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.memo to self.

Don't Answer Me - The Alan Parsons Project

If you believe in the power magic,
I can change your mind
And if you need to believe in someone,
Turn and look behind
When we were living in a dream world,
Clouds got in the way
We gave it up in a moment of madness
And threw it all away

Don't answer me, don't break the silence
Don't let me win
Don't answer me, stay on your island
Don't let me in

Run away and hide from everyone
Can you change the things we've said and done?

If you believe in the power of magic,
It's all a fantasy
So if you need to believe in someone,
Just pretend it's me
It ain't enough that we meet as strangers
I can't set you free
So will you turn your back forever on what you mean to me?

Don't answer me, don't break the silence
Don't let me win
Don't answer me, stay on your island
Don't let me in

Run away and hide from everyone
Can you change the things we've said and done? 

.when I was a child everybody smiled/nobody knows me at all.

Thought for the day: Revisiting childhood via books and writing is a pretty good way to get back to feeling right within myself, or so I am finding. Back to that in a bit. First, I am officially counting the book blog as D.O.A, sadly. I'm just finding I don't have much time for two blogs/finding guest bloggers for To Grow On. But on the bright side, it means that I can stop saving all my book-related posts and just write more about reading here. Alright. So be it. I'm a writer, this is my personal blog and my life revolves around books in many ways, so I might as well include snippets about them here.

That said, I've actually been reading - in hard copy, anyway - a lot of unpublished stuff lately. A friend's novel here, a writing group member's latest chapter there, you know? One newer participant in my Sunday group is working on a middle grade fiction novel that is really very charming and in one scene, one of the youthful protagonists over-packs his suitcase in anticipation of a trip to Morocco. And that's where I track back to my opening comment: children's fiction + me = feelings of nostalgia, some reminiscence of what I have been missing inside myself lately. To put it more concretely, I had this flashback - a recollection of my own childhood and summers in near-coastal North Carolina.

That's hurricane season for the uninitiated. While the threat to us, in our seventy-something-miles-inland town, was not terribly severe (the scariest hurricane that ever hit us while I lived in N.C. just left in its wake a soggy backyard and some down tree branches, though a few years after I left, friends and family survived the damage caused by Isabel), I remember feeling terrified as a child. The house would go dark, but not like night-time - more of an eerie, greenish darkness that dulled everything to shadow. Then the rain would begin in heavy bursts, shaking the house and pelting the roof with rocks, branches and sometimes hail. It would be impossible to see out the windows with the rolling water and steam. The wind would howl through the gutters, vents and whatever tiny crevices it could sweep through.

As long as there wasn't a power outage, my father would keep the TV tuned to whatever channel happened to deliver the most information on the storm. More often, though, since we did not have cable (read: The Weather Channel) in our home when I was growing up, my dad would just curse a lot and then tell my mother to turn on our weather radio. Shivers would run along my spine as a staticky, disembodied voice would announce how long we'd have to endure the storm while my parents argued and gave each other serious looks.

And so my brother and I created our own coping mechanism, one that makes me snicker now: we were so worried at the imagined threat to our lives, home and possessions that we began to gather our most precious items. Our stuffed animals, books, records (yeah, I'm that old). We'd take them and make piles, then sit with them. In the event of actual danger, I'm not sure what we thought piling them up would do to save them. But we would keep watch, gathering them into my brother's bedroom closet - a huge (length-wise) walk-in - because somewhere I'd heard that closets were safe places to go during storms (though I wonder now if that was for tornadoes). When the storm passed, we'd put them away.

It's such an innocent, simplistic solution to the fear of losing everything. Such a child-like thing to do. Probably the same thing that would drive a kid, going to a foreign country and away from all familiarity, to pack up everything he could imagine missing. It's just such a genuine scene and it makes me happy to have witnessed it in this work-in-progress.

As for the reading of published works, it's mostly been audiobooks for me lately with the minor exception of a book called Fast French to help me brush up on my parlant français (don't ask me if I am saying that right - I'm still not that good). I just finished a re-read (via audiobook) of Middlesex and now I am back to the Millennium Trilogy.

And that's all the update I have time for today. More soon, my lovely readers.

5 x 5, or It's Never Too Late In The Year To Make Resolutions.

Do you ever get to a place where you feel like your day...week...month requires a do-over? Ever feel like things are really stagnate and you have a hard time getting excited about things you might have been very excited about several years ago? I'm there. I have been there for too embarrassingly long now. I feel like my life has gotten off track, despite all the evidence that says I am well on my way, at least, to being back on track. So I had this idea of mapping out a few small, not overwhelming goals designed to snap me out of it (if possible - sometimes I wonder if it is, but that's an awfully pessimistic, not very proactive stance to take and thus one I am resisting because, really, yuck). Feel free to copy the idea for yourself; I've divided my rest-of-the-year goals into five sections with five goals per section. Why five? Because it's a very small number and it makes these goals seem possible - that's all.

1. Five Books To Read - Well, knowing me, I will certainly read more than five but these are five books I've always meant to read that I will finally get around to:

1. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn - Betty Smith
2. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (yeah, sue me - she's the only Bronte sister I've never read a book by and she was the one who wrote the most and lived the longest!).
3. Geography Club - Brent Hartinger 
4. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe - Carson Mccullers (one of my favorite writers, so why the heck haven't I read this?!)
5. The Puttermesser Papers - Cynthia Ozick, because she's my most wonderful recent discovery and I need to read more of her stuff.

2. Five Movies To See:

1. Un Couer En Hiver - Emmanuelle Beart  (*swoon*) and Daniel Auteuil (pretty much my favorite French actor)
2. Raise The Red Lantern 
3. The King's Speech
4. Bringing Up Baby
5. Black Swan

3. Five Things To Do:

1. Go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show at Music Box. Ok, so I went to the Wilmette one. Same thing.
2. Ride a bike for the first time in years!
3. Go somewhere on the Metra.
4. See a movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center.
5. Visit a neighborhood I've never really spent time in.

4. Five Dishes To (Learn To) Make:

1. Quiche - I assume it's similar to making a frittata but...different.
2. Moussaka 
3. Scones!!!
4. Something with summer squash - maybe this!
5. Bubble & Squeak, just because I like the name of it. 

5. Five Places To Go:

1. The Garfield Park Conservatory
2. The Field Museum (nope, I've lived in Chicago all these years and have never been).
3. The Northshore Sculpture Park - Kathy and I drive by it whenever we are headed to Evanston, but I'd really like to walk through it and see the sculptures up close. I don't think that's too much to ask.
4. The Bean - I've never been by it, haven't had my obligatory stretchy-reflection picture taken by it. 
5. Virginia/North Carolina - Sometime this year (obviously not when I am in school), I would like a trip back to my roots. I haven't seen my sister, nephews or my few friends there in about five years and a visit is really overdue.

Fairly easy. Let's see how it goes.

In Honor of National Poetry Month...

The Harold Washington Library is having their annual Poetry Fest on April 30th and you can find other relevant events listed at ChicagoPoetry.com.

Books & Birthdays – Celebrate Everywhere, Everyone!

For various personal reasons, I've decided to keep my birthday low-key this year and not have any sort of gathering of my own. However, in celebration of my birthday, I have a request of everyone I know, everywhere. I have spent a good portion of my time lately, when not thinking about the things closer to home, mulling over books and more importantly, indie bookstores. I believe that with the new reading technology – Kindles, Nooks, etc. - that more people are reading afterall and that's exciting. But booklovers...well, see, we love books. Physical objects with pages to turn and ink to sniff. And what's more, we love our bookstores. With the decline of the chain bookstore at hand, I've been contemplating the state of independent bookstores a lot lately – those places not built by corporations but by people with the same passion for books that I have, people who had a dream. While I believe that most indie bookstores cater to the community more than chain bookstores and that their connections and niches will keep them alive, I worry sometimes that I am being too naïve and idealistic holding onto that reasoning. It is due to this concern that, for my birthday (April 23^rd), I would like everyone with the means to support an independent bookstore. Namely, my favorite independent: Women & Children First in Chicago. Even if you don't live in Chicago, you can create an account and have books shipped to you (“Look ma! It's just like Amazon!” - only not).

Of course, supporting ANY indie bookstore, anywhere, would be wonderful. And everyone, everywhere reading great books would make me ecstatic, too. So bonus points if you can do all of the above.

Besides posting this blog, I am also making this a Facebook event over here – so if you are inclined, even if you are not my Facebook friend, you can “attend.”

xoxo,

Louise