Moving On©

 

I wrote that last post hurriedly, because it has been something in my brain for a while, but is becoming less and less true. To put it bluntly, sorrow has not found a comfortable home in me. It just doesn’t take. It festers like a sore for a little while then gets bored and moves on.

I am a woman of action. If I’m dissatisfied there is only so long I can talk about it before I fix it. College is getting more bearable and I’m finding myself again. I’m learning not to take everything so seriously. Rather than worrying about whether or not my acting dreams will come true, I’ve returned to my original assumption that they will. That idea is much more comfortable to wear. For me, success is much easier to visualize than failure.

My writing and sense of humor have abounded in the college atmosphere. So I’m working on that. Everyone here is kind of a characature. Every interaction fodder for the digital, word-processed tomes. The awesome, multi-lingual, super-cultural roommate. The professor on pot. The girl in the dorm who lacks awareneess, hygene, and the ability to contribute to a conversation. The lecturer who’s name must be something like Mabel or Fanny or Beatrice. People that the school must have let in on accident, because they are  so very very dumb. A lecturer who emphasizes key points with volume rather than inflection. The TA who cares. The TA who doesn’t. The professor who thinks he’s the coolest guy in the world. The professor who is the coolest guy ever, but has no idea. The kids with bikes who wouldn’t hesitate for a second at the prospect of running over a pedestrian. The skateboarders who eat pavement daily. The couple of (what are obviously) freshman who thought it would be a really great idea to bring a Razor scooter to college. The tailgaters. The party dorm. The students who only speak Chinese. The Jesus-freaks and televangelists. The sorority girls. Oh the sorority girls… The frat boys who don’t drink (a new species of man!?). And a plethora of others that find themselves in the unedited novel that is the college experience.

I finished Cider With Rosie and it was perfect. It was so wonderful. Please read this book. It is officially my favorite book of all time. The author, Laurie Lee (a man) somehow made murder a charming winter occurance and grandmothers the most vicious of creatures. He made a woman with an aversion to cleanliness, a propensity for lateness, and an assortment of profoundly deep personal losses the source of the same feeling that one gets from watching a two year old boy play with a new puppy. Cider With Rosie defies description and may be the best kept secret of modern literature. Imagine if Angela’s Ashes inspired you to cry with joy at every point without the novel without changing a single part of the plot. Imagine Joni Mitchell with the same impact but without the sorrow. Imagine The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more exciting and without any of the adventures. Imagine wishing that you could eat sentences. Imagine a world without cynisism or optimism. Reading Cider With Rosie was like reading high tea, a French impressionist painting, or an independent film. Better yet, reading Cider With Rosie was akin to being five years old and eating a piece of candy made by the candyshop owner while you walk home alone down a trail within a field of wildflowers on the English countryside, alive yet drowsy in the late-afternoon of Springtime.

If and when you buy the novel, do your best to buy the version published by Random House as a one of the “Vintage Classics.” It has a picture of a curly-haired toddler superimposed of a field of golden wheat.

Here are some quotes from the book, to spark your interest.

Rather than an acknowlegment section or a a prologue, Lee writes the note, “The book is a recollection of early boyhood, and some of the facts may be distorted by time.” – This clues you into the fact that this may technically be an autobiography, but in reality is the voice of the countryside.

The opening sentence and first paragraph:

I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

     The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was a knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

  Off page 19:

He talked something of battles and of flying in the air, and it was all wonderful to us…He was no man from these parts. He had appeared on the doorstep one early morning, asking for a cup of tea. Our Mother had brought him in and given him a whole breakfast. There had been blood on his face and he had seemed very weak. Now he was in the kitchen and with a woman and a lot of children, and his eyes shone brightly, and his whiskers smiled. He told us he was sleeping in the wood, which seemed to me a good idea. And he was a soldier, because Mother had said so.

READ THIS BOOK!

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