Baby Honey died yesterday. “Baby Honey,” an apparent misnomer, as she was the sovereign grown-up and her temperament was not an easy and recognizable sweet. Baby Honey was a strong, old-fashioned, hat-wearing, proper, church-going, God-loving woman. And yet, as I mine memory, I realize that her name is indeed fitting, for thoughts of Baby Honey are inseparable from the sweet, verdant scent of Easter Sunday.
Posts in "Thoughts" Category — Page 8
House of Mirth
I am slow to tears. Of the scores of movies that I have watched, the hundreds of books that I have read, each medium has provoked but a single crying episode. The movie, I am embarrassed to name. The book, Great Expectations, during the scene in which Pip awakens to find that he has been nursed to health by the ever-loving, all-good Joe, the rustic brother-in-law whom Pip has discounted and discarded in typical social climber fashion.
Tonight, I add to the book count, Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
On Digital Reading
& Bonus Vocabulary List
While bibliophile tortoises shun the evil digital destroyer, I hippety-hopped aboard the e-book revolution sans reservation, having been an owner of Kindle 1st generation. I am not nostalgic for that earthy book scent, the graze of wafer sheets against my fingertips, the multi-colored mélange of rectangles stacked upon shelves. Though a romantic of the early nineteenth century sort, I am not a traditionalist and can easily forgo old conventions in favor of new conveniences.
Conversion
Disclosure: I have not read Les Miserables in its entirety. On page 434 out of 959, I sometimes find its talons dug too tightly into my shoulder. Dates and deaths and detailed histories and analyses, it gets too heavy to hold. So I perch it upon the shelf, where it sits content and well-behaved amid good company, often for several months—until it begins to sing, the nightingale’s tune, sweet testament to transformation. I forget past discomfort and begin again.
I am in transition. The scratched record of loss, grief, and remorse is spinning in my mind. I feel captive to this ragtime racket until I recall that oft overlooked B-side. I flip the record over and find a more promising melody—opportunity.
Jesus on the Lean Donkey
There will be no cream for coffee in the morning. This afternoon, I did not complete the trek to the back corner of the grocery store as sadness overtook me, threatening to unleash a salty deluge, right there in front of red and white rows of soups, their golden eyes staring in judgment. I escaped from their glare into the privacy of tinted-enough windows and the detached acceptance of a leather seat.