Friday 56: The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

From Storytime with Tonja and Friends

Rules:

* Grab the book nearest you. Right now.
* Turn to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post that sentence (plus one or two others if you like) along with these instructions on your blog or (if you do not have your own blog) in the comments section of this blog.
*Post a link along with your post back to this blog.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

It was not just a bad headache; it was a cerebral hemorrhage, and Liz was dead before morning.  Liz died on the twenty-sixth of November.  The funeral was on the twenty-ninth:  my birthday. 

~The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle

Cover of The Summer of the Great-Grandmother

I had this book sitting by the computer waiting to be reviewed -- with lots of little strips of paper sticking out where I found phrases or paragraphs I especially liked.  It's a work of non-fiction about the summer L'Engle's mother died.

My world is not the world of L'Engle's family -- children eating dinner separately, trips to the Continent, summer houses, hanging out with the Empress of France or General Custer, owning a house with a marble privy designed by Thomas Jefferson -- but nonetheless I can identify with some of her thoughts and experiences. 

L'Engle came to my college when I was a student there.  I attended her lecture, but remember very little -- mostly an image of a scarf -- so I guess it was winter -- but I don't know if it was her scarf, mine, or my friend Steve's.  I've read more of her writing in my last 15 years than I did in my first 20 and wish I had the opportunity to hear that lecture all over again -- I think it would mean something different to me now.

Some more snippets I wanted to share...

I realize, with a pang, how privileged we are to be able to keep my mother with us.  This is how it should be, but what would I do if we lived in a tiny home and did not have the girls and Clara to help?   . . .  And even though we have room, and the girls to help us, there are still those who think that my mother should be put away.  Put away.  Everything in me revolts at the idea.  But my belief that we are supposed to share all of life with each other, dying and decay as well as feasting and fun, is being put to the test. (p 28)

. . . I do not think that a house can be a happy house if no one has cried in it, if no one has died in it.  If this seems contradictory, I can't help it.  I rebel against death, yet I know that it is how I respond to death's inevitability that is going to make me less or more fully alive. (p 23-9)

I'm much more use to family and friends when I'm not physically and spiritually depleted than when I spend my energies as though they were unlimited.  They are not. (p 46-7)

The mother of my childhood and adolescence and very young womanhood existed for me solely as mother, and I suppose it is inescapable that for a long time we know our parents only as parents, that their separate identity as full persons in their own right unfolds only gradually, if at all. (p 88)

If I have to conform to provable literalism I not only rebel, I propose immediate revolution.  How do I make more than a fumbling attempt to explain that faith is not legislated, that it is not a small box which works twenty-four hours a day?  If I "believe"for two minutes once every month or so, I'm doing well. (p 142)

I prayed very badly in church yesterday.  I often pray badly when I try to say my prayers at home.  But if I stop going to church, no matter how mad church makes me, if I stop praying at home, no matter how futile it sometimes seems, then "real" prayer is never going to come.  (p 144)