Bybeeary in Boxes? Am I Tough Enough?

Okay, so once upon a time, about 6 weeks ago, we moved and my new bedroom didn't have enough room for all my shelves (I put the Pulitzer collection in my bedroom), so these shelves were placed into the spare bedroom, along with a lot of other furniture that doesn't fit.

Mom has a lot of furniture. Much of it is in the garage we are still renting at our previous place. She is quite attached to her many pieces: "I could tell you stories about that one!" "I can't let that go!" "That table is a friend!" "That was your great-grandmother's!" "Your great-great grandfather built that  table for your grandmother and gave it to her for her 16th birthday!"  

Now she has a brand-new friend: A custom-built solid oak desk/TV stand. The rather large new friend went into her bedroom and the piece she was using went into the spare bedroom.

Even though there's all this furniture, we would like to get one more thing: a small bed, daybed or futon for guests. Right now, there's no room for this sort of thing.  I am feeling frustrated, because at some point, there will be guests, and it irks me to see the spare bedroom so non-functional, basically a dumping ground.

It's no good to ask Mom to part with some of her stuff, or even shuttle it to the rental garage. In fact, she would like to get more out of that garage and sort of...do a second layer of furniture...I couldn't really listen.

So I brooded and brooded. I made the Brontes look like Gretchen Rubin. 

Then it hit me that I am part of the problem in that spare bedroom. Those two bookshelves eat up a lot of wall space! They are also the only pieces of furniture over which I have any say. If I take out my bookshelves, the stuff on the opposite wall can be shifted and then there will be space for a bed/daybed/futon.

But then there's the bookworm part of me: 

Take out the shelves? Put the books in boxes? 

 Eeek.

 At these moments, it's difficult to put my Kondo where my mouth is.

All the books wouldn't have to go into storage. There's a nightstand in my room with two shelves. My turtle collection is there, but I could move it and stick in quite a few books. Then I could get some bookends and make a line of TBRs across my desk. The other books I would lovingly store in  plastic containers that would fit under my bed. I won't get rid of anything; I went through that ordeal during the international move.

Yikes, this goes against my grain, but on the other hand, I want to live in a home that looks nice and is fully functional. I'm up for the challenge. I'm quailing on the inside, but determined to apply some creative thinking and artful maneuvering to make this a success. Am I bookworm tough? Stay tuned!

Moving? What the hell; it's been about a year since the last time

Why? We need a place where Mom doesn't have to deal with steps when she gets out of the nursing home.

The good:  No steps, (it's a duplex) a walk-in shower, a real neighborhood with sidewalks, a patio,  helpful friends, just around the corner from our current place -- not an international move!

The bad:  Not everything will fit into the new place, and Mom has a ton of stuff.  28 years in the same place will do that.  Not to mention an ardent relationship with QVC.  Despite the lack of space, Mom doesn't see the beauty in culling, weeding out, downsizing.  I read Marie Kondo (again) and weep.

The silver lining: We can continue to rent the garage at the current place, so it will be used for storage. When summer comes, Mom can go through everything and see if it sparks joy.

The cloud: If I know her, though, there will be a blanket statement: "Shut up. It all sparks joy. Now put that garage door down and let's go get a strawberry limeade and get back home before QVC starts fashion hour."

What Mom doesn't know yet, heh heh: Although she embraces and champions chaos, I have arranged the clothing in her new closet in ROY G BIV order. It's gorgeous! Take that!

Looking forward:  After 3 weeks, we are finally done packing up Mom's stuff. Moving day is this Friday, so now it's time to do the fun part: My room! My books! Let the joy-sparking commence!

See you from a brand-new room.

P.S. I can't believe it! This is my 1,000th post!

Finding My Feet

I have been in the United States for two weeks and fourteen hours. There's still a bit of an unreal quality to being here. I feel happy, but unsettled. The days pass in a whirl. My watch is still set on Korean time. Last night, as I went to sleep, I mentally walked from my old apartment to the Beomnaegol subway stop then back the other way. I tested myself to see if I had forgotten any landmarks. So far, so good. This morning at breakfast, I was talking to my mother and referred to Busan as "home". Ooops.

Read Life has definitely taken a back seat to Real Life. At the present, I'm still bashing my way through A Game of Thrones. My inner Bonnethead and Nerd Girl are both enthralled with Pioneer Girl.  All those footnotes! Squeeeeee! I'm also reading a memoir by Ingeborg Day called Ghost Waltz in which she explores the elephant in the room as she was growing up: Her father was a Nazi police officer. It's well-written, haunting, disturbing. I've only finished one book since I arrived back: Unworthy by Anneli Rufus. It's part memoir, part self-help about the self-loathing that lurks in so many of us. What led me to read it was research. I'm working on my next novel and that is my main character's chief characteristic, so I needed to understand that more clearly.

And what of the Bybeeary? It's sitting in several boxes in the living room, half-unpacked. All the boxes arrived safely.

My mom is telling everyone we meet that I wrote a book. Last night, she was strong-arming a relative into buying a copy of Even if the Sky Falls Down:

Mom: Have you got Susan's book on your Kindle yet?

Relative: Book?

Mom: Yeah, she wrote a book. You can read it on your Kindle or on the computer.

Relative: What kind of book is it?

Mom: It's about Korea.

Relative: Is it about your experiences there?

Me: Uh, it's a novel. Mom, quit pressuring Carol!

Mom: Tell her the title.

Me: Even if the Sky Falls Down. I can't believe you're strong-arming people.

Relative: What, are there copies piled up in your garage, Judy?

Mom: It's not a real book. It's on the computer. [A close friend] read the whole thing, and she said it's good enough to be a movie.

Me: I don't....she's really nice.

Relative:  Yes, she is. Even if the Sky Falls Down?  Okay, I'll look for it.

I don't know whether to laugh, cry, cringe or hire my mom as my publicist.

No Bonnethead

I love the Little House books.  I can barely remember not loving them.  Like Amy in Beverly Cleary's Mitch and Amy, I liked to dress up in my mother's dresses (she had a yellow-and-white cotton summer dress with a full skirt that was just right) and play Little House on the Prairie.  I was always Laura.  My younger  brother got to be Mary or Nellie Oleson, or sometimes, Jack the bulldog.  In sixth grade, my first attempt at novel writing looked a lot like On The Banks of Plum Creek.  I was such a little calico freak that I secretly wanted a tin cup, a stick of candy and a penny in my Christmas stocking.

I always wanted my mom to like the Little House books as much as I did.  She watches the TV show from time to time, but never seemed interested in the series of novels.  I always believed they'd be right up her alley since they featured no talking animals, were based on true stories from Laura's girlhood and had plenty of illustrations.  I never gave up hope of bonding with her over the adventures of the Ingalls family.

Last summer, she seemed mildly interested when I was reading Wendy McClure's memoir of her Laura obsession, The Wilder Life   When McClure mentioned that Laura and her family actually lived for one whole year (1868-69) in Chariton county, the place where Mom was born, her interest spiked and we spent a couple of hours roaming the back roads between Rothville and Mendon, looking for the plaque that marked the Ingalls' brief homestead.  As we rode along, I knew she was ready for her first foray into the books. I would usher her into the world of Lit-Laura.  After waiting around more than 40 years, our Bonnethead time had come at last.

I didn't waste much time getting to the bookstore.  Ideally, I wanted to begin at the beginning with Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the series.  (Actually, I wanted to buy the whole set right then and there, but I thought she'd be intimidated)  No joy.  The bookstore was fresh out of LHITBW, but they had Little House on the Prairie.  That would work.  It had the same name as the TV show and it's the most perfectly structured book in the series.  I brought it home to her, but before she could begin reading, my sense of going in order was making me crazy, so I went to the used bookstore and got Little House in the Big Woods.  The pig's bladder balloon!  Butter making! Laura's corncob doll, Susan! Charlotte! Pa's stories!  She couldn't miss out on all that.

Mom picked up LHITBW and started reading.  I was reading my own book, but I was also watching her read.  I wanted to be ready when she bespoke her enjoyment at intervals.  After a few pages, she put the book down and picked up her word search puzzle book.  No more reading that evening.  Aaaah, I thought.  She's savoring.  When she went to the bathroom, I quickly checked where the bookmark was: Page 30.

"Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty, so in the wintertime, she colored the butter."

The bookmark didn't move over the next few days.  What was going on?  I would find out.  One evening, my friend and former husband, Mr. Bybee, came over for a visit.  During a lull in the conversation, I told him that Mom had started reading the first Little House book.

"It's corny, " Mom said.

"Corny?"  I repeated.  "What do you mean?"  Mr. B. looked a little worried.  He knows how I feel about Laura and the gang.  After all, he was the one who gamely drove me to Mansfield, Missouri to see The Laura Ingalls Wilder museum back in the 1990s. He knew I wasn't going to take a judgment like "corny" lying down.

"Well, all they talk about is boring stuff like smoking meat and making butter step-by-step.  It's corny.  I guess they think kids don't know about any of this."

I was perturbed, but interested in her use of the plural pronoun.  After all, the Little House books were a joint effort between Laura and her daughter, Rose.

"Did you get to the part about the pig's bladder?"

Mom snorted.  "Yes."

"Oh," I said.

Corny?!  Dammit, I had screwed up!  I should have started her out with Little House on The Prairie where the Ingalls family didn't do chores --  they just got up and moved and got the hell across the Mississippi before the ice broke! 

Long story short:  The bookmark stayed at page 30 for the next 6 weeks, and it was still there when I walked out the door for the airport and as far as I know, it will be there until time immemorial.  I'm bound to sail my prairie schooner alone.  I love my mom, but she's no Bonnethead.

Success

Mom was surprised and pleased with The Plump Pig. What can I say? I'm feeling rock-star-ish about my ability to bring the right book together with the right person. Bookworms, you probably want me as your good friend, right?

What A Mom Wants: The Plump Pig

From time to time I get bent out of shape because my mother refuses (Books! How boring can you get?) to read my "blob" as she calls it. Hmph. If she had a blog, I'd read it every day. Even if it was all about her QVC obsession or her potholder collection, I'd be right there, leaving sunny comments, posting links from my blog to hers and running up the stats on her "Visitors To My Blog" counter.

Looking on the bright side, sometimes this admittedly ultra-mild version of parental neglect comes in handy. I can write movingly about my rampant alcoholism and recent sex change and...oh wait -- I haven't done any of that. Well, I can drop a few f-bombs now and then and she's none the wiser. And what about now?! I can openly discuss her birthday gift with the world at large and she'll never know. Nyah, nyah!

A few nights ago, Mom and I were on the phone and somehow, we got on the subject of her favorite childhood book, The Plump Pig. This picture book was around the house while I was growing up, but neither of us have seen it in years. With all the moving over the years, we're guessing that it's lost forever.

"Do you think that maybe there's a new copy in a bookstore somewhere?" Mom asked. She was thinking of how her other childhood favorite, The Boxcar Children had had a resurgence of popularity.

"I've only ever heard of The Plump Pig because of you," I said, but while I was talking, my fingers were on the laptop keyboard, flying to Amazon. Bingo! It was there: The Plump Pig by Alf and Helen Evers. Several copies. No images were available, but the descriptions listed copyrights of 1938, 1942, 1944, 1956 and 1960.

"Well, 1938, that's got to be the same book," Mom said. "That's the year I was born, but I think I got my copy in 1942 for my birthday from my grandmother and grandfather. They were big on giving books for birthdays."

I checked out Abebooks and found a description that contained the first line: Although the Plump Pig was the youngest pig on the farm...

"That's IT!" we both screamed.

Since we still had no pictures, we argued about the cover and the plot: "Wasn't the cover green?"

"No, it was white."

"And the pig was there."

"Yes, he was standing in flowers."

"He was eating an apple."

"Wasn't he running with the apple?"

"How did he get from the skinny farmer's place to the fat farmer's place?"

"They weren't farmers -- they were out for a ride and saw the Plump Pig and just had to have him."

"They took him home and let him run around in their yard with the dog and cat."

"No, they made a little garden for him and fed him delicious treats."

Mom sighed. "I'd love to read The Plump Pig again."

"Me too." As far as picture books went, The Plump Pig lacked the interpersonal conflict and drama of my own personal preschool favorite, Nurse Nancy, but it was pretty damn good.

You probably already know how this ends. I pulled out the plastic today and bought a first edition, very good condition of The Plump Pig. How much? Quite a bit more than the 1938 price of twenty-five cents, but you know how it is: It's a book. It's my mom. Check out the map of my psyche and you'll see that I'm at the four-way intersection of Sentiment, Obsession, Nostalgia and Compulsion.

I can't wait to see this book. I can't wait to see my mom's face when she opens her package next month. Happy Birthday, Mom!

Poetry, My Cell Phone and Mother's Day

I couldn't let National Poetry Month end without writing about poetry a bit more. I must have a much more sensitive soul than I thought.

Lately I've been thinking of e.e. cummings. Is he still popular? We used to get in Just-Spring all the time in school textbooks. In Freshman English, we read My Father Moved Through Dooms of Love -- that poem made me mix up cummings with Theodore Roethke because it reminded me of two of Roethke's poems, My Papa's Waltz and Where Knock is Open Wide.

Why e.e. cummings? It's because of my cell phone. I use my texting feature quite frequently, but I'm kind of a dolt with it. For example, I don't know how to do capital letters, numerals, commas, question marks, exclamation points, hyphens, colons, semicolons, or quotation marks. What *can* I do? What's left: Lowercase letters, periods and the "at" (@) sign. I received helpful instructions with my phone, but they were printed on a tiny brochure in 2 or 4 point, so I flung them somewhere one day during a headachy temper fit. I decided that I'd carry on and do my best, but my English major soul was embarrassed -- it was killing me to send out messages like this:

when will you arrive at gangnam station. im bringing the austen zombie novel. didnt remember about the drabble book...sorry.

her phone number is oh one oh four six five eight one two six one but shes in thailand now.

thanks so much for the pictures from my fortyeighth birthday party. what a great party. im so glad that we could get together. omg the cake was so delicious.

Don't your fingers just itch to fix those messages? Those are the type of sentences I assign to my Comp class for editing practice!

So anyway -- I was cringing every time I had to send a text, but then I thought: "WWeecD?" It hit me: cummings wouldn't bother with all that extra punctuation unless he felt like making one of his picture poems. He'd send out texts that looked exactly like mine and people would be damn lucky and happy to get them and maybe even decide to tattoo one of them on his or her forearm!

After that, I felt better. Now when I send texts, my sparse use of conventional punctuation feels voluntary and hip: In your face! I have an M.A. I've learned all the rules and taught them to a multitude of others. If anyone's entitled to break them, it should be me. What a badass I am.

What would we do without poetry? It truly is balm for our lives.

I've also been thinking of Philip Larkin. Earlier this month, I came up with an idea for the ultimate Mother's Day gift. It was such a great idea -- so literary and edgy and twisted that I couldn't bestow it on anyone. Only I could appreciate such a gift to its utmost. I got my spawn on the phone:

Me: Hello, Sweetheart! How's Mommy's Li'l' Angel?
Spawn: What do you want?
Me: Have you bought me a Mother's Day gift yet?
Spawn: No...should I?
Me: That's up to you, but I wanted to give you food for thought.
Spawn: A book? A movie?
Me: You might be embarrassed to...
Spawn: You want PORN?
Me: No! Gross! I want This Be The Verse needlepointed on a wall hanging or a pillow. An afghan would be OK, too.
Spawn: What's This Be The Verse?
Me: A poem. By Philip Larkin.
Spawn: I don't...wait -- is that the "Your parents fuck you up" poem?
Me: Yes, that's right... Isn't it brilliant? Aren't I brilliant? I scare myself sometimes!
Spawn: I don't know how to needlepoint.
Me: That's OK. This is such a great gift idea, I'm willing to wait for years while you learn or you start dating a woman who has needlepoint skills. Meanwhile, you can memorize it and call and recite it to me on Mother's Day. Isn't that perfect? You could also recycle and use it for your dad on Father's Day!!!
Spawn: Whatever.

Rhymes With Theme, Not Them

I could get used to this meme stuff, except for one thing: Now that I've learned how to pronounce it properly, my brain doesn't want to accept the fact that meme rhymes with theme. I see the word and want to pronounce it to rhyme with them.

Enough of that. On with the meme! Meeem. Meeem.

1. On average, how many books do you read in a month? 4-5

2. On average, how many books do you read in a year? Doing the math (ew!), it comes out to about 56.6 books.

3. How many books have you read in the last 5 years? 283

4. How many books have you read in the last 10 years? 454. I thought that number would be higher, but for a couple of years, when I was in graduate school, my totals for the year fell into the 20s.

In other news:
I'm so excited -- Mom read a novel! It's called Outsider by Diana Palmer. She said that she "lived every minute of it" and that the sex scenes were really graphic. She mentioned the sex stuff in two different phone calls, so now I'm slightly curious, though skeptical. Since 1982, I've found nothing to even remotely rival that really long and really graphic sex scene in Endless Love. Anyway, Mom's sending the book to South Korea for me to enjoy. She thinks that it's probably not my taste, but if she read it, I feel compelled to. My mom, the bookworm? After all these years, maybe it's finally going to happen! Here we are last summer, bonding at our favorite pizza joint, Calgaro's, in Cole Camp, Missouri.



One last thing:
Is anyone else having a problem accessing The Superfast Reader's blog (Reading Is My Superpower)? For the past few days, everytime I visit the page, there's some annoying pop-up message "stack overflow at line 1487" on the page, then the whole thing freezes up and I have to restart my computer. This has me in a slightly pouty mode, because I can see a bunch of terrific new blog entries on that page, but I can't get to them. $%!#