Author Archives: wendywelch

Monday Book – The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

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This week’s guest reviewer is Wendy’s husband Jack Beck –

As Wendy was completing her best-selling memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap, we took a road trip through seven states visiting other small used-book stores. We took recorded books with us to listen to on the way and one was Brown’s most famous novel.

I think we had already seen the movie, so this was mostly to ‘compare and contrast’. 

I had already toured the south of France a number of times with my folk band ‘Heritage’ and was familiar with the Cathar and Knights Templar history of the region. Also, Wendy and I had visited Rosslyn Chapel a few times, so we knew the Holy Grail legends as well.

Of course the central part of Brown’s book concerns the legends about Jesus and Mary Magdalene having a child and that family line continuing to the present.

We both thought that the mystery and adventure thread throughout the book worked well and we were prepared to go along with the various questionable historical assumptions that Brown incorporated, even those that had excited people about Jesus having sex and such.

That was until the ending –

I mentioned above that we had visited Rosslyn Chapel and so we are familiar with the caretaker’s house that sits alongside it. Remember also that the site is just outside Edinburgh in the east of Scotland. 

Towards the end of the book Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu knock at the caretaker’s house and she opens the screen door – we both shrieked! No one in Scotland has a screen door – least of all near the North Sea! Then she offers them coffee – we shrieked again! Nobody in Scotland drinks coffee – they drink tea. That’s when we stopped listening!

As a footnote – The last time I visited Rosslyn Chapel, as the leader of a small group tour of Scotland, I sat inside as a chapel guide addressed us and various other tourists. Her address covered the history of the building and the family that built and still own it. I could sense a growing impatience as she neared the end and finally she said “I know, I know – you want to know what’s buried below the floor and whether it’s the Holy Grail”. She continued “The best theory I’ve heard is that it’s Elvis Presley”.

However, this is meant to be a book review. As long as you understand that it’s a novel and not intended to be taken as historical fact, then you will be carried along by the excitement of the chase and the unexpected twists.

Flushed with Success

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Accept, gentle reader, that I took leave of my senses. It happens to all of us at some point, especially when dealing with the needs of elderly, fiercely independent parents.

My mom and dad live three hours away in an ailing house. After a nasty fall that left her concussed, my mom got an emergency pacemaker, this after a previous fall that left her with a torn cuff and limited use of her right arm.

In a few words, because we all understand human dignity and body functions, people who are without the use of their full range of motion might want to invest in a bidet. Nuff said, right?

Running errands and trying to set the house up as best it could be for their continued independence there, what do I find in the clearance aisle during a supply run to Walmart?

Bidets. For $10. Snatching two, I raced home with my prizes—

–and realized that my 86-year-old father, a lifelong handyman unwilling to admit to cognitive dysfunction, was going to take the family toilet apart. At my urging, because I had made the mistake of saying we shouldn’t install the second one in Mom’s separate bathroom until we were sure she liked the bidet model.

5 pm, just as I’m starting to make dinner, my dad turns the water off. Only the handle on the toilet is frozen, so it isn’t off when he unhooks the pipe from the wall. Water sprays everywhere. Dad gets a massive pipe wrench from the shed out back and with the help of his trusty quad cane navigates the uneven hill down to the basement. Where he turns off the house water. Meanwhile, I have every towel in the house on the bathroom floor and am starting to eye the blankets.

My dad returns a few minutes after the water stops spurting. He wants me to hold the lid while he gets the plastic bolts secured. I ask if the nuts holding the bolts are on backwards, and that’s why the lid continues to slide all over the place. He gives me a classic male to female sneer. The problem is tightening, he says; what we need is a Phillips screwdriver. Off he goes to fetch one from the shop.

This is good for five minutes, I figure, and reverse the bolts, hand tightening them until they won’t turn. The lid is snug and no longer sliding when he returns. He places the Philips in the center of the bolt’s large X and turns it, ripping a hole in the cheap plastic.

The light in the bathroom is low enough that he can’t tell this has happened.

“Perfect,” I say. “Doesn’t slide at all now.” He beams. So far, so good.

He studies the t-junction for the water pipes, cannot make head nor tails of it, and declares the rest will have to wait until tomorrow.

“Where will we pee tonight?” Mom shouts from her chair in the living room. Dad frowns, and opens his mouth to shout—I am sure of it— “In the bushes.”

I cut him off, knowing what would happen if he did.

“Look! I found the diagram showing how to assemble the pipes at the three points!”

Dad is having none of it. So, I attach the first one, pretend they came pre-assembled, and then ask if the other two go together “like this?”

“See?” he says. “You just have to be patient. I have this figured out now. You can go.”

I retreat to the living room, where Mom asks if the house is going to flood a second time, because there are blankets in the linen closet I can use.

Dad heads down the hill again. I race to the bathroom and tighten all three joins so they won’t spray. As I finish the last one, the water comes on, but I am close enough to finish with minimal dripping.

Dad comes upstairs, puts his hand on the first join, and smiles. “Dry as a bone. I did a great job. No leaks.”

“Yes! High five!” I tell him. We exchange one, he goes to his chair, and I go to the kitchen to make myself a gin and tonic.