Only two week of summer break left!  We are busily cramming in as much swimming and sunning and playing with friends as we possibly can.  We are really good at cramming.  We want to be sunsoaked and happy and pleasantly tired as we head back to school to be serious again.  I think we’re going to achieve that goal.

  
In the mean time, we still have the gentle summer mornings: the sleeping in a little later, the sitting in the window seat and reading for an hour before getting down to the business of the day.  Some of that reading has been really grave and disturbing lately.  The world is a difficult place.  

Here is a smattering of other things, though.  Things to stimulate your mind and lift your spirits.  We’re not ignoring the harsh the realities, but we’re giving ourselves permission to take a break.  After all, that’s part of the beauty of having these kids.  We work hard to give them a safe and happy childhood, a sunny summer to remember as they slog through the hard work of living the rest of the year.  And while we give it to them, we get ot briefly enjoy it, too.  Let’s take it all in.

• Have I showed you this yet?  Cheap books!  What could be happier than that?
• I should probably be embarrassed by how much I enjoyed this, but I’m not.  Good-night, Dune.  Brilliant.
• These are beautiful and haunting.  The fact that they are also ground-breaking is just a bonus.  
• Now I want to make my own list of beautiful lines.  There are just too many to choose from…
• This.  Motherhood is wonderful on so many levels, but this.  This is why I wanted to do it in the first place.
• NASA will always be a favorite, but it was the comments on this post that made my day last week.  Somehow this distant planet has an actual hold on our hearts.  Humans are funny creatures.
• I can’t decide if I particularly love any of the words they’ve invented, but the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows deserves a read for its name alone.
• Have any of you read this book?  I really want to see the movie, and I keep reading that the book is amazing.  It’s definitely on the list.
• Also! Our copy of Go Set a Watchman came yesterday.  I can’t decide if I’m excited or terrified to read it.  Are any of you already on it?  Thoughts so far?

Enjoy your Monday, everyone, and soak up that summer while you can.

The need for the library is only growing, at least here in Indianapolis, where rain is making all of our gardens grow and flourish to a degree none of us will ever get to enjoy, as we will all be locked up in an institution after our constantly fighting children cause us to snap. 

What?  I’m fine.  Really.

Really.

Um…let’s look at some books, shall we?

  
This first one is for the littles among us.  I absolutely love books with imaginative stories told mostly in pictures.  Before learning how to read, all three of my kids loved to flip through books on their own and “read” the story they saw in the pictures.  This book would be ideal for that.

   
 As you can see, there are some words, but there are many pages without any words at all, and it’s such a lovely simple little imaginative story.  Super fun.

And for the slightly older among us, a little spin on the fairytales.

  
This whole story is told back in forth in letters from various fairy tale characters.

  
I love it when someone comes up with a creative new format.  This is fun conceptually, fun visually, and it weaves a new story across several fairytales.  What could be better?

Except sun, I mean.  

I’m happy to report that the forecast says today will be sunny!  So we’re putting books aside and going swimming while we can.  

We’ll be back at the library tomorrow during the next round of thunderstorms, though, so I’m sure I’ll have a fresh new crop of fun finds for you  next week.

Assuming I’m still sane, that is.

  
Here I am and here I’ll stay
My skin warmed by the sun’s fierce rays
I hear the buzz of insects’ play
I breath the sweet, fat summer day
Merge with the ground on which I lay
As hours pass by as they may
I let my mind just drift away

Here I am and here I’ll stay

It’s funny how the stories stick with you.

How they’re buried deep down inside and you don’t think about them for years until the moment life rips you open and through the jagged tear you see light streaming out and when you lean in close you can see the story glowing.

How they fill your mind with adventure and excitement and laughter, all of which fade quickly, leaving only the truth echoing around in your heart, ready to catch your ear when you least expect it.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite series to read all my own was, unsurprisingly, The Chronicles of Narnia.  I read each one of those books at least eight times.  What might be surprising is that my clear favorite of all of them was The Horse and His Boy.  That one never gets the attention it deserves.

I loved it for the simplest of reasons.  It was a great story, with all the classic elements.  Boy is mistreated, finds out his horrible father is not really his father, runs away from home, takes up with talking horses, meets a princess, saves the day, falls in love, finds out he’s really a king. What’s not to love?  Also, it’s funny.  At least, to a nine-year-old.  So I read it over and over, thrilled at the adventures, felt satisfied at the ending where everyone gets what he or she deserves.

It wasn’t until much later that it came back to haunt me.

I was thirty.  It had probably been ten years, at least, since the last time I’d read that book.  I lived in a slum in Argentina, and everything was going wrong.  People I’d been trying to help were being lost on every side.  Some were lost to terrible decisions, some to anger, and then some were actually killed, tragically, unepectedly. On we worked, trying to hold things together, to save what could be saved, to keep everything from falling apart, and just when I felt I’d performed some heroic feat of self-sacrifice, something new would be needed.  I remember the day someone showed up on my doorstep with a new horrible story (the tragic drowning of a small child), a new desperate request (an all-night wake with a hopeless family).  I remember saying to my husband, “It’s too much.  I don’t have anything left.”  He could only say that he felt the same.

But there was this echo.  It sounds a little silly, but it wouldn’t stop tumbling around in my head.  This:

Shasta had just run, as far and as fast as he could to save himself and his friends and bring warning to the King.  He thought he had made it to the end of his journey.  But he hadn’t.  He had to run more.  No one else had to do it. The others got to rest. It was completely unfair.

Want to know what happens next?

“But all he said out loud was, ‘Where is the king?'”

Just that.  “Okay.  What do I have to do?” And then he ran.

If you do one good deed, your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

Echo, echo, echo.

I carried on.  One step at a time.  Inspired and challenged by a small story I read when I was a child.

Because I remembered the end.  I had seen it all. I had seen him run past endurance, get lost in the fog, nearly fall off a cliff, find himself landed in a battle that was beyond his skills.  I had seen him do the next thing and the next thing  until it all came out the way it was supposed to.

And I recognized with my grown-up mind what I had decided in my little girl heart all those years ago.

I wanted to be a hero like Shasta, and heroes run on.

With the echoes in my head, I ran.

Oliver Tate says that chance ain’t a thing.
“I make my own luck!” says he.
He works hard nine to five,
And he carefully drives
And treats others as he’d like to be.

Oliver Tate has a favorite hat.
He wears it wherever he goes.
But one day there is wind,
It blows off in a spin,
And his head is left bare in the snows.

Oliver Tate has to a buy a new hat
There’s a store on the way to his work
So he goes in one day
To buy quick and not stay
Then stopps short at the sight of the clerk

Harriet Beam says her luck always fails
Her life’s been a pitiful tale
Both parents died young
And she got their weak lungs
She grew up lonely, orphaned, and frail

Harriet Beam had one friend long ago
They lived next door ’til they were ten
Oh how Ollie cried
When Harry’s mom died
Then she moved, never saw him again.

Harriet Beam has to live on her own
So she finds a sad job in a shop
She looks up at the bell
Musters courage to sell
Sees the man stumble as his jaw drops

Oliver Tate marries Harriet Beam,
Gives the happiest toast of his life:
“I wish I could say
I made things end this way,
But in truth, the wind gave me my wife.”

Colonel Jessup was right.  We can’t handle the truth.

We like some truths, of course.  It’s true that no matter how horrible winter is, spring always follows it. (Thank God.) It’s true that we live in a huge world full of beauty.  It’s true that we share this world with an astonishing variety of human beings and other creatures.  We are not alone here.  These are pretty happy truths, universally acknowledged and easy to accept.

But so many truths are much harder to face.  Reality is tough to swallow.

The truth is that we suck.  We’re all selfish and afraid and think ourselves way more important than we are.  We just do.

The truth is that the world is full of atrocity.  People oppress, enslave, rob, rape, and murder each other every day.

The truth is that the planet is indifferent to us.  Tornados, earthquake, hurricanes, tsunamis, blizzards.  They just keep coming and there’s nothing we can do to control it.

The truth is that every single one of us is going to die.  Our lives will end, sooner or later, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

Depressed yet?  Is it any wonder we mostly prefer to lie to ourselves?

We all know the extreme cases. Holocaust deniers. Schizophrenics. People who are convinced that Elvis is alive and they’ve seen him.

But we’re not that bad.  Not the rest of us.  We don’t go that far.  In fact, what we do isn’t even really lying (is the first lie we tell ourselves).  We just…spin.  We refocus.  We ignore.

“I’m not a bad person.  I had to do it.  If I hadn’t that person would have taken advantage of me.  We all have to look out for ourselves.”  True? True, but just because you aren’t rewriting the holocaust doesn’t mean you’re being honest about your own history.

“I am cautious and careful and wise.” True, but still avoiding a bigger truth. If I focus really hard on driving the safest car and taking the most expensive vitamins and keeping scary people at arms length, I can convince myself that I’m safe, that I won’t be touched by the tragedy that touches others.

“I’m so busy.  My work, my family, my charity work, excercise, shopping” True, and good for me for working hard.  What I’m not saying, though, is that if I maintain constant motion, if my mind is crammed full of the details of my life, then I don’t ever have to think about what’s happening to people outside of my immediate line of sight, and I most certainly don’t ever have to think about my own eventual end.

Does that seem too harsh?  I actually feel uncomfortable typing out the words.  Plain speaking is one thig, but this all feels judgmental and negative and really, how helpful is it for me to point out the obvious?

THIS IS WHY I TELL STORIES.

Unlike facts which are so useful for avoiding reality, STORIES ARE THE LIES WE TELL TO HELP US FACE THE TRUTH.

I don’t ever want to write a post like this again.  I don’t want to tell you that it’s easier to ignore reality than stare it down.   I want to tell you a story.

Once upon a time there was a princess who reached the age that her parents decided she should marry.  Being a princess, she was naturally not allowed to choose her own husband.  A member of the royal family had to be suitable.  Her father chose a man for her marry.  He was a prince from the neighboring kingdome, the seventh son, so he had nothing to keep him in his own country.  A week before the wedding, the prince arrived at the princess’s castle.  he looked okay on first meeting, but over dinner, when she tried to talk to him, she realized that he was spoiled, arrogant and more interested in dogs than in people.  Throroughly depressed at the idea of marrying such a person, the princess went for a walk in the garden late that night, weeping.  Just as she passed the pond, she heard a loud croak and a frog jumped out from behind some bushes.  The frog had some vines wrapped around his head exactly like a crown.  Glad to be distracted from her own worries, the princess stared at the frong, thinking how mmich  like a prince he looked and becoming convinced that he must be one under a spell.  Believing that she could undo the spell by kissing the frog, the princess picked up his repulsive fat body, congratulated herself on being able to see past the external to his true heart, and kissed the frog.  Nothing happened.  She kissed the frog again, with more feeling this time.  Nothing happened.  She put all her heart and sould into it and kissed the frog once again.  This time, hating how hard she was squeezing him, the frog leaped out of her hands and disappeared under the bushes again.  With a cluck, her old nanny stepped of the shadows.  She had been following the princess, worried about her extreme sadness.  Now she realized that it was time the princess was told a few things, starting with the fact that the chief characteristic of frogs was that they were completely froggy (and also that they had a tendency to get tangled up in vines from time to time) and ending with the fact that when princes were kept at home with only dogs for company and given everything they ever asked for, they tended to be a bit spoiled and backward.  The princess went home.  She married the dog-loving prince.  They traveled, and he learned to be interested in a few other things besides dogs.  The princess found that she wasn’t completely uunhappy with him.  When the time came, they made a very passable king and queen.  The citizens of their country lived happily ever after, as they would never have done with a frog for their ruler.

Not the finest story ever, I grant you, but way more fun to read than “The truth is that we all are who we’ve been made to be and we may as well accept that other people are, too.”

So yep, I’m sticking to the storytelling.  And I promise the next time I mention the inevitablity of death, it will be a fictional character who dies, so we can all wear sunglasses and squint at it sideways. Some realities are too glaring to take in all at once.

Roly Rabbit hated winter. Winter was cold, which meant winter was boring. All of the rabbits huddled in their den, sleeping in warm piles of snugly fur. His mother said it was her favorite time of year. Roly shuddered. It was nice to be warm and snugly sometimes, of course, but not day after day.

Roly tried to liven things up in the den. He told jokes and turned somersaults (his somersaults were spectacular, as you might have guessed from his name). His father said to settle down, and his mother gave him rose hip medicine to “soothe his fidgets.” Roly hated rose hip medicine. Almost as much as he hated winter.

“Go away,” said his sister grouchily when he poked her in the side and asked to play.

This seemed like a good idea to Roly. He crept up the tunnel of his family’s home and poked his nose up into the frigid air outside. The cold smell prickled his nose and made his whiskers tremble. It smelled like freedom.

Roly hopped out into the snow.

“You shouldn’t be out here, little bunny,” said an owl on a nearby branch. “You’ll slip on the ice.”

Slipping on the ice sounded quite fun to Roly. He tried it. He slipped and slid and careened wildly across the icy meadow. It was fantastic!

“You shouldn’t go this way,” said a passing fox. “You’ll fall into the icy lake.”

Falling into the icy lake sounded quite exciting to Roly. Anyway, he couldn’t really stop himself now. The ice was whooshing him along too quickly. With a final fast flip off the frozen bank, Roly splashed into the icy cold water.

“Don’t go out in the wild wind,” said a fish as it sank down deeper, “with wet fur in the wind, you’ll freeze solid.

Freezing solid sounded quite interesting to Roly. He wondered if his whiskers would freeze, too. Roly hopped out of the lake. His fur instantly iced over in the winter wind. Roly found that it was hard to move his legs. In fact, it was more than hard. It was impossible. Roly was frozen stiff.

“Don’t let those bear cubs play hockey with you,” said a raven flying by. “They’ve been looking for a hockey puck.”

Roly thought being a hockey puck would be very uncomfortable, but at least then he would be moving. He started to yell as loudly as his frozen lungs would allow. Soon two bear cubs came. They thought Roly looked like a splendid hockey puck. They began to bat him back and forth across the meadow. It really was quite uncomfortable. But after a while the friction thawed Roly’s legs, and he was able to hop toward his rabbit hole.

“Don’t go underground!” Yelled the bear cubs. “We can’t follow you there!”

Roly thought it would be very nice if the bear cubs couldn’t follow him. He slipped down the tunnel and into the cozy den where his family lay piled. It was warm and snugly there, and no bear cubs hit him back and forth.

Cuddled up and feeling sleepy, Roly thought back over his exciting day. Maybe winter wasn’t quite as boring as he had thought. Still, he thought maybe he would just rest here and wait for spring.

If my life were a book
I like to think
You would laugh out loud as you read it through
In part from the witty things that I say
But also from mixups along the way
And the weird, funny people I knew

If my life were a book
I sincerely hope
It would sometimes make you want to cry
Because people came close, right up into the heart
To the place that will bleed when it must come apart
And you stand there just wondering why

If my life were a book
I sort of suspect
You’d get angry at points and then hurl it away
Because life isn’t fair and some people aren’t kind
And at times I am lazy and waste my own mind
And you don’t want to read of those days

If my life were a book
I’ll admit I would like
It to often inspire you to go make a snack
In the warm, snuggly evenings of fullness and cheer
As you read of good food and of friends gathered near
You should fill up whatever you lack

If my life were a book
Oh I really do hope
There’d be some shining moments that jolt you awake
Where the miracles happen and magic unfolds
Where corners are turned, victories won by the bold
Your heart pounds and your hands start to shake

If my life were a book
My only true fear
Is for you to feel nothing as you skim its lines
Because nothing much happened and nothing was risked
Your mind wanders as you hide a yawn with your fist
It falls closed and it slips from your mind