All posts tagged life

Abandoned Graves

Before the Revolutionary war, a man by the name of Barnaby Cabe owned some land on a nearby river. After the war, his son built a mill and had 9 daughters many of whom married mill owners along the river. One daughter stayed on the family lands, married and took a new name. Her descendants occupied the land for another hundred years. It’s now part of a state park and just off a neglected path you can still visit the remains of the Cabe family cemetery.

The stones are scattered seemingly randomly and many are canted at strange angles. Trees have grown and fallen. Dead leaves carpet the whole area. The oldest stone markers aren’t even carved. One is a faded and broken slab of sandstone that dates the eighteenth century. There’s nothing about the woods immediately surrounding the graves that indicates that people once lived here – no remains of a household or clearing even. No view of the river. Just a few stones scattered forlornly among the trees.

creepy graveyard 2

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creepy graveyard 3

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creepy graveyard 5

9 Comments
by Evolution of X on February 16, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on February 16, 2013

http://forkinmyeye.com/2013/02/16/abandoned-graves/

Waiting

The only good waiting room is an empty one.

The only good waiting room is an empty one.

I am constitutionally disinclined to wait gracefully. Four of my least favorite adjectives describe why. Waiting is most often passive, public, unpredictable and confined meaning I will be confined to a prescribed area with strangers for an undetermined amount of time during which I will have a very limited range of sessile activities to choose from to pass the time. This makes me batty.

But when you have a family to care for, waiting rooms become an unavoidable evil. Kids have to go to doctors and dentists. Pets have to go to the vet. And, as was the case yesterday, cars have to get serviced. After years of practice, I can usually deal with most waiting rooms now with a travel cup of coffee and a book. Sometimes, though, extremer measures are called for.

How to pass the time in waiting rooms:

1-      Stare surreptitiously at the person sitting in a more desirable spot until they get the telepathic message and relinquish the seat. (Doesn’t work, but worth a try.)

2-      Count the people who are playing with phones, laptops or tablets and compare it to the number of people who are reading books or magazines.

3-      Glare at the rude guy talking loudly on his cell phone until the device bursts into flames. (Doesn’t work either, but I keep hoping.)

4-      Try not to think about how many people have, are or will invade your personal space before the waiting is over.

5-      Try not to think about how many people have occupied the chair you currently inhabit and what communicable diseases they may have carried.

6-      Read the book you brought. If concentration is difficult, pretend to read it so you won’t look like some goober staring off into space.

7-      Stare off into space (until you realize that that “space” is occupied by a person who is glaring at you for staring at them).

8-      Go outside and try to find someplace to pace or loiter unobtrusively at the edge of the parking lot. Go back inside when someone comes out, stands nearby, and lights a cigarette. Cough as you walk by them.

9-      Count the people wearing glasses. Calculate ratio of the total. Count the women with short hair. Calculate ratio.

10-   Glare at the woman talking loudly on her cell phone but do it surreptitiously because she is old enough to be your grandmother and deserves courtesy even if she is an annoying nit.

11-   Wonder how many people are left in the world who are old enough to be your grandparent and how quickly that number is dwindling. Try to calm down after that thought freaks you out a little.

12-   Wonder what on earth could be taking so long. Drum your fingers. Stop drumming your fingers because that annoys people. Realize you are grinding your teeth. Try to stop.

13-   Count the people sleeping.

14-   If you are in the waiting room of a pediatric practice, stare at the fish tank. Count the orange fish. If there’s not a fish tank, spend a few moments wishing there was.

15-   Repeatedly pick up your travel mug to make sure it’s still empty. Sigh loudly when you find that it is. Slump in your seat.

16-   Open your book and stare at it.

17-   Repeat these steps for the length of your wait. Good luck.

Happily, I managed to break my pattern yesterday. I did actually go through all these steps for the first half hour. Except the book. I purposely didn’t bring a book to read this time. I brought a notebook. And after that first half hour, I wrote it all down. That killed another half hour and made my hand hurt. But I felt slightly productive and even enjoyed myself a bit. So I wrote some more. I call that a success.

Your turn. Does waiting make you nuts or do enjoy the downtime? What do you do to pass the time? Do you have Asperger’s, social anxiety or another condition that makes waiting or standing in line (ugh) problematic for you? What do you do about it?

16 Comments
by Evolution of X on February 1, 2013  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on February 1, 2013

http://forkinmyeye.com/2013/02/01/waiting/

Lights of the Outer Banks

Bodie Island Lighthouse was my first. It was a birthday present. No not the lighthouse, though wouldn’t that be cool? The trip to see it, I mean. My partner gave me a weekend at Nag’s Head for my 45th birthday. I had lived in North Carolina for 10 years and never been to the Outer Banks. Of course, it would have been so much cooler if she could have come with me but someone had to stay home to take care of the kids. (We made a family trip a few weeks later.)

This one also has the distinction of having a creepy name, because it is pronounced “body.” After literally minutes of research on the internet, I was unable to determine whether the name of the island (and light) was derived from the family who owned the land or simply from the number of shipwreck victims who washed up on its shores as local legend attests. Since I’ve never been one to let the truth get in the way of a good story, I’m going with the latter.

A few fun facts: It was completed in 1872, is 156 feet tall and its Fresnell lens (more on that here) has a beam range of 19 feet. Since it’s built on the sound side of the island, it’s surrounded by pine trees and marsh, an unusual setting for a lighthouse. Bodie Island was completely undeveloped when the lighthouse was new and accessible only by boat. Even the keeper’s family probably lived on nearby Roanoke Island (where the nearest school was) except during the summer. It must have been wonderfully creepy. It’s kind of creepy now, actually.

The keepers’ quarters serve as a ranger’s office and visitor center for the Hatteras National Seashore. Most importantly, there’s a gift store where you can buy a hat. (I try to buy a hat at every new coastal place I go. It’s kind of a rule.) I believe it’s currently undergoing a major restoration and is temporarily encased in scaffolding.

A few weeks after my weekend trip, my family spent a week at a rented beach house in Avon, one of those tiny villages on Hatteras, and that’s when I got to see my second lighthouse, the granddaddy of all the Outer Banks lights.

At 210 feet, the Cape Hatteras Light is the tallest brick lighthouse in the US and painted like a black and white barber pole. In 1873, the Light House Board decided that each of the lights on the Outer Banks should have their own distinctive daymark or color pattern so mariners could determine their location by day the way flash patterns allowed them to by night. That’s when the Cape Hatteras light got its stripes.

It was built in 1870 to protect one of the most dangerous sections of Atlantic coastline. Just offshore at Cape Hatteras, the warm waters of the Gulf Stream and the cold Labrador Current collide spawning storms, creating the ever-shifting Diamond Shoals and earning the area the nickname, the Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Another fun fact about the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse:  Though it was originally a half mile from the ocean, a century of erosion threatened to topple it into the sea, so they moved it. That’s right. In 1999, while most Americans were busy making dire predictions about Y2K, a company called International Chimney Corp assisted by Expert House Movers of Maryland picked up the monster brick tower (and the keepers’ quarters) and moved them 2,900 feet – more than half a mile.

The lighthouse was open to the public again before the year was out. And, if you have a hardy masochistic streak, they’ll let you climb the 268 steps to the top.

Ocracoke Lighthouse was built in 1823 and stands 75 feet tall, making it the oldest and shortest of the Outer Banks lights. Its daymark is solid white. The original whitewash recipe was a combination of lime, salt, Spanish whiting, rice, glue and boiling water. Because there was a village at the busy Ocracoke inlet, keepers and their families had a social life and their children were schooled in the village.

The photo is a drive-by, or very nearly. It had been a long day, most of which we had spent in line at the ferry landing on Hatteras. Once we finally made it onto Ocracoke, we drove the length of the island, stopped in the quaint little village for an overpriced lunch, and drove by the very full parking lot of the lighthouse without stopping. I later stopped almost in the middle of a narrow road, blocking traffic and got out to snap this picture just before we drove back to the ferry.

Cape Lookout Lighthouse was completed in 1859 and is 163 feet tall. Like the other Outer Banks lighthouses, it was originally a red brick tower, and was painted with its current daymark pattern in 1873. Now I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that the diamond pattern assigned to the Cape Lookout Lighthouse was meant for Cape Hatteras (to signify Diamond Shoals) but the silly nits mixed them up when they painted them. But again, I got tired of trying to verify the facts online (because lately I have the attention span of a gnat), so I’m just going to take it on faith because it’s a good story.

I’d like to say that I took this photo for effect – to show how the Cape Lookout light might have looked to sailors at sea, but that would be a fib. If you saw my last post, you know that this was taken from the shore of the nearby island, Shackleford Banks, which is as close as I’ve managed to get so far.

You can climb this one too – just 207 steps or the equivalent of a 12-story building. Good luck with that. I’ll be admiring it from the bottom (one day).

That just leaves Currituck for me to see. The northernmost light, the one that got to keep its red bricks bare.

Anybody out there have a favorite lighthouse? Favorite short story featuring a lighthouse? (I’m thinking Bradbury.) Cool lighthouse legend? Lighthouse featured in a movie? Lighthouse anecdotes or trivia? Have you climbed one recently (or ever)? Don’t be shy.

16 Comments
by Evolution of X on November 28, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on November 28, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/11/28/2005/

Deserted Island: Shackleford Banks

At the southern end of a 200-mile string of barrier islands off the North Carolina coast known as the Outer Banks is Cape Lookout National Seashore. And at the southern end of that is an uninhabited island called Shackleford Banks. I spent the day before Thanksgiving there with my parents.

The island is only accessible by boat but there are a couple of ferry services on the mainland in Beaufort. Beaufort itself is a cool little town established in 1709. It’s rich in history and very picturesque but its biggest claim to fame (and my favorite thing about it) is the fact the Blackbeard’s ship, the Queen Anne’s Revenge ran aground just off its coast in 1718. The wreck was discovered in 1996 and is the subject of an ongoing archaeological research project.

You can view artifacts from the QAR in the NC Maritime Museum in Beaufort  which happened to be right across the street from our ferry service. So while we waited for our departure time, we got to wander about the museum examining artifacts from straight pins and tiny glass beads to cannon that had been buried under the shifting shoals of Beaufort Inlet for 300 years. To me, that’s a lot of fun and I tried to read every sign in the 45 minutes we had before our boat left.

Our ferry was a flat-bottomed skiff that offered no protection from the frigid late November wind which I thought it was invigorating. My parents looked slightly less thrilled, but 15 minutes of cold wind and spray seemed a small price to pay.

Leaving Beaufort in our wake.

We were plenty warm enough once we arrived at the island and hiked the half a mile through the dunes to the ocean side.

The sound side of the island where the boat dropped us.

My parents hiking across the island.

And when we got there, it was delightfully deserted.

There were just two people on the other side when we arrived and they were just leaving to catch the boat back.

The Gulf Stream passes at it’s closest just off shore here before swinging away to the east bringing with it plenty of shells more common to shores farther south.

I haven’t picked up a Florida fighting conch (lower right) since I was a kid beachcombing in Florida.

A broken queen’s helmet, also not common this far north.

There were also plenty of shorebirds…

…and a lone shrimp boat being swarmed by gulls.

And to my delight, a bonus. To visit the Cape Lookout Lighthouse (and take a photo of it making my collection of Outer Banks lighthouses almost complete), we would have to have taken another, longer boat ride and our mini-vacation just didn’t allow time for both trips. But when I took a closer look at this photo, I realized the Cape Lookout Light is just barely visible on the horizon.

See the tiny tiny lighthouse on the horizon? I say this counts.

And even more delightful, on the walk back across the island, we got to see some of the wild horses that have lived on the island for about  400 years.

Locals say the “banker ponies” are shipwreck survivors. You can find a more detailed history here.

So I’ve added another island to my mental list of favorite places, and I’ll be going back first chance I get.

How about ya’ll? What’s one of your favorite places and why?

14 Comments
by Evolution of X on November 25, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on November 25, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/11/25/shackleford-banks/

Changes in Attitudes

In my last post, I wrote about being diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome when I was 40. I thought it was a good fit and explained a whole lot of things that had always puzzled me. But it didn’t seem of much use so I filed it away in the back of my mind and carried on with my life. I figured I was already an adult and had developed coping skills, flawed thought some of them may be, and had identified and accepted my idiosyncrasies and limitations. I was wrong.

I had a therapist once who had a tough-love kind of counseling style. Sometimes, I would tell her something I had realized about myself, some insight I thought was relevant or important, and she would nod and say,

“Okay. So what?”

I think her point was that insights, or new information, are only helpful if you use the new perspective to effect positive change in your life. She continued to use the phrase on and off throughout our therapy to get me to follow through with my thinking. (Or maybe she was just daydreaming about Wynona Judd and that was just what she said instead of, And how do you feel about that?) But annoying as the habit was, it did lead me to see and accept that self-knowledge is only helpful if you use it.

When I was first told that I was on the spectrum, I thought, Wow. That explains a lot, followed closely by, It might have been cool if people had known that when I was a kid.

Because for 40 years, I was just weird – socially inept, absent-minded, awkward, angry, clumsy, withdrawn, fidgety, nervous, intense, and emotionally immature. From the time I was very young, I was told that I lacked self-control and common sense, that I was too smart for my own good, too timid to make friends and too stubborn to try new things, that I lacked grace and taste, or that I was just spoiled rotten. These aren’t adjectives or descriptions that I picked. They were chosen for me and over time, I suppose I internalized them.

Though Hans Asperger had done his work 3 decades before my childhood, Asperger’s Syndrome didn’t make it into the DSM-IV until 1994, ten years after I graduated high school. (And now the American Psychiatric Association plans to remove it from the DSM-V which will be published next year. But that’s a whole other essay.) So now there seems to be this whole group of adults, including me, who finally have a workable paradigm that makes sense of their feelings and perceptions and behaviors, but it seemed to come a few decades too late.

I didn’t give it much more thought until recently, when my friend, Catherine, retired.

Every once in a while, I meet a person so warm and down-to-earth and genuinely caring, that I suspect right away that they are exactly what they appear to be. Catherine is like that. I liked her instantly – which hardly ever happens for me. (I tend to reserve judgment on new people I meet, because it generally takes me a long time to really assess their character.) So I thought it was particularly fortunate for our family, that Catherine came into our lives, because she is also an adept teacher and communicator, a deeply intuitive therapist, the author of 3 books on autism, and for many years, a member of the team at the Asheville TEACCH center.

Catherine became “our person” at TEACCH. She was on the team that evaluated our son, G, 12 years ago, and became our go-to person when we had questions, needed advice or reassurance, or desperately wanted back-up in IEP meetings at school. She helped teach us how to make schedules and write social stories and to communicate with G through all the struggles from potty training to dealing with bullying at school. And she has the most remarkable smile. When Catherine smiles, I always want to smile back.

So when my partner asked me to be evaluated, I wrote to Catherine. Poor woman. I sent her eight pages of evidence for and against and asked what she thought. She read every word, complimented me on my writing, and said, Let’s get you on the schedule.

One of the things I loved about Catherine was the way she defined autism in her book, Asperger’s…What It Means to Me. Autism, she wrote, is another way of thinking and being. It was a much more affirming way of describing it to our young son than telling him he had a “disorder.” We have never felt that autism is a disease that needs to be cured, never wanted to tell G that he is broken and needed to be fixed. Autism is a fundamental part of who he is. We wanted to help him get along in the world given his different way of perceiving it, not change who he is. And Catherine was the first to give us words to express that.

So when I was evaluated, there were people telling me, for the first time, that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me. I was just different. I didn’t need to be fixed. I think that’s what I couldn’t accept. Our son is a loving, wonderful, unique person and I would never want him to be anybody else. But I had spent my whole life wishing I was somebody else – someone who was laid-back and happy and comfortable in their own skin, somebody people liked, who made people feel good instead of making them uncomfortable. I wanted to be Jimmy Buffett.

But since I couldn’t play guitar or sing (and I don’t care for flip flops or Margaritas), I had just resigned myself to being me and to being unfixable. Catherine changed my mind – by retiring. Because being who she is, she’s not really retiring. She’s just leaving TEACCH and moving on to a new way of helping people on the spectrum.

One of her retirement ventures is TAG: The Autism Gathering. Catherine and another remarkable lady from the TEACCH center in Asheville, Carolyn Ogburn, conceived and launched this project to promote the empowerment of autistic adults.

You can visit the TAG blog right here on WordPress for essays and stories by and about Asperger adults:                                                             http://tagalogblog.com/

For more about Catherine Faherty and how she will be spending her “retirement” continuing to help make the world a better place for children and adults on the spectrum, check out her website:                 http://www.catherinefaherty.com/

And for more information about Tag: The Autism Gathering and the weekend retreats they sponsor, you can visit the TAG Asheville page on Catherine’s site:         http://catherinefaherty.com/tag-asheville.html

If you have any thoughts, stories or questions (or more adorable cat videos, thank you very much Sandy Sue!), please leave a comment below!

7 Comments
by Evolution of X on November 17, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on November 17, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/11/17/changes-in-attitudes/

Asperger’s after 40

via terraforming.com

Six years ago, when I was 40, I was told I am autistic.

My partner was jubilant. Or maybe joyfully vindicated is a more apt description. After years of trying to live harmoniously and communicate meaningfully with me (or even get my attention long enough to try), it was she who had asked me to be evaluated.

As a family, we were not new to autism. We have a son (G) on the spectrum and had learned a lot about the condition in the preceding years. We had spent a lot of time and effort tailoring our family life and our household to his needs.  So when my partner invited me to sit on the back porch with her and have a cup of coffee and a little talk about autism, I naturally thought we would be discussing G.

Until she began with the phrase, “You know I love you, right?” Then there was a significant “but” followed by a fairly comprehensive accounting of mystifying habits of mine that made her crazy. Until, she said, she had a moment of clarity and the pieces finally fell into place. It had been right in front of her all along, so obvious – like the pot and the kettle, she said. Fortunately, unlike our little 10-year-old curly-haired kettle (who was at that moment hopping up and down in front of the Nintendo-altar in his room lost in The Legend of Zelda), I understand metaphors. You want me to be evaluated, don’t you? I said. She smiled at me and nodded.

As parents of an autistic son, we’re lucky to live in North Carolina because we have TEACCH. TEACCH is a program of the University of North Carolina dedicated to meeting the research, training, education, and diagnostic needs of autistic people and their families. There are 7 regional offices, including one in Asheville, where we lived at the time. They offer free diagnostic evaluations for any resident of the state, so when G was four years old and we suspected he was autistic, that’s where his mom took him. And now she wanted me to go, too. I wonder how soon they can get you in, she pondered.

It took a year. But finally my appointment came up. And after all the forms and questionnaires and interviews were done, the team at TEACCH agreed with my partner. Asperger’s Syndrome. I was officially on the spectrum.

My partner was thrilled, because, I think, it gave her a new framework with which to view my behavior. I wasn’t overtly ignoring her. I just really didn’t notice her sometimes. I wasn’t being obtuse. I often really had no idea what she was feeling or why. I wasn’t angry. My face just looks like that when I concentrate. I am not purposefully tactless. I’m just prone to assiduous honesty and not adept at communicating verbally. (As opposed to writing which is much easier and gives me a chance to choose my language carefully. Once I completely lost my voice for almost a month. It was awesome.)

So, my partner finally had a professionally- sanctioned perspective that made sense of my behavior and that came with a set of possible strategies for dealing with it (that we had been practicing on our son for years). She was thrilled.

As for me, it was kind of anticlimactic, really. I thought, Okay that explains a lot. And then I thought, But so what? I’m 40 years old. How does that help me now? So I kind of tucked it away in the back of my mind filed under “interesting trivia” and moved on.

Lately, I’ve been thinking (and reading) more about it. The internet has mushroomed since I last sought out material on autism and now there are blogs and essays and articles by and about autistic adults everywhere, it seems. And many of the authors, like me, didn’t have a name for what they were until they were adults. The more I read, the more it all seemed strangely familiar.

Raising an autistic son, I’m pretty familiar with the condition. But when you spend a lifetime thinking about yourself in certain terms (like socially inept, awkward, odd, or just really freakin’ weird), then you don’t always make the connections. For example, I’ve been fidgety all my life but I’ve never thought of it as “stimming.” I know I suck at multitasking and I am fundamentally inclined to want to dedicate myself to one thing at a time (to the absolute exclusion of all else). But I always thought of that as intensity of focus, not as a clinical feature of autism.

So what do the words I call myself matter, if the result (a functioning me) is the same? I’m finally beginning to suspect the result isn’t the same. I’m starting to accept that there’s a big difference between trying to change some behaviors (or develop certain skills), and trying to change (or disguise) who I am. For much of my life, I saw the latter as my only option.

I did eventually realize years ago that self-acceptance could be liberating, and I have proudly accepted my nerdly traits, my intense all-consuming interests that are often so puzzling to others, my aversion to being social, my retarded palate and other sensory oddities, along with a whole passel of other personal eccentricities. But put them all together and call it autism and suddenly, the pill was too big to swallow.

I’m still not really sure why, but I think it’s time I got over it. I think now that self-acceptance is not only liberating, but necessary for growth. Shedding old labels and redefining myself may be the key to making the changes I want. Even after forty-something years, I suppose I can try a fresh perspective. So I’m going to give it a shot, starting here.

So there will be more to come in the near future about me and autism. Please feel free to jump in and comment if you have anything to add or share – suggestions, thoughts, stories, anecdotes, corny cat jokes. All is welcome.

21 Comments
by Evolution of X on November 16, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on November 16, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/11/16/aspergers-after-40/

Graves in the Garden

Halloween is my favorite holiday. More than Thanksgiving because I can’t cook. More than Christmas because I hate to battle frantic masses to shop on command.

I love Halloween because every year I get to make my own house guest.

His clothes never change but his head often does.

The first year, he was partial to Garfield and Dr. Pepper. By last year, he preferred a real lap cat and black coffee.

After I make the guest, I dig graves in the garden…

…and plant the giant zombie hands.

I bury bones in fresh dirt.

Last year, I tried my new Yoda pumpkin plug-ins and was grateful not to have to scrape out the goo and carve out a face.

And our youngest son is the only one who still dresses the part. He makes his own costumes and creates a character.

This year is still a mystery. I haven’t quite felt the spirit. I haven’t yet chosen the guest’s head or planted the gravestones. Our son has not bought a mask or make-up or cloak. I did drag home a cast iron rendering pot for my partner because every Irish witch needs a cauldron.  It squats on the front porch where the neighbors can see. Maybe tomorrow we’ll fill it with bones.

13 Comments
by Evolution of X on October 26, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by Evolution of X on October 26, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/10/26/graves-in-the-garden/

You Better Not Tell: Best First Lines of My Favorite 20th Century Novels

Once, in another life, I went to college – four of them actually, in three different states where I studied a variety of subjects, got disillusioned or distracted, dropped out, moved, got a another crappy job, quit and went back to school, until finally, in 1996, after 12 years of false starts and changes, just after my 30th birthday, I got a big piece of embossed paper that says, basically, that I’m rather good at reading.  It’s not a particularly useful degree, but it was fun to get.

Because I love books. I love everything about them. The weight of them in my hands, the smell of aging paper, the lure of the cover art or the mystery of a battered, jacketless hardback; the crackle of brittle glue when you open an old text; the marbled or illustrated endpapers; the arcane details on the back of the title page; chapters with names or numbers or introductory quotes; epilogues and intriguing prefaces, and all those lovely pages filled with words in every permutation imaginable. Books are my drug, and I’ve been a junkie since I learned to read.

So here’s another post about books – in particular, their first lines –  a follow-up to my last post about the novel beginnings of some representatives of my favorite genres, science fiction and horror. This time, I’m focusing on any novel that I’ve read and enjoyed that was published in the century of my birth.

(Some of my favorite novels didn’t make the list because their first lines weren’t all that catchy. And some of the best first lines I’ve read didn’t make the list because they were the beginnings of short stories. Not to short the short story. As a literary form, I tend to agree with Edgar Allen Poe who once called it the ideal device for telling a story, superior to the novel in delivering a singular punch. But this is a list of novels. So here we go.)

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”
The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath
 
“You better not tell nobody but God.”
The Color Purple (1982), Alice Walker
 
“I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
Out of Africa (1937), Isak Dinesen
 
“My wound is geography.”
Prince of Tides (1986), Pat Conroy
 
“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway
 
“Time is not a line, but a dimension like the dimensions of space.”
Cat’s Eye (1988), Margaret Atwood
 
“We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.”
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), Margaret Atwood
 
“I bought Mother a new car. It damn near killed Aunt Louise.”
Six of One (1978), Rita Mae Brown
(I have to cheat at least once per list, so I included these two sentences that could have been one.)
 
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of a fleshy balloon of a head.”
A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), John Kennedy Toole
 
“Mildred hid the ax beneath the mattress of the cot in the dining room.”
Mama (1987), Terry McMillan
 
“Novalee Nation, seventeen, seven months pregnant, thirty-seven pounds overweight – and superstitious about sevens – shifted uncomfortably in the seat of the old Plymouth and ran her hands down the curve of her belly.”
Where the Heart Is (1995), Billie Letts
 
“The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum.”
The Joy Luck Club (1989), Amy Tan
 
“Millions upon millions of years ago, when the continents were already formed and the principal features of the earth had been decided, there existed, then as now, one aspect of the world that dwarfed all others… a mighty ocean, resting uneasily to the east of the largest continent, a restless ever-changing, gigantic body of water that would later be described as Pacific.”
Hawaii (1959), James Michener
 
“No one remembers her beginnings.”
Rubyfruit Jungle (1973), Rita Mae Brown
 

Now that I look at the list I’ve assembled, I’ve realized every one of these books had a powerful effect on me for one reason or another, the quality of the prose, the circumstances of the author’s life, the elements of the story and how it was told, and, always, a connection to my life. I remember when, where and why, I read each and how I felt when I read it and what I loved about each. So I guess these are very personal choices.

Do you have books like that? Did you ever read a favorite book of a friend or partner to get to know her/him better? Ever read that first semi-autobiographical novel of a poet or writer to try to see how she ticked? Ever fall in love with an author who can write more eloquently than you about a passion you share? Ever feel grateful to an author for expanding your world? Yeah, me too.

So let’s talk. Tell us about your personal books (with great first lines or not).

23 Comments
by Evolution of X on October 4, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in bookworm
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Posted by Evolution of X on October 4, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/10/04/you-better-not-tell-best-first-lines-of-my-favorite-20th-century-novels/

Far Out: Best First Lines of Sci Fi and Horror Novels (that I Think You Should Read)

The modern American reading public has the collective attention span of a stressed-out, sleep-deprived gnat with ADD. At least, that’s what conventional wisdom would have us believe. English teachers, editors and published writers all seem to tell aspiring writers every day that they’ve got to hook readers with the first line or they’ll lose them. Disgusted editors, they are told, will fling their manuscripts disdainfully into the slush pile if they’re not captivated by the opening lines. As a member of the reading public, I find these assumptions vaguely insulting.

And a little true – though I tend to give an author a few paragraphs or pages before I make any summary judgments about his or her skill. So I don’t require that a “hook” be buried in that first line to keep me engaged. But I have to admit, I love a good opener.

So here are a few of my favorite first lines from my two favorite genres, science fiction and horror. Not only are these intriguing sentences, but each begins a book that I would highly recommend reading. See what you think:

 “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
1984, George Orwell
  
 
 
 
“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
 
 
 
 
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.”
2001 – A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke.
 
 
“It was a pleasure to burn.”
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
 
 
 
 
 
 
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.””
The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien
(Okay I know this is two sentences but it could have been one and it’s one of my favorite openers.)
 
 
 
 
 “No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream.”
The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson
 
 
 
 
 
 “The story so far: In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams
(Two sentences again, I know. But it’s my list and I can cheat if I want to.) 
 
 
 “First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys.”
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
 
 
  
 
 
“My name is Odd Thomas, though in this age when fame is the altar at which most people worship, I’m not sure you should care who I am or that I exist.”
Odd Thomas, Dean Koontz
 
“Sam Vimes sighed when he heard the scream, but he finished shaving before he did anything about it.”
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
 
“Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening Hall, taking care to keep to one side, out of sight of the kitchen.”
The Golden Compass, Philip Pullman
 
 
 
 
  
 
“The terror, which would not end for another twenty-eight years – if it ever did end – began, so far as I know or can tell, with a boat made from a sheet of newspaper floating down a gutter swollen with rain.”
IT, Stephen King
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
“The year that Buttercup was born, the most beautiful woman in the world was a French scullery maid named Annette.”
The Princess Bride, William Goldman
 
  
 
 
“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”
War of the Worlds, HG Wells
 
 
 
 “The regular early morning yell of horror was the sound of Arthur Dent waking up and suddenly remembering where he was.”
Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams
(Nobody opened a story like Douglas Adams.)
22 Comments
by Evolution of X on September 28, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in bookworm
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Posted by Evolution of X on September 28, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/09/28/far-out-best-first-lines-of-sci-fi-and-horror-novels-that-i-think-you-should-read/

Parenthood: The Job You Can’t Quit

“Okay, that’s it. I quit. I don’t want to be a parent anymore. I’m pretty sure I suck at it. All my kids are going to end up in therapy, and I’d just rather go hiking really.”

(via pictures funny16.com)

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably been here, right? You’ve had those days when you were just so discouraged that you couldn’t see a way through the tangled morass of hope, fear, fleeting joy, worry, doubt, and dread that is parenthood. It’s a colossal task, being a parent, and one for which we are all are, ultimately, woefully unprepared. We all start off as amateurs, sometimes little more than kids ourselves, who suddenly become responsible for other little human beings. And because there is no rule book or fool-proof training, child-rearing occurs largely on a trial and error basis.

The only models we had (some of us) are our own parents. But they raised different kids in a different world that bore little resemblance to the one currently filled with constant electronic stimuli and shadowed by the threat of a dystopian future. Because kids are, by definition, changeable, capricious, and often downright cheeky, they won’t make it easy for you. Just when you become an expert on your particular kid, he/she will change. Kids do that. They grow, they develop, they…gulp…enter puberty, and then all bets are off. So some days, I just want to know, Who the hell decided this was a good system?

Here I am trying to make decisions on a daily basis that are going to affect the development and future potential happiness of our children, and I’m guessing! Most of the time they are educated guesses, sure, based on past observations of said child, the experience of other parents, and often, extensive reading. (I’m a researching kind of girl and we have kids with autism and OCD.)  But when it comes down to it, every decision is a judgment call, an educated guess at best, and one that is very often swayed by how much or little patience I’ve got left for the day. And lately, I’ve got to say, the reservoir is pretty darn low. I’m thinking about rationing, but I can’t figure out how to get my family to go along.

And that’s where I run into my other little problem – raising a child in the context of a family. It’s complicated! Everybody has needs, and they don’t always spread them out so that you can deal with them one-by-one when you are well-rested-and-emotionally-prepared. That’s not the way life happens. No, life likes to descend on you like a shit-storm of need, nausea and broken appliances. It’s failing grades and juggling bills and used Kleenex and muddy paw prints on the spread you just washed. Life happens in your face, when you least expect it, or when you honestly think the very next thing will be the last straw. You know what happens when you have that thought? Something awful, usually. (At least in my experience as I interpret it in my current frantic state of mind.)

Life is like someone calling your name over and over, but they never come to you. You must seek out the caller and carry out their commands. Can you get me a towel? I don’t understand my chemistry homework. Will you get those dogs to stop barking? I’m stressed, I’m nauseous, listen to my problems, fix it, fix it, fix it! It’s like being a genie with a house full of sadistic wishers. And just when you think you have a handle on it all, when you have put your house in order, walked the dogs, and anticipated and prepared for every child (and partner’s) every need – life will surprise you. It will wait until you have done your very best, until you are sweaty and dirty and proud of yourself, and then it will walk up, wag its tail, look you right in the eye – and then hike its leg and pee on your shoes.

So this is where I would probably be expected to add a paragraph about how it’s all worth it in the end and how the joys by far outweigh the stresses. And yeah, that’s true, though I’m not feeling it so much at this particular moment. Because we all know, you have to work for that attitude. So this is my first step – writing it down. It’s therapeutic. Then I’m going to go have a cleaning frenzy all over my house, because that’s what I do when I’m stressed and don’t know what to do next. (I already had a cleaning frenzy on our yard last evening and may have been a bit too vigorous with the weed-eater and gardening shears. I’m a little afraid to look.)

So after I’ve obsessively put our house (and yard) in order for a few hours, I will be sweaty, tired, satisfied in a way only a career house-not-wife can be after a day spent cleaning, and happy to see my partner and our children when they get home this evening. And we are going to have a happy and fun Friday evening together with lots of hugs and positive affirmations. But until then, I’m going to go bleach something.

13 Comments
by Evolution of X on September 21, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in coolest beans, humor, kith & kin
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Posted by Evolution of X on September 21, 2012

http://forkinmyeye.com/2012/09/21/parenthood-the-job-you-cant-quit/

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