Sophia Serve

Oh, the Flood Stories!

Everyone has one. Or more.

Since raising my hand and becoming involved with coordinating volunteer donations and efforts in our post-Irene central Vermont White River Valley, stories have been piling up in my overburdened brain. In between emails and phone calls, I grab my iPAD and read Ann Patchett’s wonderful little book about writing. In The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life, she says, “Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of imagination for the stark disappointment of words.”  That’s what I face daily. How can I possibly describe in my weak and disappointing words the stories I’m hearing.

“I think the beach the river left around my property is beautiful. All that sand!”  Right. Until you discover how toxic that sand/river silt is. Hasn’t she heard about all the propane tanks broken loose and spilling into our rivers? And all the topsoil Irene ruined?

“It’s safe to drink the water,” says one local small town’s manager in the town where I’ve done some phone answering as a volunteer. But I know better from people’s stories. Take the woman who said, “No way! Even if you boil it there’s scummy stuff floating on it.”  Or the man leaning on the doorway, obviously totally exhausted, saying, “Our water smells like gasoline—even when I boil it.” And then later a FEMA guy with some chemistry background reacted to that account by saying, “Get the EPA here now! That water contains (followed by a lot of four syllable chemical terms totally new to me!) and boiling makes it worse—it could explode.” However, I think the EPA's busy--and underfunded. Or maybe cut altogether by now. This guy has to solve this on his own.

I heard another heartbreaker while volunteering in the local food pantry the other day:  “I need bottled water.” We’ve got a lot of it—help yourself, I tell her as I volunteer to play Grandma while she shops.

“My baby had very bad diarrhea until I started making her formula with bottled water.”  “We’ve got lots of water for you. Please use it—for everyone in your family.” The Red Cross has delivered mountains of water (not to mention all the other federal sources of water lately) but getting it to where the baby’s formula is being made is a whole other challenge, given that many are trapped in unpassable roads. Nor do people want to leave what little they have left to get out to see what’s available to them. Thankfully we haven’t heard about much looting, but lots of people are taking pictures! Also, we live in a very independent culture where few care to ask for help. Oh, just so you know. I saw the baby, smiling and happy several days later.

One of my favorite stories appeared just yesterday: “Karen, my neighbor needs a yurt-he can use what’s left of his house if he dries out the lumber over the winter to rebuild, but he wants to live on site.”  Ever tried to find a used yurt? I did hear about one from a friend who knows the area very well and he told me “But it’s gone now.” Then last night a young woman told me about a group of great teenagers from our nearby Sharon Academy who are headed to Maine next weekend to learn how to build yurts. They’ll bring back their knowledge and muscle to help. Problem potentially solved.

But we continue to scour the area for temporary places for people to live. We know there are vacation homes all around and we know people are eager to help, but coordinating all that seems to be beyond anyone’s expertise, time or energy right now.

During the hot weather following the flood, a friend of mine had to abandon her car, walk several miles, and became very dehydrated. She spent the day with an IV hookup in one of the truly wonderful makeshift clinics that sprang up immediately (thanks to area hospitals and medical disaster experts.) She’s in Massachusetts now wondering how to get her car back.

“Can you get our volunteers and road crews Gatorade? All people have is water to drink—that’s great, but they’re getting sick of it.” "Can you get us some juice?"

Fortunately we have a system in place through our Episcopal churches in Vermont and the “angels” in White River Junction can fill our requests as fast as we can send them.  My learning curve on what people really need (gas cards!! or even a car!) and what will be nice to have later (furniture when they have a place to put it) has spiked this week.

This morning I got an e mail asking for water testing kits!

I’d heard from my new “best friends” at a huge Feed Supply outlet that those kits which are usually just given out, are in very short supply. So I wrote to my new contact at Dartmouth Medical who immediately wrote back, “Where do you get water testing kits? To which I responded. “Beats me. Do you know any chemists? Or plumbers?” She wrote back: “Okey dokey.” And I suspect, knowing Mary as little as I do, I’ll hear of some water testing kits coming our way soon. Towns that even have health officers might not have them.

The stories just keep piling up. Some don’t actually shatter my heart. I’ll leave you with two. A friend still stuck on Stony Brook Road, the worst road in Stockbridge, is one of the few who has internet access. So every day he prints out the latest news/town directives and posts them on his barn for neighbors to read as they walk by.  A 90 year old woman needed medical attention so the neighbors put her in a sidecar of an ATV and bounced her several miles to their town green for a helicopter to medivac her to the closest hospital. She was heard to say, “I’ve never had so much fun in my entire life.” 

I hold her close to my “living beauty of imagination.”  Just as I hold Gabriel who had to leave his lost pet bunny when the family ran to safety in Bethel. After the flood, they pushed the kitchen door open and there was Gabriel’s bunny perched on the topmost kitchen counter. Who knew bunnies had such faith? Or that they could swim to safety? I later tearfully watched as Gabriel’s house was hauled away. But I smile when I remember his bunny.

 

Sweetness at the Bottom of my "To Read" Stack of Books

If you're still contemplating writing your first novel and you're thinking, "I'm too old for this!" don't despair. The Canadian author, Alan Bradley, did it last year it at 70. 

He was writing a detective novel when suddenly a  young girl appeared whom he later named Flavia de Luce. His old detective character was in a remote driveway and there she was...just sitting on a campstool with a pencil and notebook. He asked her, "What are you doing?" and she replied, "“Writing down license plate numbers.” He said, “Well, there can’t be many in such a place,” and she said, “Well, I have yours, don’t I?” 

Bradley says he had no idea who this cheeky girl was and where she’d come from. Characters do that to writers from time to time. Flavia turns out to be eleven with a passion for chemistry (mainly poisons) and solving mysteries. She first appeared  in Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie and then in The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag.

She's a precocious little thing. And a philosopher to boot. Flavia was born around the same time I was so I can identify with many things including her first encounter with a fuzzy-screened black and white TV set. But I was long past eleven when I stumbled on her insights about such things as death. "It's a masquerade--and so morever is life," she says in in the second book. That's the book in which she also offers these insights into brain gender differences.

"Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by  heavy-footed dray  horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.

But the female  mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it 'woman's intuition.'"

How can you not love Flavia de Luce? And Alan Bradley for birthing her. He describes Flavia as embodying “a kind of hotly burning flame of our young years: that time of our lives when we’re just starting out, when anything—absolutely anything!—is within our capabilities.”

The next one is set to be downloaded to my IPad, so don't call me on February 8th. Flavia and I will be much too busy to talk.

 

 

Words, Words, Non-Words

It's not easy being married to "Mr. Language Person," as my sons and I call my husband, John. (Especially if you're as word-challenged as I am.) Crossword puzzles are his meat and potatoes. He eats Jeopardy for dessert. My cousin and I have never forgiven him for trying to score with "nexor" at Scrabble. Challenge!

Thanks to a friend who just sent me an article from UK's Tribune, I can now counter with some non-words of my own. Well, not exactly mine.

Who knew? Ever since J.R.R. Tolkein was editor of the Oxford English Dictionary around 1918, they've been keeping "non-words" in a vault. Actually it's fifty dusty file cabinets. You see, once a word gets into the OED they can't really get it out again, so they're careful. Nevertheless, non-words have leaked out and I'm about to share some with you so unfold your Scrabble boards. I discovered my husband nearly "wibbled" when an officer caught him "pregreening" once. And isn't "locavor" a real word? See what you think of a these OED's vaulted candidates:

Accordionated – being able to drive and refold a road map at the same time

Asphinxiation – being sick to death of unanswerable puzzles or riddles

Blogish – a variety of English that uses a large number of initialisms, frequently used on blogs

Dringle – the watermark left on wood caused by a glass of liquid.

Dunandunate – the overuse of a word or phrase that has recently been added to your own vocabulary

Earworm – a catchy tune that frequently gets stuck in your head

Espacular – something especially spectacular

Freegan – someone who rejects consumerism, usually by eating discarded food

Fumb – your large toe

Furgle – to feel in a pocket or bag for a small object such as a coin or key

Glocalization – running a business according to both local and global considerations

Griefer – someone who spends their online time harassing others

Headset jockey – a telephone call centre worker

Lexpionage – the sleuthing of words and phrases

Locavor – a person who tries to eat only locally grown or produced food

Museum head – feeling mentally exhausted and no longer able to take in information; Usually following a trip to a museum

Nonversation – a worthless conversation, wherein nothing is explained or otherwise Elaborated upon

Nudenda – an unhidden agenda

Oninate – to overwhelm with post-dining breath

Optotoxical – a look that could kill, normally from a parent or spouse

Parrotise – a haven for exotic birds especially green ones

Peppier – a waiter whose sole job is to offer diners ground pepper, usually from a large pepper mill

Percuperate – to prepare for the possibility of being ill

Pharming – the practice of creating a dummy website for phishing data

Polkadodge – the dance that occurs when two people attempt to pass each other but move in the same direction

Pregreening – to creep forwards while waiting for a red light to change

Quackmire – the muddy edges of a duck pond

Scrax – the waxy coating that is scratched off an instant lottery ticket

Smushables – items that must be pack at the top of a bag to avoid being squashed

Spatulate – removing cake mixture from the side of a bowl with a spatula

Sprog – to go faster then a jog but slower then a sprint

Sprummer – when summer and spring time can't decide which is to come first, usually hot one day then cold the next

Stealth-geek – someone who hides their nerdy interests while maintaining a normal outward appearance

Vidiot – someone who is inept at the act of programming video recording equipment

Whinese – a term for the language spoken by children on lengthy trips

Wibble – the trembling of the lower lip just shy of actually crying

Wurfing – the act of surfing the Internet while at work

Wikism – a piece of information that claims to be true but is wildly inaccurate

Xenolexica – a grave confusion when faced with unusual words

Feel smarter now?

Words to Ashes

“Burning libraries is a profound form of murder, or if self-inflicted, suicide.”

Stewart Brand The Clock of the Long Now.

Destroying books is murder. I've believed this ever since I earned my very own first book in second grade. Pinnochio. I got it for reading the most books that year and it’s still here on my shelf. Intact. If someone had burned it, part of me would have gone up in those ashes.

But alas, far too many books are not safe, including those in Baghdad and throughout Iraq. A Baath party professor of medieval history said, “Our memory no longer exists. The cradle of civilization, writing and law have been burned. Only ashes remain.”

Our soldiers may not have deliberately torched Iraqi libraries, but we certainly didn’t protect them—and of course there were those bombs.

I learned a lot about how we humans have systematically destroyed books from Fernando Baez in A Universal History of the Destruction of Books From Ancient Sumer to Modern Iraq. The Romans had a process called “damnation of memory” and practiced “libricide” the destruction of written records of the people they subdued.

Every time someone thinks only his ideas are valid and only his culture is correct, books get stacked in public squares and torched. Or hung onto the people who wrote them and burned along with the author. Or burned and the ashes dumped into rivers.

Paul burned books in Ephesus. Vikings burned books at Lindisfarne. Ghengis Khan burned mosque libraries. Catholics burned Cordoba's library. The Dominican Savonarola burned Florentine books. Spaniards burned Mayan codices. Pope Leo burned Martin Luther's books. U.S. soldiers burned Toronto's parliament and legislative library. The British burned the Library of Congress. Anabaptists of Munster burned Catholic libraries. Joseph Goebbels organized the Nazi burnings in 1933. And some “strict-thinking” people today burn Harry Potter just as they burned Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath a few years ago.

Why? What is it about reducing memories to ashes that we as human beings find so compelling? The disturbed man who burned Artemis’ temple in Ephesus believed “He who destroys perseveres.” That’s one clue. But it goes more deeply than that. Baez offers this: “When man destroys with fire, he plays God. It reduces the spirit of the work to matter and ash.” Ray Bradbury vividly painted that concept in Fahrenheit 451.

The Sumerians believed in the supernatural origin of books. They came from the Goddess. Scribes prayed before and after inscribing words onto clay. Soon collections of clay tablets piled up in temples. Egyptian scribes went to the “House of Life”—the library—where they unrolled what the Divine had to say. Book burning, just as cutting down Her sacred groves, may very well be an intentioned attempt to rape and eliminate all aspects of Her.

Thanks to Baez, I now have a new heroine. Her name is Wiborada. In 926 she was living in a Swiss monastery appropriately enough called St. Gall. One night she had a dream that her beloved library burned. She buried the books, the Huns came, she was killed and mutilated but her body was later found spread out over a mound. The mound was excavated and her precious books were found. Whole and safe.

Clay, stone, wood, papyrus, parchment, paper, computer bytes. We put our words down to capture who we are and what we believe and until those words turn to ashes or a hacker erases them, we know who we are.

And it behooves us to remember, as Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821:

“Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”

Tell Me Why

A SophiaServe reader alerted me to this wonderful song composed and sung by

Declan Galbraith in 2006 when he was thirteen. It's worth hearing and watching.

 

The Writer's Prayer

Last night I was invited to our local library to host a conversation around the collection of quotations about writing that is now finally published. It's not been without its trials. Pulling 6,000 quotations together around twenty questions wasn't just time consuming. It was exasperating. Even though both my  husband and I proofed it--several times--errors crept in like little gnomes playing tricks on our eyes. I used to caution authors I worked with to steel themselves because no book is perfect. What made me think my books would be any different? But discovering them in front of strangers undresses you. There you are. Naked.