In which I concede that e-books are sort-of OK...

Several years ago on this blog I presented an argument against e-books, vowing that I would never use them. But during this pandemic, e-books (and audiobooks) have been a godsend.

That's because the local library is still closed to the public. To borrow a physical book, I have to order the book online, then wait for the librarians to find it on the shelf (at whichever library it is available) and notify me. I then must make an appointment to pick it up within whatever timeframe they have available, sometimes days away. The library leaves the borrowed book(s) on a table in the alcove, in a paper bag with my name on it. 

When I borrowed a book this summer on how to learn Korean the whole process took a couple of weeks. And it turned out to be the wrong book. Without being able to browse it on the shelf (or see previews of it online), I hadn't realized that the book used a Romanized Korean alphabet, when the whole point was that I wanted learn to read Korean.

Last week when I wanted to borrow The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, I merely had to go to my phone, open the Libby library app and request to borrow it, and download the audiobook to the app, which took maybe ten minutes. I was given 21 days to read it. After a few days, when I wasn't feeling Tom Hanks's narration, I checked Libby again and found an e-book copy available and was able to download it in under five minutes to my iPad, so I could read it with the Kindle app. (I sat up last night, well past midnight, to finish it). I sent back both versions of the now-finished book this morning via the app, and now it's available to the next readers on the list.

So I don't think e-books are evil anymore. They serve a purpose. But I don't want paper books to be entirely replaced with them. When my iPad battery runs down, poof, the book disappears. Meanwhile, all the paper books I own sit placidly on the shelves.

Gardening, listening, creating quiet monuments of narrative experience

Aunt Lydia (from Hulu's Handmaid's Tale), haunts my garden

During the pandemic I've been gardening--a lot. There's really nowhere else to go but my backyard anyway so I might as well be growing salad vegetables and getting rid of the weeds.

After I bought two pairs of overalls to work in, I discovered that I could put my phone in the front breast pocket and listen to podcasts and audiobooks from the library. (Before I had struggled to listen with wireless earbuds or a bluetooth speaker I lugged around the yard). I didn't realize how much time I was spending in the yard until I listened to all of The Golem and the Jinni (500+ pages), followed by Becoming by Michelle Obama, and The Testaments by Margaret Atwood--all in a couple of months time. And that was between listening to different podcasts.

An unexpected consequence is that I now associate certain areas of my yard with specific characters or stories. My strawberry patch is now the Aunt Lydia strawberry patch (I think of her and her perhaps justifiable cruelty when I am in there weeding or picking berries). The new patch of grass that, it turns out, happens to be the dimension of two side-by-side cemetery plots now brings to mind Chang and Eng (from listening to Mo Rocca's Mobituary on the original Siamese twins, while I sowed it). And the stone and brick sidewalk I've been putting in reminds me both of the Southside of Chicago and NYC at the turn of the century...

These are quiet tributes created not as statues or anything permanent, and which only I can see. It makes me realize that anywhere we are, wherever we walk, there is probably one of these silent monuments of experience, whether lived in actuality or through words. There may be multiple monuments, multiple experiences, all on the same patch of land or in the same place. Aunt Lydia's monuments may be found on bus seats or city sidewalks or bedside tables. A stairwell, a flower, a patch of earth, may evoke Michelle Obama's voice because that's where you or I were when she told us about her life.

My garden is filled with plants and with memories of places to which I've journeyed through the sound of voices coming out of the bib of my overalls. It may look like I am growing only lettuce and parsley and tomatoes, but I am also growing memories. Small miracles, freely given, voices emitted from a phone that seldom rings.

While reading Cheryl Strayed's Wild...

1.
I am listening to Wild on audiobook in my car. Like the people in those Audible ads, I am immersed in the book. I may appear to be driving, but I'm hiking hot stretches of the Pacific Coast Trail or rounding an icy bend balancing the weight of my pack. I push on to the next goal post by pushing my foot on the accelerator, driving further in an hour than what Cheryl Strayed walked in a day. I'm only running errands, yet I emerge from my car feeling I've accomplished something akin to a hero's journey.

2.
As I drive and listen, I contemplate the question: why did Strayed keep hiking after her toenails fell off? After her pack bruised and skinned her? After she nearly died of heat exhaustion and thirst? Most people would have quit when the first toenail turned black or after the first encounter with a rattlesnake.

But the answer is in every line of the book. She didn't quit because she had nothing else. No home, no other destination, no one needing her to be somewhere particular. Just desperate determination, and the trail ahead.

Maybe it's desperate determination that separates good artists/singers/actors who acquiesce to careers that pay the bills and push their art to the side, and those who  continue to create because they must. Without desperation, a lot of art wouldn't be made or made visible.

3.
Her hike isn't entirely a fantasy for me because I, too, have hiked in California mountain and desert. I, too, have stuck out my thumb and gotten rides along quiet roads and busy highways there. At one time in my life, almost all of my possessions could fit into an external-frame Kelty backpack. I had no ambition but to see new things and talk to people in different towns. I wanted the world to be my education.

4.
It's funny typing this, on a Mac computer, in my house in Maryland. Now all my possessions would fill a large moving truck or two. The Kelty backpack is long gone, traded for money or gas to someone in a town left behind. Just as Cheryl Strayed eventually got off the trail, I, too, moved on to my life. After an off-and-on relationship with college, I finished my degree at about the time I quit hitchhiking and long-distance hiking. Now I rarely see the wilderness and hike only on well-worn trails.

It is without much nostalgia that I think back to being young and hiking in the heat of the Mojave Desert, or camping on high, snowy ridges in Southern California. I don't want to be that unrooted young woman again, yet I'm enjoying being reminded of her/me as I listen to Wild.

5.
Perhaps every life is a hero's journey, getting from there to here, and we don't recognize it as such. Even ambling we can reach our destination or create it as we go along.