So I did the Friday Five thing and I totally left out the names of novels that I truly love. It's so hard to come up with a list like that, anyway. But I was looking at sunnflower and a couple of things there jumped out at me. By the way, she likes children's books, too.
It seems I overlooked Jane Austen. Now, I never read Jane Austen back in the English major days, because I was some sort of modern-literature snob. That olden English stuff, I wasn't into that. I swooned over Hemingway and Steinbeck and Joseph Heller. (Although I was the only person I ever knew who liked Silas Marner.)
But then I wanted to see the movie Sense and Sensibility when it came out, and I got it in my head that I head to read the book first. No idea why. I read the book. The first page was rough-going. By the third page, I was laughing out loud.
It was magic, it was wonderful! It was so funny! Within the next three weeks, I read EVERYTHING Jane Austen wrote. Well, now they do all kind of run together in my head. But every one of them was great.
And somehow I forgot THE influential novel of my life. Unexpected, perhaps, but here it is: Little Men, by Louisa May Alcott.
Why Little Men? I read it before Little Women, for one, so it was my introduction to the March sisters. I didn't meet them as girls, but as women. Jo was the kind of teacher I wanted to grow up to be. Her home was her school, and she taught each child according to his or her own needs. She saw each one as an individual human being, and special. I loved that about her. I wanted to live in a big house and make it into a school and teach a small group of wonderful children there. Sometimes when life in a public high school gets too strange, I think about Jo March and her husband, Professor Bhaer, and what being a teacher really is supposed to be.
*******
I've been spending the last week going through everything in my father's apartment with my sister, sorting clothes, knick-knacks and everything else into boxes for taking home, giving away, throwing away. Probably due to a peculiar incident in our childhood (my grandmother died, my aunt accused my totally honest father of taking her share of money, even though she knew otherwise, he stopped speaking to her for the rest of their lives), Sibs and I know that there could not possibly be a thing worth fighting over. We know and believe this with all our hearts.
But the very day after he died (now ten days, can't believe that), we remembered his wedding ring, and wondered what we should do with it.
"We should both be able to have it," I said.
"We should make two rings out of it," she said.
We looked at each other, and knew that together, we had come up with the answer. The next day we took it to a jeweler, who actually cut the ring into two half-circles, and then closed the circles, leaving us with two very tiny rings that look just like Jack's wedding ring. We picked them up today, and are wearing them on chains around our necks.
And since I already wear Shirl's ring, it means that one day my two girls will each get one: Grandma's wedding ring for one, Grandpa's for the other.
It's good.
