Tag: Gone with the Wind

The ultimate reading experience: when your real life setting jibes with (or opposes) the one in your book

September 10th, 2013

In general, my memory is pretty terrible. I remember books; I remember their stories, their characters, whether I enjoyed the work or not. But I rarely remember details of the circumstances under which I read them: where I was sitting, what was around me, the physical, sensory scene in my real life.

But sometimes the universe conspires to give you the ultimate reading experience, putting a book in your hands at the exact time and place you will be able to experience it to the fullest. Sometimes the words on the page interact with real life in a way that sets a scene you will remember for a lifetime, bringing literature to life so vividly that the story is impressed into your reality, forever:

‘Salem’s Lot, by Stephen King: I was a young teenager when I went through my Stephen King phase. My family lived in a large house on a small island off the coast of Georgia. At the time there were only a few houses on the island, and our road was dirt, not asphalt. We were a twenty minute drive from the mainland (ie a hospital), if there was an emergency. We were isolated. My room was on the second floor, and I had a white day bed with brass knobs on the corner posts. My bed was pushed up against the window, so that when I propped my head against the pillows to read, my body lay inches from the glass, my face in the center of the single four-foot pane. On the other side of the glass, a few feet from the house, swayed a cabbage palm, its moppy head at eye level with my bed.

One night, I stayed up late eating King’s pages. My blinds were closed (Duh! Of course I closed them. I was reading ‘Salem’s Lot), and I came to a scene where a vampire hovered outside a window, tapping, seeking entry into the home. My heart pounded, my eyes darted to the glass a foot from my face, and then there came a quiet screeching on my window, like fingernails on a chalkboard. Screeeeeech. Screeeech. I threw the book down and jumped out of bed, my chest heaving, until I rememberd, “The palm fronds” (pant pant), “It’s just the palm fronds.” With each skritchy squeak on the window, my heart thumped dangerously. I envisioned the vampire floating there, only inches away, his fingernails sharpened to better scratch the glass, his smile twitching because he could smell the vigor of my fresh, pulsing blood. I have never been more terrified while reading. I think I may have hidden the book, or removed it from my room, but the screeching continued all night. Even now, twenty-something years later, when I go home and hear the sound of palm fronds on glass, I think of ‘Salem’s Lot.

Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell: I was once traveling and got delayed in Atlanta for several hours – maybe six or eight? I had brought with me the 32-pound hardcover of Gone With the Wind, and with so much time on my hands, rather than sit in the loud and bustling Atlanta airport, I decided to take the Marta train downtown to Centennial Olympic park. I lugged Mitchell’s tome with me and found an outdoor table at a café where I could watch kids chase bursts of water shooting up from the ground in the Centennial park fountain. As I read with my huge book splayed flat on a black iron café table, the moist Georgia heat pressed down on me. Condensation from my icy Coke trickled down the cup and pooled, then dripped onto the sidewalk below. I didn’t understand Atlanta, this city that seemed to be both South and not-South, with its messy tangle of inelegant roads and its fast pace and its strange mixture of old and new that I rarely experienced in coastal or rural Georgia. For four hours I sat with my dripping cup and I turned pages. I read the city – it’s pre-Sherman heyday, its burning, its invasion by outsiders, the fierce pride and dignity of its natives, reconstruction’s disregard of the South’s ways, of gentility, and Atlanta’s in-your-face rise from the ashes – on the pages of Mitchell’s book as in real life I breathed its air, drank its Coke, and listened to the laughter of its children, finally, through a work of fiction, understanding the history of this proud city that rose and fell, and then rose to what it is today.

Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris: (There are, um, a few F-bombs in this piece. Consider yourself warned.) Though it wasn’t the first time I read Me Talk Pretty One Day, my most memorable reading took place in Minnesota where, in the Mom circles I ran in, I never heard a single swear word (much to my dismay). I sat in the bleachers at the ice skating rink where my daughter wobbled back and forth in her lessons, the paperback in my lap, and I read “The Rooster,” a story about David’s brother, Paul, who “politely ma’ams and sirs all strangers but refers to friends and family, his father included, as either ‘bitch’ or ‘motherfucker.” Paul’s response to his father’s various lectures was, “‘Fuck it,’ or on one of his more articulate days, ‘Fuck it, motherfucker. That shit don’t mean fuck to me.”

The story was absolutely inappropriate for the wholesome ice rink setting, which added to its hilarity, and I tried to stifle giggles while moms chased toddlers around me. Children ran laps on the metal benches to hear the tinny clank clank clank of their feet on aluminum just as I got to the line where Paul says, “Some motherfucker told me to get the fuck out of his motherfucking face, so I said, ‘Fuck off, fuckface,’” and I laughed the kind of laugh that when you try to keep it in, it builds until your face contorts, and your shoulders shake, and tears are streaming down your face and you can’t see because your vision is blurred and you have to close the book before some nice non-swearing mom asks you what you’re laughing at. (This is not the first time this unsuccessful laughter-containment has happened to me. See: Lost Balls). Once my eyes were dry again, and I felt I could go on (because this is possibly the most fun I have ever had reading a book), I finished the story, which ends with “an enormous Fuck-It Bucket – a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars, [because] (‘When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.’)” and I was simultaneously pleased and horrified to have the laughing fit happen all over again when a small child fell and hurt his knee, and I felt bad for him, and I thought, that poor kid needs a Fuck-It Bucket.

What about you? Have you had an ultimate reading experience?
Chasing fireflies in rural twilight

May 28th, 2013

The sky above turned slowly from azure to the delicate blue-green of a robin’s egg, and the unearthly stillness of rural twilight came stealthily down about her. – Margaret Mitchell

I’m reading Gone With the Wind again, and it is making me homesick for the red clay of middle Georgia, where our family traveled from our marshy home on the coast to visit Grandaddy and Nannie on their farm.

Compared to the flat lowlands of southern coastal Georgia, the rolling hills and deciduous forests of central Georgia were like a different country to me. Where we had low, always-green live oaks, dripping with gray beards of Spanish moss that swayed in the breeze, and our hills were bridges over tidal rivers, middle Georgia had tall trees – hickories, and scarlet oaks – that cast cool shade in summer and were stripped bare as bones in winter, and the land undulated like knees under a green blanket. Where we had sandy soil fit for cabbage palms and saw palmettos, they had rich red clay that yielded emerald crops of corn and cotton.

Where we had the ocean, they had the swimming hole. Or the yellow lake.

In summer, when our cousins came down from Virginia to Eatonton, the small town in North-to-us Georgia where Grandaddy and Nannie lived, Uncle Clayton and Aunt Dot hosted a pig roast at the lake. Aunt Dot’s hair was teased up into a blue-black beehive, and her hands clicked with rings and lacquered nails. She always brought bags of candy for the kids, and she doled it out to us in secret, away from our parents. She’d pull a piece from the bag and say, in her honey drawl, “Here you go sugar,” and she’d smile with her bright red lips and wink.

The kids ran around in 1980’s neon bathing suits while our parents sipped beer from pull tab cans. They sat in a circle around a bubbling pot-bellied cauldron. The black stew pot was big enough for a small child to climb inside. While we splashed in the silty lake, or slapped mosquitoes in the shade as we played Monopoly in the bed of Grandaddy’s silver pick-up, they drank Budweiser and stirred Brunswick Stew. They took turns with a paddle that looked like a sawed off canoe oar, and they stirred for hours, passing the wooden scull clockwise around the ring.

After tending the pig – a whole pig, head and all – on the spit in his homemade cinderblock barbeque pit, Uncle Clayton would amble over to the pot to check the progress of his stew. He’d stand over the cauldron that came up to his thighs, then look over his shoulder for Aunt Dot, who was grinding meat, or prepping potato salad, or laying plates, or icing her Coca-Cola cake. When he felt safe she wasn’t looking he’d block her view of the kettle with his body, pull a bottle of Tabasco from his overalls, waggle his eyebrows, and dump the whole bottle of hot sauce in.

“Clayton, don’t you make that too hot!” Aunt Dot hollered from the dessert table.

As a kid, I didn’t care much about the food. Well, except for Aunt Dot’s cakes. But I remember the fun and freedom of a day at the lake with the cousins. The adults relaxed and laughed in their grown-up conversations while we ran from swimming, to pick-up truck, to digging worms, to fishing, always drinking cold Coke from shiny red cans and eating Aunt Dot’s secret candies.

At the end of the day, we rode back over to Nannie and Grandaddy’s house, drowsy in the bed of the pick-up as the truck rose and fell over rolling hills. At their house, we barely went indoors, except maybe to change clothes, before we retired outside on the front porch to feel the sunset. Drained from the day, we were lulled into quiet. As twilight descended, the only sounds were the creak of the porch swing chain, the gentle thump of rockers on porch planks, and the rising chorus of katydids. Ice clinked in glasses and heads leaned against the top rails of rocking chairs.

And then, the squeal of the first cousin to see a firefly pierced the revery. Nannie gave us jars as we jumped off the porch swing. The empty bench swung wildly while the chain screeched its surprise. We – my brother, our cousins, and me – ran down the green hill, chasing lightning bugs in rural twilight, in the magic freedom of childhood.

It’s easy to romanticize the Georgia of my childhood now that I’m grown. I remember the lake with fondness, and the front porch with a nostalgia that aches. Nannie and Grandaddy, and Uncle Clayton, they’re all gone now. The cousins are all grown. As an adult, the red clay and green hills of Georgia still grip me, but they are not a part of my life anymore except in memories, and visits that are too short, and too seldom, and too adult to feel magical.

For the next week, though, while I lose myself in Margaret Mitchell’s glorious prose, my heart will sing for the land I grew up on, and I will miss Georgia. Gone with the Wind will move me with the beauty, and the memory, and the magic of my home.

Tag: Gone with the Wind

The ultimate reading experience: when your real life setting jibes with (or opposes) the one in your book

Chasing fireflies in rural twilight