more than five or six, whose father spoke only Russian but wanted (I gathered) to open an account. So the little boy was very painstakingly trying to sound out the words on the application and then translate them for his father. "Excuse me," he kept saying in his little piping voice to the rude staff people (who were so charmed by him they forgot to be rude), "do we write our address here?" And then, the more important question: "Excuse me. . . . Can I get two games?"