Category Archives: Life reflections

THE MONDAY BOOK: Talk Before Sleep, by Elizabeth Berg

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I started this book once several years ago and didn’t get far, so I didn’t expect it to impress me when I picked it up a second time. But sometimes you have to be in the right head space.

This is my favorite kind of book: character driven. A handful of women are gathering around their beloved friend who is dying of cancer. And the friends are kinda the stereotypes you see in those crises: the one doing all the organizing, demanding answers to tough questions; the one determined the friend Shall Not Die because she will feed her kale and such; the one taking it personally, etc.

The dying woman, Ruth, is drawn enigmatically, a stroke of Berg’s particular genius with characters. She recedes into one-liners and personality-pulsing moments, as the narrator takes up more space in how she is reacting to the impending death.

And the narrator comes out with some cracking observations. Here is one of my favorites: “I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay. I’ve heard that when elephants are attacked they often run, not away, but toward each other. Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society.”

The sweetness of women friends, the horror of a sad thing you cannot fix, the pushes and pulls on women’s time are all here. Berg has a way of pulling together an ensemble cast and not making any of them feel like they are mechanisms serving the plot.

The bickering between L.D., the kale-feeding lesbian friend, and Sarah, the get-the-funeral-arrangements-done buttoned-up-jacket friend, is adorable. So are the moments when Ruth lets fly on the narrator. This book may be about loss, but it has a lot of giggles in it as well. Perhaps they are sweetened by the inevitability of the bitter end to come.

The book also delves into a thing that happens with female friends: jealousy and envy when family obligations are involved. The narrator is abandoning her family temporarily, hoping she isn’t hurting her marriage personally. The dying Ruth has a brother who wants her to die at his house. The decisions characters make are embedded in the reality of the demands on women’s time and our extraordinary capacity to manufacture energy out of sheer need.

Highly recommend this book. You will laugh more than you cry, and sometimes the laughter will be in recognition.

What was her Name?

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The house next door to us has been unoccupied for about 20 years. Watching it fall slowly into disrepair, we joked about the new tenants each time a squirrel moved in through the kitchen window, the groundhog dug a new tunnel under the foundation, the blue jays built another nest in the chimney. (At least we think they were jays.)

Two days ago, an enormous crane (the machine kind) arrived on the lawn, and knocked the house down. Noise and dust and beepings, oh my–although the crane was VERY careful to contain everything, I hasten to add. Never a minute’s worry.

We saw a few cars drive slowly by. One elderly couple sat across the street for several minutes watching, bittersweet looks on their faces. We were told the people who owned the house had died decades ago; maybe they knew them.

On the evening of the second day, with nothing remaining but a whole lot of aluminum siding and the concrete pad of the porch, Jack and I wandered over to … I don’t know. Because we were bored and curious and wanted to pay our respects all at the same time?

Where the kitchen had stood was quickly evident; apparently all the cupboards hadn’t been cleared because some ancient spice canisters, the kind one buys in a store, were lying about. Some were things like Boric Acid and Cream of Tartar.

Since broken glass was everywhere, I picked up the home canning jar carefully, expecting it to be cracked and fall apart in my hand. But it was whole. Further, it was still sealed. Green beans waited expectantly inside for someone to eat them.

Another jar contained pickles. I knew–because I am that nerd–that the Kerr jar was from the 1950s and the Mason jar predated 1962. Valuable enough to a collector, but not big deal money items on eBay. I took the two jars home and started to wipe off the decades of dust clinging to them, then thought better of it.

Instead I placed them out of the sunlight in a corner of my canning closet. They don’t touch anything, no asbestos dust poisoning happening here. But they sit there, a connection to she who ruled that house, what 30, 40 years ago?

When did she can them? Who did she hope would sit at the table and eat them with her? Why were they never eaten?

One could feel melancholic about women’s work and the march of time and aging, but honestly I feel inspired. We who enjoy it have been canning since that French baker won Napoleon’s prize money (Google it) and so many connections still exist to those early days. We honor each other’s work.

We know what kind of sweat equity goes into making sweet pickles. We believe in the long flow of tradition-with-improvements. When we got better, safer lids we used them instead of wax. When we got freedom-infringing advisories from agencies influenced by lobby money, we ignored them and canned milk, meat, and greens. We learned what tasted good, and why, and how to make it taste better for the long haul. All while that carrying stream of tradition skipped generations of children and rebirthed itself in new eddies of panic as the pandemic spread fear of shortages. Kinda like World War II, the last time canning surged. (For some reason, it skipped the sixties. Maybe not enough dancing involved.)

It makes me feel good, rescuing those two jars from a fate of being ignored for eternity. I don’t know her name, but I know she was good. The pickles are beautiful. The green beans are evenly layered with perfect head space. And the jars are sealed despite having a house pulled down on top of them.

I’ll never know her name. But I feel connected to her, and that’s enough.