Thank Goodness for Pirates

I was very grateful for pirates yesterday.

It was my afternoon at the hospital and I had brought along my Kindle to continue reading the book I had been reading the last time I worked.  This is a book written by a friend of mine.  He has written several books and I am embarrassed to admit I had not read any of them.  I finally read one a few months back and it was OK, but I had some complaints, mostly that there were so many characters that it was like reading an American version of "The Brother Karamazov" and I couldn't keep them all straight.  This resulted in my not really caring about any of them and since the action that kept you reading didn't happen until about 2/3 of the way into the narrative, the only reason I kept reading was to see if it would ever happen at all.  

But I heard his latest novel is getting some "buzz" and so I decided I would read that, and it is on my Kindle, though I am finding that I am having the same complaints I had about the last one about this one too.  When you have several families and each family has several children and you write about each of the children, it's nearly impossible to keep them all straight.

But nevertheless, I am plowing through it.

At some point, I hit something, I don't know what, on the Kindle and it jumped back to the beginning of the book.  No problem; I would just go to the last page read, only it didn't know the last page read.  No problem.  I would go to the table of contents and see if I could guesstimate where I was.  No table of contents.  I stymied until I remembered that I had read a particularly delicious quote while reading and had marked it so I could find it again.  It was "there were enough peg legs in town back then you'd think the town was a retirement home for pirates."  That tickled me, so I did a search for bookmarks I'd made and voila!  I was back to where I left off, just a few pages later.

More than one way to skin a cat.

So I was able to continue reading the book as I worked at the Information desk yesterday afternoon.  As usual, it was mostly uneventful, with a couple of moments of business.

Two women came to the desk.  As usual they were late for their 1 p.m. appointment, arriving t 1:15 with no idea of where to go.  They were there for a birthing class, mother and daughter, neither of whom spoke English.

I checked with the birthing center, but there was no class going on.  I called information who had no information about a birthing class.  I called Women's Health (my old office) and got caught in voice mail hell, the end of which was "leave a message and we'll return your call."  I tried calling the clinic, which is a separate office on the other side of the parking lot.  I didn't want to send them over there, with the pregnant lady in such shape.  But there, too, the best I got was a voice mail telling me to either call 911 or leave a message.

Then I checked their referral slip and saw that they had been referred from the mother's OB in Woodland, so I called THAT office.  The phone was answered by another recording, this one telling me that just by virtue of my calling that number, I had won a special vacation somewhere and the guy went on for so long explaining what I had won that I hung up.

At some point a woman came along who spoke Spanish, so at least she could interpret.  We finally decided to send them to the clinic after all, since that seemed the most logical thing to do and off they waddled across the parking lot.

I immediately went to the iPhone App store and downloaded Duolingo, determined to try and learn a little Spanish!

Then along came a guy from some Latin country who explained that his wife had finished her courses in pharmacology and was looking for an internship with a pharmacy.  I explained that we didn't do internship and that our pharmacy was very small, but he was adamant that he wanted his wife to have an internship and he wasn't interested in her going to Sacramento, where she would be more likely to find an internship, but wanted it HERE.  He asked "How many patients do you have -- a couple of thousand?"  I told him that if we were full, we had 50 and suggested to him that he go to the med school at the university.  He wanted to know if there was a hospital at the university and I explained that their hospital was in Sacramento, which brought us back to his insistence that she had to do her internship in Davis, despite the fact that there was no facility for her.

Finally, in desperation, I checked the phone number for Sutter's pharmacy and gave that to him and sent him on his way.  I'd love to know what he was told when he called.

At night we went to see a production of a Neil Simon play.  We are going to see God of Carnage tonight, another comedy.  "Two comedies and a funeral," Walt quipped, since we are going to a memorial service on Sunday.

We sat at a table with a nice couple.  Walt introduced himself to the man and explained to me that he had been his boss.  Turns out Richard Rominger served for eight years as the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Agriculture under Bill Clinton so technically he was Walt's boss, several steps up, and that explained why he didn't have a clue who Walt was.

We settled in to enjoy the play, Rumors, which I have since read is one of Simon's funniest comedies, so I'm thinking maybe it wasn't a very good production since all four of us were ready to leave at intermission.  I thought it would be an easy review to write, but it's not going to be.  This is a company that gives the term "amateur" its true meaning, people doing it for the love of it in a tiny town so I always try to be more gentle with their reviews.  As I said, this one is going to be tricky.

The Goldfinch

The reading selection for my new book club was Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch," a hefty 775 page book which I'd been reading for the month.  I had a little over 100 pages to go on Monday and read until I couldn't stay awake any more, so went to sleep.

When I woke up at 5, instead of going back to sleep I started reading again and finally finished the book (rushing through the last pages) by 7 a.m., which was just in the neck of time, since I had to leave for Char's house and the book club meeting around 11.

It's an odd book and what I said in my review of it was that I had a love-hate relationship with it, since it seemed almost like it was four different books and there were sections I hated and sections where the writing was so beautiful, I reveled in it, much as I do with Steinbeck or with Pat Conroy's "Prince of Tides."

The story is about a painting by Dutch artist Carel Fabritus, who painted it in 1654.  It hangs in the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague.  In the book, young Theo is visiting the Metropolitan Museum (in New York) for an exhibit of Dutch Masters when there is an explosion that kills his mother.  Theo survives and in escaping the museum, he takes with him the small painting (it is about the size of a piece of typing paper).  He's not sure why he takes it, but his mother loved the painting and it is his connection to her.

Interestingly, I discovered that while I knew this was the last painting Fabritus did, I didn't realize that he was killed in an explosion.  I'm sure this must have inspired the author when she started working out her plot for the book.

It's an odd painting for us since it shows a goldfinch chained to a post by a little chain around its leg.  Apparently keeping finches as pets like this was popular in the 1600s.  

 

It was so much fun having a group of people to discuss this book with, since everyone had such interesting things to add. It's a book about damaged people and how they cope with life.  Sadly, much of the coping has to do with drugs...massive amounts of drugs...and I did get tired of the drug taking, which dominates one section of the book and is very much a part of the rest of it.  Two people in the book group hated that so much they didn't finish the book.  But I'm glad I stuck with it to the end because there was a fairly satisfying resolution.

I think I'm going to enjoy this group since I love discussing books and it's nice to find a group of people who enjoy discussing them too.

Of course I'm kind of an interloper in the group, since it is run through the San Ramon public library and technically I'm supposed to be a resident of San Ramon to attend.  In fact, when the leader asked for my email address yesterday, I gave her my gmail account rather than my Davis account.  Char says she's going to let her know that I'm really not from San Ramon but doesn't think she will care, especially now that I've been there for two meetings.

On the ride home, I had my Harlan Coben book to listen to, which was good because there was bumper to bumper traffic for a good part of the trip and audio books always make times like that much more palatable!

I really don't know what people do without books.

An ELEPHANT Never Forgets

Today ended up being completely different from what I anticipated.  The plan was to take my mother to lunch with her friends in San Rafael again, to celebrate another birthday.  To my amazement when I called to make sure she was awake she remembered that we were supposed to go out, but she was not feeling well...said she "ached all over" and that she didn't feel like going anywhere.

Of course I worried about her all day, but when I called in the afternoon, she felt just fine and didn't remember feeling bad in the morning.  The woman is a constant enigma.  I admit that the thought crossed my mind this morning that she might have claimed illness because she didn't want to go to lunch, but we'll never know.

With the day stretching out ahead of me, I got a couple of letters written and then sat down 'for just a minute' to read a bit more of the book I'm reading, "Leaving Time: A Novel," by Jodi Picoult. My friend Pat said she had it on her old Kindle and thought I'd like it, so she was willing to loan me the Kindle (since she has a newer one anyway).  I started reading it on our way down to Santa Barbara and could see instantly why she thought I'd enjoy it.

The story is told from the point of view of four people -- 13 year old Jenna, whose mother disappeared under suspicious circumstances when she was 3 years old, Virgil and Serenity the retired detective and the psychic she hires to help her find her mother, and Alice, the mother, an elephant researcher whose observations of elephants, in Africa and in the sanctuary in the U.S. that she ran with Jenna's father, make up a huge chunk of the book.

Well, it was the familiar old story ...  Yeah, I know I have stuff to do and I'll get to it after I read just. one. more. chapter.  It was so interesting and gripping that I finally just gave up and decided to read until I finished.

I took a brief break to make bread again (yes, I remembered to add yeast), which is about ready to come out of the bread maker as I write this.

I also had to stop at 4:30, with only 10% of the book left to read, so I could watch the streaming concert from Berklee that Jeri had told us about.  Unfortunately, I could get the stream, but the speakers to my computer are terrible and I missed everything that the faculty said, but remembered to plug in my headphones and at least heard the students in concert, even if I wasn't sure exactly what I was hearing.

 

Oooo....bread just came out of the bread maker.  Looks beautiful.  Smells better.

More than Petticoats

Today was a good day at Logos.  I like the days when we have lots of interesting (and some quirky) customers, but today it was dead as a doornail.   I think I made fewer than 10 sales in the four hours I worked (and one of them was me!)

But I was able to find an interesting book that was the right length to complete while there in the store (and I did).  It was called "More than Petticoats: Remarkable California Women" by Erin H. Turner.  (Apparently "More than Petticoats" is a series of books about women in various states around the country.)

The author sets out to debunk the common saying about talented women "imagine what she could do if she had been a man." "The women who were chosen for this book are remarkable because they are women, not in spite of it," she writes.

I was hooked from the first chapter, which tells the story of Mary Ellen Pleasant, whom I remember hearing about, growing up in San Francisco as "Mammy Pleasant," and only knew that there was something negative about her.   Apparently the scuttlebut about her was that she was a "Voodoo priestess", a baby stealer, a baby eater, a multiple murderess, a madam, a lying, conniving, and cunning, schemer."  How far from the truth!

It turns out she was called "the Mother of Civil Rights in California" from work begun in the 1860s, her achievements went unsurpassed until the 1960s. Pleasant was once the most talked-about woman in San Francisco. When other African Americans were rarely mentioned, she claimed full-page articles in the press. Her dramatic life was part of the story of slavery, abolition, the gold rush, and the Civil War; she helped shape early San Francisco, and covertly amassed a joint fortune once assessed at $30,000,000. She became the business partner (and perhaps more) for wealthy Thomas Bell and lived with him and his wife for many years until his death, after which Mrs. Bell accused her of murdering her husband and sued her for the home that Pleasant had designed for the family.

She died, penniless, in 1904, but finally got public recognition in 2011, when a memorial was dedicated in Sonoma.

(if you can't read it it says "mother of civil rights in California)

The book goes on to give thumbnail sketches of people like Sarah Winchester, heiress to the fabulous Winchester rifle fortune.  She was the woman who built the Winchester Mystery house, which I have wanted to tour for decades.  I learned the back story (which includes the death of a child and then her husband.

Isadora Duncan is in there.  I never thought of her as a California woman, but apparently she was born here, though she didn't really achieve fame until she moved to Western Europe and later Russia.  American audiences weren't ready for her scantily clad modern dances.

There are several other lesser known women, but eventually you get to Mary Pickford, who really helped create the movie business as it exists today.  With her tiny stature and bouncy curls, she was playing young girls into her 30s (sounds like Gilbert & Sullivan tenors!)

The book ends with the story of documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, who took the definitive photo of the Depression.

She was born in New Jersey but she died in San Francisco at age 70.   She said that contracting polio as a child, which left her with a weakened right leg, led to her pursuing a career in photography because of feeling shy and self-conscious around people. 

It was really uplifting to read this book and realize that there were women in an era where "women" seemed to do little but take care of the house and raise the children, accomplished great things.

Kinda makes me think of congress this week.  Some male congressman interviewed today pointed out that it was the men that caused this mess and it took the women to bring an end to it.

Yay for us!