Family Matters – –

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Jack is slow again but there’s always an excuse – –

The last two weeks have been quite adventurous and enjoyable –

First of all, our good friends Beth and Brandon organized a week in the Boston area, staying at a lovely house in Manchester by the Sea. We were joined by our mutual friends Barbara and Oliver from Scotland and we had a great time visiting Salem, Boston and all the adjacent beaches. Sadly, Wendy was tied up with work meetings and couldn’t join us.

Some of the chosen family with our Bruce

Following that Barbara and Oliver had a rather eventful train journey from Boston to Roanoke where they stayed the night in a local hotel. In the meantime, I had flown back to Asheville with Beth and Brandon and finally home. Wendy and I drove up to Roanoke the next morning to collect the train riders and bring them to our house and guest room. Three hours later Wendy set off to Montana for a conference, so not much time to catch up on our Boston experience!

The highlight of this week was a small house concert in the local bookstore here in Wytheville where Barbara and I revisited our musical past on Wednesday evening. Earlier in the day another two friends, David and Susan came up from North Carolina and then to the evening concert. In addition our Scottish friends and I drove down to the small town of Appalachia to visit with Sam and Kelley and their kids who they know from our time running our bookstore in Big Stone Gap.

Why is all this significant?

Well – all the people listed above live far apart and are of very different ages and generations. The only thing that really connects us all is myself and Barbara. But we have all shared memorable experiences here in America and in Scotland and are always in close contact via the internet. During the height of the Covid pandemic we ‘Zoomed’ most Sundays.

I asked the group earlier today how we’d describe ourselves and the consensus was – ‘a chosen family’!

The Monday Book: SULA by Toni Morrison

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Sula is a tragi-comic book. Toni Morrison comes out with the best lines, told in this even pacing with no drama about the most dramatic subjects.

Age turns men’s lust to kindness about little girls in town. Two of them, Nel and Sula, are the ying to each other’s yang. While the book is named for one of them, it’s really a composite collection of characters: Shadrack, damaged by war and way too wise to be such a loose cannon; Eva, the misunderstood matriarch; Helene, “who won all social battles with presence and a conviction of the legitimacy of her own authority.” And Sula’s mother Hannah, who taught her daughter that “sex was pleasant and frequent, but otherwise unremarkable.”

The town of Medallion is divided into black and white residents, given the book’s timeline primarily between the world wars.

Overhanging the whole book is a miasma of “it doesn’t matter,” a kind of low-grade gloom summed up in the ways the characters expect or don’t expect things to happen. Morrison wrote it best: “They did not believe death was accidental—life might be, but death was deliberate…. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance.”

The book is rife with sly humor. Sula makes the women in town mad, because, “She came to their church suppers without underwear, bought their steaming platters of food and merely picked at it—relishing nothing, exclaiming over no one’s ribs or cobbler. They believed she was laughing at their God.”

I laughed out loud at this book several times, which was frightening to the person seated next to me on the plane. Enthusiastic recommendation for reading Sula.

In closing, this is my favorite quote about Sula: And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.