There and Back Again

Disposition: Craving
Listening: Sex and Lucia Soundtrack
Reading: The Interpreter
Watching: Novo
Obsessing: Eduardo Noriega
Pondering: It is books that teach us to refine our pleasures when young, and to recall them with satisfaction when we are old. (Leigh Hunt)

Got this game from foggydays:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

From Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy:

“Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble, and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced that those of his grammarian.”

Random reading of passages from a book is always so cool. You never quite know what you’d find. Taking and modifying the instructions above, I grabbed the next nearest book on the shelf, flipped to page 9 (my favorite number) and read the first complete paragraph.

“As a boy, I always thought my mother was strange. She never cared to socialize with our neighbors. Her past was a mystery she refused to discuss. She drank tea out of a glass. She could speak Yiddish. She had an absolute distrust of authority and an insistence on complete privacy which seemed to make her, and my family, even odder. My family was huge, twelve kids, unlike any other family I’d ever seen, so many of us that at times Mommy would call us by saying, “Hey James-Judy-Henry-Hunter-Kath - whatever your name is, come here a minute.” It wasn’t that she forgot who we were, but there were so many of us, she had no time for silly details like names. She was the commander in chief of my house, because my stepfather did not live with us. He lived in Brooklyn until near the end of his life, staying away from the thronging masses to come home on weekends, bearing food and tricycles and the resolve to fix whatever physical thing we had broken during the week. The nuts and bolts of raising us was left to Mommy, who acted as chief surgeon for bruises (”Put iodine on it”), war secretary (’If somebody hits you, take your fist and crack ‘em”), religious consultant (”Put God first”), chief psychologist (”Don’t think about it”), and financial adviser (”What’s money if your mind is empty?”). Matters involving race and identity she ignored.”

From:The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride.